Taste of Fear (inexplicably retitled Scream of Fear in the States) was the first of what Hammer’s managing director James Carreras came to call the company’s “mini-Hitchcocks” though in fact they owe more of a debt to Henri-Georges Couzot’s Les diaboliques (1955) (which had been released in the UK on a double bill with Hammer’s X the Unknown (1956), written by Taste of Fear‘s author Jimmy Sangster) than it does to Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). The otherwise unrelated series of films (Taste of Fear was followed by Maniac (1963), Paranoiac (1963), Nightmare (1964), Hysteria (1964), Fanatic (1965), The Nanny (1965), Crescendo (1969), Straight on Till Morning (1972) and Fear in the Night (1972)) was begun by a film that Sangster, Hammer’s most prolific scriptwriter, had originally written for another producer. Beginning to tire of the Gothic horrors he’d been writing for Hammer since The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Sangster originally wrote Taste of Fear (then titled See No Evil) some years before for producer Sydney Box. When Box suffered a heart attack and was unable to make the film, the script ended up in the hands of his brother-in-law Peter Rogers but eventually ended up back with Sangster who took it to Hammer, admitting later that that was what he should have done in the first place.
Taste of Fear remains the best of the Hammer psychological thrillers, partly due to its not having been written to a formula. The film opens with an audacious ploy by Sangster that doesn’t become obvious until the very end of the film – he very clearly shows us the answer to the mystery but we don’t get enough additional information to realise that until almost the very last minute. A body is seen floating in a lake and we’re initially led to believe that it’s that of Maggie, the nurse to wheelchair-bound heiress Penny Appelby (Susan Strasberg) who subsequently travels to the French Riviera estate of her estranged father. By the end of the film we come to learn that just about everyone we’ll meet over the the next 78 minutes or so are not at all what they seem.
Penny arrives to be greeted by the step-mother Jane (Ann Todd) she’s never met who tells her that her father has been called away on business and she has no idea when he will return. Drawn to a summerhouse in the dead of night, Penny thinks she’s found her father’s body sitting in a chair but inevitably he’s disappeared by the time she summons help. Local doctor Pierre Gerrard (Christopher Lee sporting a convincing French accent) supports Jane’s view that Penny’s merely stressed following her recent tragedy and imagining it all. Her only ally appears to be the family chauffeur Bob (Ronald Lewis) who befriends Penny and helps her investigate while a French police detective, Legrand (John Serret) begins to suspect that Penny has her own secrets.
Taste of Fear boasts one of Sangster’s best scripts (“I made around 35 movies, but Taste of Fear has always been my favourite”), a constantly twisting and slippery narrative that changes course every time you think you’ve finally got a handle on where it’s going. It requires a bit of an exposition dump at the climax to unravel it all but, as with the body in the lake in the opening scene, everything we need to make sense of it all is present and correct and there in plain sight the whole time. Characters are revealed to be either red herrings (Lee was cast explicitly to throw audiences off the scent), up to something that we hadn’t realised until it was too late or simply someone other than we’d been led to believe. It’s not an entirely watertight script – think about it too hard and it starts falling apart, but as it plays out it grips the viewer from the start and refuses to let go until the twist-laden ending.
Director Seth Holt holds it all together admirably. The script is a labyrinthine affair but he keeps it moving at a creditable pace and in the moment when Bob discovers Penny’s father lifeless at the bottom of a weed-infested pool he pulls off a moment as macabre and unsettling as anything that Hammer came up with in their Gothics. Similarly, the vision of the father in the fantastically creepy summerhouse, lit only by candlelight is another highlight, as is a great bit of business involving a freezer and what Penny thinks she might find inside. Holt particularly makes excellent use of sound and silence throughout but never more so than during Bob’s eerie nocturnal dive into that pool.
Like Sangster, Christopher Lee was particularly impressed with the film, calling it “the best film that I was in that Hammer ever made… It had the best director, the best cast and the best story.” By any standard, that’s very far from the truth but it is still a remarkable film, beautifully shot in black and white (an unusual but rewarding decision given that Hammer were by now synonymous with lush Eastmancolor Gothics, one very likely taken because both Les diaboliques and Psycho were shot that way) by Douglas Slocombe who, like Holt, was an Ealing veteran, and directed with the tautness one would expect from a former editor like Holt. It wasn’t a massive hit in the UK or the States, despite a clever advertising campaign, but it did well enough and certainly made an impact across Europe, prompting Hammer to embark on a series of similar suspense tales. The “mini Clouzots” would offer a few more gems along the way but few were ever quite as satisfying as Taste of Fear.
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