The Horror of It All

**½

Terence Fisher’s The Horror of It All (1963) was one of my “Halloween Holdovers”. I had no place on the schedule for it, and I had some time early evening on Monday. It is Fisher’s own Old Dark House “chiller” (used loosely as this is designed more as a dark/light comedy) with the ole family of eccentrics and a killer among them with sights on the grandpa’s fortune. Pat Boone (who even gets a musical number featuring the film’s title) is the American Encyclopedia salesman in love with Cynthia (Erica Rogers), arriving at her family’s estate to propose marriage. Cynthia’s family is the collection of kooks, from inventor Percival (Jack Bligh), whose inventions (such as electricity and the “horseless carriage”) are fifty years too late, to Muldoon (Archie Duncan), the brutish mental case kept locked in a room. There are the likes of Dennis Price (as Cornwallis) and Valentine Dyall (as Reginald) as brothers who could very well be a murderer, as well as Erik Chitty as the deaf, bedridden Grandpa. Price is known for his work in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and later in some films directed by Jesús Franco. Here is the aristocratic brother, a bit high maintenance and extravagant. Dyall, who many will know as the gatekeeper in Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), is the held-together, totally-unmovable, ice-water-in-his-veins Marley, barely registering a pulse even as murders happen in the mansion to his family. Percival holes away in his laboratory, the wide-eyed scientist Boone’s John Robinson befriends. The Marley family has no motor car, telephone, or mode of transport besides a bus that passes by at ten on Thursday, so when John loses his own car nearby the estate, getting to the police isn’t an easy task. Cornwallis falls after a supposed poisoned drink, Grandpa collapses due to his medicine being placed too far away, while the doorbell firing blanks shoots an actual bullet into Muldoon when John tries to escape his monstrous pursuit. Andrée Melly, as the vampish, bloodthirsty goth of the family, many will recognize from Brides of Dracula (1960). There is even a “Grand Guignol museum” inside the mansion complete with guillotine and Iron Maidan! The trapdoor does come in handy, particularly when John must flee from the rampaging Muldoon. Just about 71 minutes, Fisher’s film is slight and doesn’t necessarily add anything new to this genre, but the cast seems to be in good spirits. I guess I consider it forgettable but harmless. There's even the killer in disguise, right out of Scooby Doo. The use of gin to help fuel a hearse-styled vehicle and how Cynthia startles John conclude the film on a surreal note. I could see a horror fan plugging this in during October as its running time is ideal, and it fits in nicely with something Castle might have made.