After two years away from Hammer following the release of The Phantom of the Opera (1964), director Terence Fisher was back at Bray Studios for another romantically tinged Gothic, The Gorgon. In retrospect it was a bittersweet return as it marked the last time he would work with both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee at Hammer, though they would be reunited one last time on Planet Films’ science fiction film Night of the Big Heat in 1967.

Somewhere in early 20th century Europe, there lies the haunted village of Vandorf where several locals have been killed in a perplexing manner, their bodies apparently turned to stone. The pregnant Sascha Cass (Toni Gilpin) becomes the latest victim, and her innocent boyfriend, the artist Bruno (Jeremy Longhurst) hangs himself in grief. His father, Professor Jules Heitz (Michael Goodliffe) refuses to accept the prevailing view that by taking his own life he has tacitly admitted his guilt. Heitz is aware that something terrible is happening in the village and that the locals are conspiring to keep it quiet and comes to suspect that the spirit of one of the Gorgons of Greek mythology, Megaera (actually the name of one of the three furies of Greco-Roman mythology), whose face can literally petrify anyone who looks on it, has possessed a local woman. Heitz becomes the Gorgon’s latest victim but lives long enough to complete letter warning his son Paul (Richard Pasco) of what’s happening in Vandorf. Paul investigates, meeting Dr Namaroff (Peter Cushing), the local doctor who he realises is hiding the truth of his father’s death from him, and falls in love with his assistant Carla (Barbara Shelley). When Megaera (Prudence Hyman) almost kills him, Paul calls in his mentor Professor Karl Meister (Christopher Lee) to help him track down the monster – but it’s going to be a quest that will end in tragedy for Paul, Namaroff and Carla.

Fisher was keen to pursue a more fairy tale feel that was usual for Hammer and Michael Reed’s gorgeous autumnal photography perfectly captures the ambience his director was after with haunting shots like Megaera appearing reflected in a pond during a rainstorm. The film is eye-wateringly gorgeous with some of Bernard Robinson most extraordinary sets so far. It’s a cliché perhaps, but every frame is a little work of art in its own right.

Some commentators have complained that with Shelley the only female character of any note in the film, it’s not that hard to work out who the Gorgon is, though the script, written by John Gilling and Anthony Nelson Keys, half-heartedly tries to distract away attention with the business about the mad woman in the asylum. But the point of the film isn’t that it’s a whodunnit, but a poetic and doomed love story – the fact that we know who the Gorgon really is, or at the very least suspect it, only plays into the awful sense of inevitability and fatalism, both Paul and Namaroff blinded by their love for Carla that they’re unable to see what is obvious to the audience. The climax, though not as gut-wrenching as that of The Damned (1962), is still one of Hammer’s saddest and bleakest with neither of the men who adored Carla so much seeming to make it through unscathed.

Shelley is fantastic though – it’s not hard to see why Paul and Namaroff fall so deeply for Carla as Shelley brings real warmth and charm to the part. Richard Pasco, who had worked with Fisher on Sword of Sherwood Forest in 1960s, is one of the great unsung talents of 50s and 60s British cinema, carving a more successful career on the stage than the screen but he’s very good here as the obsessed-to-the-verge-of-madness Paul. He was also particularly good as Hastings in Hammer’s Yesterday’s Enemy (1959).

Of the other returning Fisher collaborators, Cushing comes off the best, playing the love-struck Namaroff while sporting a beard that’s far more flattering than the not-at-all-convincing “old age” wig and ‘tache combination that Lee was stuck with. It’s testament to his commanding performance that he overcomes these needless and unconvincing embellishments that might well have sunk a lesser actor and gives a sterling performance as the voice of reason in a village gripped by superstition, fear and blind love.

In the climax, we get far too many close-ups of former ballerina Prudence Hyman (Hammer’s first female monster, not counting the various victims of Dracula’s bite) as the eponymous Gorgon which cruelly exposes the shortcomings in Roy Ashton’s less-than-special effects. The green-tinged stone effect make-up is bad enough but the feeble nest of vipers thrashing mechanically about in her hair is simply laughable. In her early appearances, Fisher gives Megaera a dreamlike quality, a combination of Hyman’s graceful movements and keeping the make-up at arm’s length but perhaps bowing to Hammer’s insistent that he show the monster front and centre we get far too much of her as the film draws to a close. Rather than turn us to stone, she’s more likely here to reduce us to fits of giggles. Shelley often complained that she’d offered to play Megaera wearing real snakes in her hair but had her offer turned down.

But that’s a minor misstep in an otherwise intelligent and thoroughly accomplished film that effectively marries a figure from Greek mythology (the Gorgons, the three sisters Stheno, Eurytale and Medusa are mentioned in Homer) to the Mittel-European world of Hammer’s Gothic to surprisingly good effect. It’s a film that Fisher said he was “unashamedly, and totally without modesty, very proud of” (quoted in Wayne Kinsey’s book Hammer’s Film Legacy) as well he might be. It’s a gorgeous film, beautifully acted and directed with a genuinely poetic touch by Fisher.

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