Tormented was a change of pace for director Bert I. Gordon who capitalised on his initials by specialising in film that featured, in one way or another, giants, either people or monsters. King Dinosaur (1955), The Cyclops (1957), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), Beginning of the End (1957), Earth vs the Spider (1958), War of the Colossal Beast (1958) and Attack of the Puppet People (1958) all preceded Tormented with Village of the Giants (1956), The Food of the Gods (1976) and Empire of the Ants (1977) still to come. Tormented is a strange anomaly in his filmography to that date – he would later direct several genre films that didn’t feature monsters or giants but it felt like he was looking for something else to do in 1959 when the film was shot, something that could still show off the special effects he usually provided for his own films, but which didn’t need him to optically enlarge anything.

Pianist Tom Stewart (Richard Carlson, lately of The Magnetic Monster (1953), The Maze (1953), It Came from Outer Space (1956) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1956)), “the piano genius of jazz”, is engaged to Meg Hubbard (Lugene Sanders) but his future happiness is jeopardised by the return of jealous ex-girlfriend Vi Mason (Juli Reding) who tells him that she will stop at nothing to prevent the wedding. During a clandestine meeting in an old lighthouse, a railing gives way, and Vi falls to her death, Stewart refusing to try to save her. The next day, Stewart finds Vi’s body floating in the water but it dissolves into seaweed when he recovers it and over the coming days, strange happenings persuade him that he’s being haunted by a vengeful Vi. Her disembodied head appears from time to time to taunt him, a hip-talking (“enough of this jazz, dad!”) beatnik ferryman (Joe Turkel, later of The Shining (1980) and Blade Runner (1982)) gets too close to the truth and has to be killed and a supernatural force disrupts the wedding. It can all only end in even more tragedy…

Tormented (the title refers to a record that the ghostly Vi keeps playing, even after Stewart smashes it) is a bit of a muddle. Gordon and his screenwriter George Worthing Yates try to have their cake and eat it, hinting that everything that happens to Stewart is only happening in his head, a la Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, while still showing various supernatural happenings when he’s not looking or even when he’s not present at all. Gordon seems to be trying to mimic the style of William Castle and to a degree, he almost succeeds.

He does whip up some pleasingly weird imagery – a body transforms into a pile of seaweed, for example, or later a seaweed-draped wedding dress. The traumatic wedding itself is the best directed sequence in the film, with is spectral winds from nowhere, withering floral displays and wedding Bible that turns to a chapter inexplicably titled “the burial of the dead.” Gordon wrings a surprising amount of spooky atmosphere from the beachfront setting and particularly the lighthouse. There’s a particularly tense scene with the ghostly Vi luring the blind Mrs Ellis (Lillian Adams) up the stairs and towards the broken railing that played a key role in her own death.

Gordon’s effects are crude but quite effective at times, but he lacks the imagination to do much with them. And yet despite all that, it’s a lot of undemanding fun – scrappy, entirely lacking in subtlety (Calvin Jackson’s blaring jazz cues sit uncomfortably amid Albert Glasser’s more conventional score and the kill the atmosphere stone dead), Gordon’s ambitions scuppered by a lack of the money to pull off the effects properly, but fun, certainly entertaining enough for its target audience, playing on a crowd-pleasing double-bill with Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava’s Caltiki il mostro immortale/Caltiki the Immortal Monster (1959).

Tormented has long had a poor reputation and to a point, it’s one it deserves. But it’s a better made than you might expect, well-acted and Gordon’s direction veers annoyingly back and for the bland and the atmospheric. But it’s effective enough – nothing revolutionary and it certainly didn’t inspire Gordon to try anything similar himself. It’s one of those films that isn’t very good but which will, for reasons that are sometimes hard to fathom, stick with you for years afterwards (the poignant ending in particular).