In short: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Medical doctors in 1920s London are killed in various peculiar and grotesque ways. It does take some time until the inauspiciously named Detective Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey) figures things out, but the only thing these doctors have in common apart from their titles is that they all took part in an operation which left their patient, one Victoria Regina Phibes (various very fetching photos of Caroline Munro), very dead indeed. It is the dead lady’s husband, the supposedly dead renaissance genius Dr Anton Phibes (Vincent Price) – assisted by the beautiful, talented and fashionable (that’s important) Vulnavia (Virginia North) - who is committing the murders, inspired by the biblical plagues no less. In between bouts of vigorous organ playing and monologues to his dead wife, of course. Will the police catch him before he manages to teach the last of the medicos, Dr Vesalius (Joseph Cotton) a valuable lesson from his bible studies?

I’m actually rather surprised I’ve never written even a tiny piece like this about this particular high water mark in the career of the great Vincent Price, as directed by Robert Fuest in his own career best moment. It’s high pop art in look and feel (some would say high camp), a film so stylish and stylized, so clearly understanding how the funnily grotesque and the macabre are related, it is still a feast for horror kids of all ages and tempers. It’s not a film for anyone of my kind of taste to simply enjoy but one to feel completely at home in, a comfy chair/favourite blanket combo of absurd murder methods, bright, popping colours, and production design that is at once strange, bizarre and makes absolute sense in context. Of course Dr Phibes would have his own tin robot band, and of course he’d have an organ that not just glows in the most intense red but also moonlights as a practical elevator perfect for dramatic entries and exits.

Price is absolutely brilliant here (as he so often was), projecting a grotesque operatic grandness even though the script by James Whiton and William Goldstein – in one of those perverse decisions that can turn out to be pure genius – lets Price use his wonderful voice only occasionally, in a scratchy form, when he’s plugged into his self-made voice box. But no matter for our hero, he can use body language just as well and nuanced in its bigness as his voice, gifting the film (and the audience) a performance that’s just as bizarre and perfectly right as the rest of this pretty perfect movie.

In short: And Soon the Darkness (1970)

Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice), two young British nurses, are on a cycling trip through France. Not the big tourist spots, mind you, but the more desolate, or at least mostly tourist-free, parts of the countryside. It seems to be more Jane’s kind of trip, really, and the two eventually get into a big row about their itinerary, which feels like work rather than fun to Cathy, clearly to Jane’s complete surprise. The argument becomes so big, Jane cycles off in anger, leaving Cathy so sunbathe alone in some idyllic patch of woods.

That’s the last Jane sees of her, for, as we the audience know, Cathy is attacked and probably raped and murdered by someone. Once she has cooled off and Cathy simply doesn’t reappear, Jane starts to worry about her friend something fierce. Her various attempts to get someone to help her never quite reach their goal, what with her French being horrible, and she starts to fall into a state somewhere between paranoia and simple panicked worry. Which is no wonder, seeing as everyone in this part of France seems to be a proper creep, and those people actually offering their help may do this only to get rid of her too. Or worse.

Scripted by The Avengers’ Brian Clemens and Terry Nation, and produced by the same people as the show (of course again including Clemens), this intense thriller directed by Robert Fuest has very little to do with that much (and rightly so) beloved British TV show, but rather feels as if it were only one step away from descending into a proper, proto-Texas Chainsaw Massacre style piece of early backwoods horror.

While the plot never quite leaves relatively traditional thriller structures behind until the end (though it is also really good at using these structures), the cast of characters populating this part of the French countryside are just the right kind of weird to suggest a whole history of all the unpleasant stuff of movies to come. There’s certainly quite a lot of mental illness and poverty involved, suggesting a nasty underbelly below the closed rural communities here. Everyone seems to have some sort of terrible secret; everyone seems to be obsessed with something or someone.

To Jane, in her panicked state, these surroundings and the increasingly eccentric people around her can’t feel anything but threatening, particularly since her attempts at getting help only ever seem to point into directions that will endanger herself, or put her fate into the hands of suspicious strangers, instead of her finding Cathy.

The film is wonderfully paced and constructed, and manages to achieve its obvious goal of feeling somehow grubby and unpleasant as well as thrilling usually by showing something bordering on the threatening or the truly weird and only suggesting more to it. Until the climax, that is, when Jane finds herself in surroundings where things truly become concretely nasty.

Unlike many of the “tourist in danger by evil foreigners” films of later years, And Soon never feels xenophobic somehow. It seems more a film playing into other prejudices by looking askance at the countryside, France coming into the equation so Jane can be easier isolated from proper help, and because there’s little better than the contrast between a sunny countryside and the unpleasant things happening there.