Fear in the Night
It has been a year of both good and bad for Peggy, a mental breakdown followed by the surprise joy of a courtship, marrying teacher Robert Heller despite having only known him for four months, leaving her live-in position with a wealthy elderly lady to take up residence beside him in the cottage behind the rural boarding school run by Michael Carmichael.
The headmaster slightly eccentric but genial, his wife, Molly, is younger and more hostile, confronting Peggy when she finds her in the grounds and assuming she is a trespasser; adding to her unease, with Robert called to a conference, Peggy is plagued by nightmares of the unidentified one-armed man in leather gloves who assaulted her before her relocation.
A script which passed through many iterations over an extended period before finally being greenlit for production by Hammer, directed by The Curse of Frankenstein’s Jimmy Sangster and co-written in its final form with Michael Syson, Fear in the Night stars Doomwatch’s Judy Geeson in the weak role of Peggy, uncertain and afraid, browbeaten, talked over and her concerns dismissed, though Robert offers somewhat more to Ralph Bates than he had while exposing The Horror of Frankenstein.
Joan Collins hardly required to stretch herself other than the difficulty of accepting that she is a housewife called Molly, an arrogant woman who shoots first and casts accusations after when not sculpting, Peter Cushing is only present in a supporting role as Michael, a distant man who could be charming but might also be creepy depending on the context of his actions, while the empty halls of the school where the voices of the children still echo recall The Innocents transferred to a less Gothic romance than modernist dinge.
1972 epitomised by the grotty motorway service station through which Robert and Peggy transit, Fear in the Night is a filler in the Hammer catalogue, a tale of obvious gaslighting in which Chekov’s gun is literally handed to the vulnerable woman who has a bad habit of fainting any time she gets a fright, which is often, the dialogue and characters flat and the premise having been thought through better (and without the frustrating loose ends – who set the fire and accompanying boobytrap?) by Ira Levin in Deathtrap later the same decade.
Also known as Dynasty of Fear and Honeymoon of Fear, restored in 4K StudioCanal’s new edition of Fear in the Night is supported by two commentaries, from Sangster with Hammer expert Marcus Hearn and from film historian Troy Howarth, and two discussions of the film and its precedents in the thriller genre from Kim Newman and a roundtable, in addition to a gallery and the original trailer.
Fear in the Night will be available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from StudioCanal from Monday 23rd March
