Dot Rotten

Frightmare (Pete Walker, 1974)

Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) wasn't the only horror film involving a family of cannibals released that year. On the otherside of the pond, Pete Walker's Frightmare (1974) had a similar premise when it came out in theatres a month later. Unlike Hooper's influential classic, Walker's film was lambasted by critics due to its bloody violence and its commentary on the legal system. Decades later, Frightmare's reputation has improved drastically and revised as a British horror classic from the seventies.

Beginning with a monochrome prologue, set in the year 1957, a young Andrew Sachs, more commonly known for playing Manuel in the sitcom Fawlty Towers (1975-1979), enters a grotty caravan to have his fortune told. These would be his final moments as he meets an unpleasantly gory demise. His muderer, the psychotic fortune teller Dorothy (Sheila Keith) and her accomplice Edmund Yates (Rupert Davies), are sentenced to a mental institution until they are cured.

Fast forward to the present day (the film's present day; not ours!) and the fifteen year old hellraiser, Debbie Yates (Kim Butcher) has it in for the poor nightclub barman who won't serve her alcohol. Young Debbie doesn't take this too well and lies to her biker boyfriend and his mates that she was called a slut by the barman. The end result is the barman being beaten by the biker mob after closing time. Debbie goes one step further after her friends ride off by murdering the beaten man.

Meanwhile, Debbie's older half-sister, Jackie (Deborah Fairfax) is attending a friend's dinner party and being cringefully chirpsed (it's suprisingly working, though) by another guest, the psychiatrist Graham Heller (O.G Captain Zepp - Space Detective Paul Greenwood). Jackie is now Debbie's guardian after the murderous brat was thrown out of her orphanage. As a result, her social life has been terrible while looking after the bad seed.

Jackie has a secret of her own; which revolves around her sneaking off during the night and delivering a wrapped parcel to an isolated farm. Cue lots of day for night shots and library sounds of owls hooting. The farm is where her recently released father and step-mother now dwell, and a major proponent to the film's  brilliantly macabre atmosphere.

No surprise to anyone into horror films, Dorothy has had a relapse. Sad, lonely women visit the farm to have their fortunes read by Dorothy while Edmund is away at work. Their futures are cut short once Dorothy has one of her turns. The murders are gruesome; one poor woman is stabbed in the abdomen with a flaming poker with Kensington gore gushing from her mouth. The victims are covered with hay in the barn next door to the farm. The corpses aren't given any dignity. The sight of Sheila Keith's blood spattered crazed face as she uses a power drill on a cadaver is horrifying.

There's a cool scene where Debbie and Graham are at the pictures watching La Grande Bouffet (1973), but you can hear the recognisable dialogue from Walker's fantastic, previous film House of Whipcord (1974). With the stress of living with Debbie living under her roof and her parents being released, she abandons her date with Graham and drives back to the farm.

With Jackie's aid, the cops find the barman's corpse in the boot of a car. The mutilated barman proves Debbie is a psychopath and possibly a cannibal, just like her dear old mum. "What did you mean when you said 'it was more than murder'?", are what Jackie asks the fuzz; implying Debbie might have developed a hunger for long pig. 

The film gets bleaker and darker as the film progresses, and this is the appeal as to why Frightmare is so memorable. Walker courted controversy for how lurid his films were, but they also were critical of British institutions and the generation of our elders. All this from a tory who made sexploitation films a few years prior. His commentary on both mental health and judicial systems in Frightmare is damning, regardless of its intentions being possibly exploitative

The film is bookended with a judge's quote:

"And let the members of the public be assured that you shall remain in this mental institution until there can be no doubt whatsoever that you are fit and able to take your place in society again."

Comparitively speaking, Sheila Keith was the Robert De Niro to Pete Walker's Martin Scorsese. The elderly actress was a class act in Walker's films and elevated them a great deal. She was an intergral part of why Pete Walker's films clicked for a generation of Brit horror fans. Keith would also play a fortune teller in an episode of the BBC mini-series Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001) — a comedy which lovingly mocked various British horror films from the sixties and seventies.

Frightmare would turn out to be Deborah Fairfax's only real theatrical film; which is a shame, since she played the frustrated protagonist way better than some of Walker's other heroines. It would also be the last film by the veteran actor Rupert Davies, as he passed away a couple of years later.

With the exception of Die Screaming Marianne (1971), your host is unashamedly a fan of Pete Walker's "terror films". Torn between House of Whipcord and Frightmare over which is his best. What is an absolute certainty is just how fun it's been revisiting his films recently after purchasing 88 Films' Pete Walker blu-ray set; so it's no real surprise at least one of Walker's films got some shine on this blog, eventually.

Highly recommended.