Taste of Fear (1961)

aka Scream of Fear

Not having seen her father for nearly ten years after her parents’ divorce, wheelchair-bound Penny Appleby (Susan Strasberg) travels to his coastal villa in France, following a somewhat surprising invitation. Penny’s father is away on business, so Penny is greeted by her stepmother Jane (Ann Todd). Jane makes quite an effort to make her feel welcome, as awkward as the situation between a young woman and the second wife of her father she’s never met before is at its core.

However, something is very wrong at the villa. Starting on the very first night of her stay, Penny repeatedly encounters what looks a lot like the corpse of her father propped up in macabre manner. Of course, when Penny’s trying to show the corpse to Jane or hunky chauffeur Robert (Ronald Lewis), the thing disappears. Very quickly, Jane starts mumbling about the “neurotic tendencies” Penny has supposedly displayed in childhood. The doctor Jane calls in, supposedly a friend of Penny’s father, the very rude Dr Pierre Gerrard (Christopher “Frenchman” Lee), does love to go on in the same manner, making dinners with him rather a strain on everyone’s nerves. At least Robert – just call him “Bob” – is a lot of help, sharing some of the doubts Penny is developing.

Despite the great success (particularly for such a small company) of their horror films, beloved Hammer Studios weren’t exclusively making horror films in the sixties. Following the success of Hitchcock’s Psycho, Jimmy Sangster wrote about five or six (depending on which ones you count) twisty thrillers clearly influenced and encouraged by that film, yet never simply copying it. Rather, Sangster takes some of Psycho’s formal inventions, its play with the audience and its expectations, and thinks them further for his own purposes.

Case in point is the first film of this group, as directed by Seth Holt, using the viewer’s knowledge of the structure of a gaslighting-type film against them to pull off quite some clever things not just once but twice. The film doesn’t only use the audience’s assumptions about genre and characters, though – the characters themselves repeatedly fall into the same trap of taking what’s on the surface of others on very literal face value. Treating people as types and tropes is a dangerous thing, as it turns out. I’m not actually going to spoil the twists here despite the film’s age, because when a plot twist is as well constructed and wonderfully timed as those here are, its writer deserves the respect no to have it spoiled.

Despite not really being a horror film, Taste does feature some wonderfully macabre moments, too. The business with Penny’s father’s corpse is effectively creepy, Holt shooting these scenes as expressionistically influenced nightmares that stand in fine contrast to the many scenes of black and white sunlight surrounding them. And the final destiny of one of the film’s villains – in a move typical for the film probably the lesser one – has a sense of dreadful yet deserved irony many a horror twist ending strives for.

Holt does some grand work in other regards too, staging scenes in ways that make them feel so intimate, the film’s threats seem all the more personal. Generally, Holt as well as Sangster’s script like to keep events and emotions tightly controlled, in fact enhancing their impact by not overplaying them like many another film would. In lesser hands, the plot, where nobody involved, if still alive, will end up any happier than before, would be material for shrill melodrama, but Holt and Sangster let their audience figure out for themselves how much of a parade of broken people doing broken things we are actually witnessing.

Young Susan Strasberg is a great casting choice, too, projecting vulnerability and confusion yet also a hidden reservoir – clearly unexpected to the rest of the world – of strength and determination she desperately needs. The rest of the cast is up to the same fine standards – with the exception of Lee’s “French” accent – though this is really Strasberg’s show.


Really, said accent is the only thing I can find fault with in Taste of Fear, and if a bit of a ropey accent is the worst thing a film has to offer, nobody can fault me if I call it a little masterpiece.

Past Misdeeds: Mr. Sardonicus (1961)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

After some carnival impresario-like mugging of our host (and director and producer) William Castle, the film introduces its hero. Sir Robert Cargrave (Ronald Lewis) is a successful Victorian physician and specialist in the treatment of paralysis.

Unexpectedly, Cargrave receives a letter written by the love of his youth, Maude (Audrey Dalton), who would have become his wife if not for a greedy father without the proper faith in Cargrave's future career. Maude is now married to a certain Baron Sardonicus and lives in one of those imaginary Central European countries full of people with utterly incongruous accents I know and love from dozens of other movies.

In her letter, Maude invites Cargrave to her husband's estate, but gives the invitation an urgent undertone that convinces the physician to close his practice at once and run off to the continent. Why, one could think he is still in love with Maud.

In Europe, the good doctor soon notices some peculiarities. The local citizenry fears his host as if he were Dracula himself, and it doesn't take too long of an acquaintance with the Baron's lifestyle to understand why. It's the usual combination of gothic ghastliness - a sinister servant, Krall, (Oskar Homolka), a permanently locked door, the total absence of mirrors in the house, experiments with leeches on the house maid. And those are the things Cargrave experiences before he finally meets Sardonicus himself (Guy Rolfe). Sardonicus is a very unpleasant man with the peculiar habit of hiding his face behind a waxen mask and with more than a whiff of the sadist about him, as the screeching town girls he likes to secretly entertain will agree.

There's a good reason for the Baron wearing a mask, though. His face is disfigured, paralysed in a permanent deathly grin he acquired when he robbed his father's grave of the lottery ticket that bought him his title. Obviously, Sardonicus needs Cargrave's help, and he is willing to threaten his own wife to get it.

Given that Mr. Sardonicus is a William Castle production, it is self-evident that it has a gimmick every carnie barker would be proud of. When the movie made its initial matinee run, cards picturing a hand showing thumbs up or down were distributed in the audience. At a certain point shortly before the end, Castle appears on screen again, asking the audience to vote if poor old Sardonicus is in need of further punishment by presenting the appropriately positioned thumb to him. After a gleeful pretence at counting the votes, the audience then is presented with the film's only existing ending, which is of course the "more punishment" one. There are rumours that a more redemptive ending does actually exist but is now lost, but the way Castle's counting scene is set up alone should make clear that there's just no chance for that; if you think otherwise after having watched the film, I have a nice bridge to sell you.

It's not my favourite Castle gimmick - that would be the ones in The Tingler - it does however give the film a gleeful charm that helps loosen up its sometimes a bit talky proceedings.

That doesn't mean the gimmick is the movie's only virtue. Probably inspired by the success of that other great cheapskate director/producer Roger Corman's House of Usher, Castle makes a trip into gothic horror, a field he usually didn't work in. There are a few differences between the two films' approaches to their sub-genre, though, and certainly one in quality and artistic vision, the latter just not a thing very close to Castle's heart. The most important difference, however, is that Corman uses colour - or rather COLOUR! - where Castle makes a black and white film (although I doubt this was anything other than a budgetary decision). Corman's film is very much screaming "new Gothic" through this alone, while Sardonicus looks much more like Castle is going for a continuation of the visual language of the classic Universal horror film, although with the addition of open sadism and relatively daring content most of its old brethren just couldn't get away with. There's an emphasis on stylish but cheap artificiality in the sets that looks to me very much like the Universal style without the verticality of the sets the older films could afford. I'm a firm believer in artificiality as a stylistic element in films as long as the artificiality serves the building of mood, as it does here, so I found this part of Sardonicus quite satisfying.

The film's photography is equally moody and satisfying and at times unexpectedly beautiful, again showing the influence of early Universal and the cheap semi-noirs Castle started his career with, albeit with less emphasis on shadows, and more on sharp contrasts and interesting framing.

Not as satisfying are the more sensationalist moments, not because I have any ethical problems with them (which would come as a surprise, wouldn't it?), but because they don't really agree with the film's more subtle aspects. The more of Castle's films I have seen, the more I come to the conviction that the man should have trusted in his own ability to be subtle from time to time, even if he (probably rightfully so) believed his kid audience to be averse to subtlety. On the plus side, Castle's lack of restraint grants the viewer moments of silliness like the beloved flying head dream sequences you'd usually connect with cartoons.

As is often the case with Castle's films, there are also some quite memorable dialogue scenes that present a sharpness and a cynical view of humanity you don't usually expect to find in exploitation films aimed at teenagers. Ray Russell's script (based on his own novella) is particularly interesting, building a castle made of classical Gothic tropes, cheap Freudianism, extreme but thematically fitting psychology and dialogue that is a bit stiff but deeper than it strictly needs to be. One could criticise that there isn't much happening in the film, but gothic horror is all about mood and theme, with little need for plot or action beyond having everything go to pieces in the end.

The acting is also pretty good, with Ronald Lewis giving (and that might very well be a first) a sympathetic and even vaguely charismatic hero in a sub-genre that usually has no time or interest for making its heroes memorable, Guy Rolfe granting his Sardonicus just the right mixture of sadism, sarcasm, desperation and even a bit of humanity and Oskar Homolka relishing the opportunity to lay it on really thick as the sinister factotum.

Audrey Dalton on the other hand seems to struggle with most of her dialogue and is never able to make Maude an actual human being.

All in all, Mr. Sardonicus is one of the better films in Castle's filmography, especially for people with an interest in Gothic horror beyond the initial Universal wave, Corman and Bava.

On WTF: Mr. Sardonicus (1961)

Please imagine me grinning and chomping on a cigar.

Find out what happened when the lovely William Castle was trying to catch some of that Corman gothic magic - alas without Vincent Price - in my review of Castle's Mr. Sardonicus on WTF-Film!

 

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