Persecution (1974)

Kevin Francis – son of Freddie – tried his hand at producing a number of horror films in the mid-1970s through his Tyburn Films but met with only qualified success. The likes of Legend of the Werewolf (1974) and The Ghoul (1975) attracted some decent actors (Peter Cushing features in both) but, along with this dreary What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) knock-off, the scripts never amounted to very much and the films prove too arduous to really enjoy.

Lana Turner is the obligatory past-her-prime Hollywood star drafted in for this one, playing Carey Masters, a reclusive and vengeful woman still pining for her cat Sheba, killed by her young son David (Craig Weavers) in a fit of jealous pique when he decides that mummy is paying the poor creature more attention than him. As an adult, David (now played by Ralph Bates) returns home with his wife Janie (Suzan Farmer) and newborn child only to find that mother is still harbouring a grudge and determines to ruin her son’s life, even if that means murdering the child and driving Janie insane. This preposterous old nonsense also somehow ropes in a tired looking Trevor Howard and Olga Georges-Picot in a sort of low rent femme fatale role as the nurse hired by Carey to seduce David away from the mad Janie.

It took an extraordinary three writers (Robert B. Hutton, Rosemary Wootten and Frederick Warner, the latter credited with supplying “additional scenes & dialogue”) to resurrect the sort of creaky plot that had already seen better days in the tail end of the first wave of grand dame horrors of the 1960s. The character motivations are specious at best, the performances are consequently uncertain and the plot stumbles around in search of meaning or simply a point, so much so that it often gives the impression of having been made up as it went along.

There’s a vaguely Christmassy feel to the film, the reds and greens of the festive season occasionally cutting through the otherwise bleak, grey drabness of the proceedings. It begins and frequently flashes back to the Christmas period – David’s trauma is triggered by his mother callously dismissing the present he made for her at school – and occasionally flashes back to David’s childhood yuletide but even that tends to get lost along the way. As does the role of the cat, a new Sheba (or maybe it’s the old one reborn, we can never be sure) who wanders in and out of the narrative, smothering poor baby Paul to death and then doing very little but observing from afar with that characteristic feline aloofness and tripping Janie so she falls to her death down the stairs. We’re never really clear if the cat is acting of its own volition, whether its the vengeful ghost of the original Sheba or whether the deaths it causes are just very far-fetched coincidences.

Bates was never the greatest of actors and here he’s mostly in his usual wooden mode, blankly reciting the dialogue without a shred of passion or conviction while Turner reins it in for most of the film but turns on the histrionics in the bizarre final act. Poor Suzan Farmer is caught in the middle as is Olga Georges-Picot and neither are particularly well served by a script so flawed that it can’t even make up its mind to what extent Sheba the cat is supernaturally endowed or even who David’s real father is. We never find out who any of these people actually are. Carey and David are clearly wealthy but how is something no-one bothers to explain. Janie is just there to go mad and fall down the stairs and Monique the nurse is there just to be sexy and make poor Janie even more paranoid. There’s no depth to any of them – they’re just empty ciphers, chess pieces being moved around by the director Don Chaffey and the writers and none of them are interesting enough to warrant the attention both Chaffey and the script afford them.

Chaffey’s direction is textbook pedestrian. He finds nothing to engage him in the script and just shoots what’s on the page with no flourishes, no hint of any discernible style. The film plods along at a snail’s pace and between the intriguing opening and the over-the-top finale lie vast acres of mediocrity and tedium. It barely qualifies as a horror film really – there’s no suspense, no blood, no scares and the attempts at psychological horror are laughable.

Persecution was a late night staple on British television throughout the 1980s and 90s but it disappeared from sight in the late 2000s. As Francis has been reluctant to part with the rights to his films for some time it’s now hard to find in anything like a watchable version but to be fair you’re not missing all that much. There are plenty of better films out there awaiting your attention and the loss of the Tyburn horror films is hardly a cause for much complaint. Persecution can sometimes be found on streaming services under the alternative titles of The Terror of Sheba or The Graveyard should you absolutely need to see everything, even something as tawdry and muddle-headed as this.