The second of the “Women in Terror!” double bill dreamed up by Michael Carreras – the first was Peter Collinson’s Straight on Till Morning (1972) – Fear in the Night was the last of Hammer’s psychological horrors and it’s fitting that the end was overseen by the man who had helped to start it all off in the first place, Jimmy Sangster, writer of Taste of Fear/Scream of Fear (1961), Maniac (1963), Paranoiac (1963), Nightmare (1964), Hysteria (1964) and The Nanny (1965). The script’s roots can be traced to the abandoned Brainstorm project, one of the mini-Clouzot’s written by Sangster back in 1963 which was due to have been made after Hysteria. With the psychological thrillers seeming to have run their course, the script was abandoned and revived briefly in 1967 as The Claw which Freddie Francis was set to direct, but it kept getting delayed and put back until it eventually morphed into Fear in the Night. Sangster had already updated his script when it was reversioned as The Claw, and now had his friend Michael Syson take a look at the script and he relocate it in an abandoned boys’ school.
Peggy (Judy Geeson) has recently married Robert Heller (Ralph Bates) who works at a private boys school in the country run by Molly (Joan Collins) and Michael Carmichael (Peter Cushing). The night before the couple is due to leave London to move into the school, Peggy is attacked by an intruder sporting a prosthetic arm. Peggy explores the school, finding it strangely deserted, despite hearing the sound of boys talking. She bumps into Michael who takes her on a tour of the school, but there’s still no sign of the pupils. That night, she’s attacked by the one-armed man again, and Robert doesn’t seem particularly sympathetic, questioning her fragile mental state. It turns out of course that Peggy is the victim of one of those plots to drive her insane by her husband who is secretly having an affair with Molly. Her only hope seems to be Michael, but he’s clearly insane too – the boys Peggy heard were tape recordings and the school has been closed for over a year – and to make matters worse, Peggy has already emptied a double-barrelled shotgun in his face…
Sangster was allowed to direct as well as write Fear in the Night and, for what little it’s worth, it was his best directorial effort for Hammer – but given that its competition was the execrable Horror of Frankenstein (1970) and Lust for a Vampire (1971) that really isn’t saying very much at all. The school setting harks back to the film that inspired all those 60 thrillers in the first place, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les diaboliques (1955) but by now Sangster had done far too many of these things and wasn’t a fan of the finished film. He’d simply grown tired of this sort of film though that didn’t stop him from re-treading the same ground on American television in films like A Taste of Evil (1971) and Scream, Pretty Peggy (1973). It would be the last time he worked for Hammer, the end of an association that stretched back to the late 1940s when he was assistant director on films like Dick Barton Strikes Back (1949), Celia (1949) and The Man in Black (1949).
It would prove to be an unhappy farewell for Sangster. He claimed that Joan Collins was difficult to work with and had kept her pregnancy from the production – the first they knew was when wardrobe complained that her costumes no longer fit her – and she apparently refused to talk to him for a week after he demonstrated to her how to kill a rabbit.
But even without these production troubles, Fear in the Night was doomed from the start. Sangster had written so many of these psycho-thrillers by now that Fear in the Night feels a bit by the numbers, a bit routine, like we’ve seen and heard it all before. Indeed there are undeniable echoes of both Taste of Fear and Nightmare, and it all feels very old-fashioned – Sangster himself described it as a “creep-around, bump in the night kind if picture.” And yet for all that, it also anticipates the feel of the later television series, Hammer House of Horror (1980) and particularly Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense (1984).
It also feels cheap, mostly set in the one location with the tiniest of casts. Judy Geeson is a bit insipid in a role that was thoroughly warmed over from much better films, and Collins is stuck playing the “bitch” character that had become her stock in trade by now. When the film was released on American video it was retitled Dynasty of Fear to capitalise on Collin’s turn as the similarly unpleasant Alexis Carrington in the soap opera Dynasty (1981-1989). Ralph Bates, on a losing streak with his Hammer appearances, is a bland leading man and the show is partially saved by Peter Cushing who gets far less to do than we’d like, but whose shattered spectacles provide the film with its most iconic image.
The plot hatched by Molly and Robert is one of those ludicrously over-heated plans that makes no sense at all and relies on people acting in illogical ways to make it work. It’s a criticism that can be levelled at many a Les diaboliques-inspired thriller, including some of Hammer’s but there’s so little going on here that one is constantly reminded of just how ridiculous this conspiracy is. Molly even questions it at one point, asking the not unreasonable question why not just take Michael out into the woods and shoot him? However you feel about Fear in the Night‘s double-bill mate, the gruelling Straight on Till Morning, it’s a lot more inventive than this tired and obvious rehash, much more in tune with the times. Fear in the Night – already long in the tooth – must have looked even more old-fashioned alongside Collinson’s trendy, flashy thriller.
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