With the over saturated zombie genre still shambling forward, sometimes it's refreshing to go back and look at the kind of thing that was around before 1968. A simpler time when reviving the dead was still all about voodoo magic, and nobody had to eat the flesh from anyone else's bones. Despite George A. Romero's reinvention of the whole revived corpse idea being just couple of years ahead in the same decade, it manages to feel worlds apart from the sort of stories that came before. However that isn't to say that John Gilling's film about occult rituals in rural Cornwall is bad, it's just very different. In fact it's one of the best Hammer horror releases in their catalogue.
The film itself has the tone of a supernatural detective story, with André Morell playing Sir James Forbes, a doctor investigating the strange deaths in a remote countryside village. Maybe it's just a feeling I have because he played Watson in Hammer's 1959 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles which also had strange goings on and fog covered moors. But it's great casting and having a grouchy older hero is a lot of fun. The interactions with his daughter Sylvia (Diane Clare) in particular are often sardonic as they play off one another. Sir James might not be a likely candidate for winning the fist fight in the third act, but I'll overlook it in this case as the scene has one of the funniest accidental room fires outside of The Last Crusade.
It's not an entirely serious movie, however there is something to be said of the overall atmosphere and the production design. One badly placed smoke machine (and a suspiciously light weight grandfather clock) aside this is a great looking story. There are weird voodoo dolls, dramatic underground lairs and eerie graveyards. The ritual mask worn by the villain is particularly memorable, and is used to good effect during an alleyway ambush moment. The zombies themselves are also very striking, with grey skin and dead blue and white cataracts. They don't show up that often, but it's more effective that way. The first to appear is one of the best monster moments in the Hammer library, as a recently dead man appears from a tin mine and starts shrieking with almost a kind of insane laughter.
The actual plot however is less effective, although for the most part the it keeps things moving forward. Sir James arrives to see why his former pupil Peter (Brook Williams) is having trouble with his new practice. It seems that the locals are getting a bit testy when several recent deaths are unexplained. There are several bad signs (and a few dodgy accents) since with no village coroner Squire Hamilton (John Carson) has sway over the kinds of examinations Peter can conduct. Sir James will have none of this and sets out to do things his way whether Hamilton or the police like it or not. Luckily his hunches are correct and soon he has Sergeant Swift (Michael Ripper) on his side.
It's not particularly violent but there are a lot of good moments in which the spooky mood and the weird make-up effects combine to create a pretty engaging chiller. The one major walking dead sequence is the standout as heads roll, graves open and a lot of Dutch angles are thrown at the viewer. The red paint they use for blood is far too thick and glossy, and sometimes it appears in rather large quantities from rather small cuts. But it's appropriate for the kind of heightened Victorian style of the film, with its scenery chewing fox hunters and ridiculous Caribbean drums.
Sylvia of course becomes a typical damsel in distress towards the end, even if what the villain needs her for is unclear. But she does at least feel a bit more fiery in the first half of the story, not taking any nonsense from her father or Hamilton - at least outside an eye roll inducing moment where she gets assaulted by his friends for interfering with their hunting trip. The Squire himself is a bit stiff in terms of bad guy material, but I suppose you can't get Christopher Lee for everything. His diabolical scheme however is a bit puzzling, and the final reveal raises few questions (and eyebrows). What good are slow, rotten people as labour? How will beating their dead, unfeeling flesh help? Is this all a convoluted scam to avoid making a tin mine safer for workers?
As Sir James gets closer to the truth his own motives also become a bit muddled, as he sneaks into the Squire's mansion but can't seem to get out again. He would have been burnt alive if a random servant hadn't wandered in to open the door. But in a way this is part of the fun, watching him try and fight a man half his age and then setting fire to the place by accident. The zombies becoming confused and trying to pat themselves down as they begin to cook is also a great moment. These kinds of images may not be as iconic as Lee's Dracula and Cushing's Frankenstein, but I think they still deserve to be remembered fondly. As a Hammer movie it's an essential, and as a voodoo tale it's like White Zombie and The Believers - mostly nonsense but still always enjoyable.
4/5
