Demons of the Mind began life as a story titled Blood Will Have Blood (a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth) when composer and sometime producer Frank Godwin (composer of the infamous Strange Love song in Lust for a Vampire (1971)) came up with a freshly minted bit of mythology, the entirely bogus German legend of Blutlust, that he claimed to have learned about in a Stuttgart museum. Together with co-writer Christopher Wicking, he dreamt up a tale of lycanthropy that he sold to Michael Carreras at Hammer. In the early 1970s, Carreras was keen to take Hammer in new directions and although he eventually rejected the lycanthropy angle, he saw something in Blood Will Have Blood that appealed to his desire to strike out for new territories.
Elizabeth (Gillian Hills), daughter of Baron Zorn (Robert Hardy), escapes from an asylum and has a brief moment of happiness with a young medical student, Carl Richter (Paul Jones), before being recaptured by her Aunt Hilda (Yvonne Mitchell) and the family manservant Klaus (Kenneth J. Warren). She’s taken back to Castle Zorn where her brother Emil (Shane Briant) is also imprisoned by their dangerously obsessed father Baron Zorn (Robert Hardy) who lives in fear of the hereditary madness that he believes afflicts his family. Elizabeth and Emil have developed an incestuous dependency on each other as their father spirals further into madness, seeking help from disgraced psychoanalysis pioneer Dr Falkenberg (Patrick Magee). Meanwhile a series of brutal murders is plaguing the nearby town and a mad holy man (Michael Hordern) is spreading fear among the locals.
Originally Eric Porter was cast as the mad Baron Zorn but was allegedly lured away by producer Aida Young to appear in Hands of the Ripper (1971). Desperately wanting to avoid casting either Cushing or Lee as he saw it as a break from the Hammer tradition, Michael Carreras tried to interest both Paul Scofield and James Mason in the role, but neither were interested. The role went instead to Robert Hardy and the originally cast Marianne Faithfull was dropped at the last minute, replaced by newcomer Gillian Hills. The chopping and changing in the cast delayed production which was originally set to begin on 12 April 1971. By the time filming finally started on 16 August, most traces of the werewolves that had first attracted Carreras was gone, replaced by much Freudian psychology.
Zorn is a catalogue of neuroses, guilts and manias that would keep a Freudian analyst fruitfully and profitably employed for years trying to untangle his myriad hang-ups. Wicking and Director Peter Sykes cram the film chock full of relevant symbolism – the cracked mirror reflecting back an image as splintered as the minds of those looking into it, the blood-red petals scattered on the bodies of the victims, Zorn’s sex- and blood-soaked dreams. It also draws on the life and work of Franz Mesmer – Wicking later said that “it made the Patrick Magee character much more interesting and much more of a tragic sort of character because we based it really on Mesmer’s life.”
There are, perhaps, a few hints here and there of the original tale of lycanthropy – under hypnosis, Zorn recalls being like “an evil demon of the forest, lusting to kill” and at the climax Elizabeth slashes at Carl’s face leaving claw-like marks. But Demons of the Mind eschews the supernatural in favour of a psychological Gothic the likes of which Hammer had never tried before. There’s a touch of the Nigel Kneales about the script with its clash between rationalism (the new-fangled psychoanalysis practiced by Falkenberg with his strange machinery) and superstition (Zorn’s stubborn belief in a curse and the holy man’s fearmongering), Depressingly it’s the latter that wins the day, Zorn’s scientific methods dying with him while Zorn meets his end at the pint of a fiery cross.
This is all intriguing stuff, written in Wicking’s typically intelligent if occasionally hard-to-fathom style. It’s not a completely successful experiment but it’s a thoughtful and bold one. It’s let down – often quite badly – by Robert Hardy and Patrick Magee who seem to be locked in a struggle to see who can chew the most scenery in the shortest amount of time. Even the rantings of Michael Hordern’s wild-eyed, fire and brimstone religious zealot – himself in the grip of a very different kind of madness – seem restrained by comparison. But the ideas survive their mangling by the leading actors (the younger leads, Hills, Briant and Jones, the former Manfred Mann signer and veteran of Sykes’ surreal short film The Committee in 1968 and Peter Watkins’ Privilege (1967), are better) and with Syke’s often dreamlike direction, beautifully photographed by Arthur Grant, Demons of the Mind has a dark fairy-tale quality about it.
Demons of the Mind would be the last score written for Hammer by Harry Robinson, Under the name Lord Rockingham, he’d subjected the world to the hideous 1958 novelty song Hoots Mon before working as a musical director on British TV pops shows Six-Five Special (1957-1958) and Oh Boy! (1958-1959). He started working with Hammer in 1968 with the main title theme for the television series Journey to the Unknown and composed five film scores for them – Countess Dracula (1971) all of the “Karnstein Trilogy” (The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1971)) and Demons of the Mind which he always maintained was his favourite. It found him experimenting with instrumentation, using an early model Moog synthesizer for some of the eerier passages.
Perhaps inevitably, British Hammer’s distributors EMI hated Demons of the Mind and probably didn’t understand it. They begrudgingly gave it only a limited theatrical outing in the UK where it was incongruously paired with Jim O’Connolly’s trashy but fun Tower of Evil (1972) – it opened in the States with Hammer’s psychological thriller Fear in the Night (1972).
The EOFFTV Review 