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Do you like tying knots in things?
Fear in the Night (1972) may be minor Hammer in the scheme of the studio and minor horror in its cast's CVs, but it is the rare slow-burn twist-based thriller that doesn't melt itself down for scrap in the third act and until then it does more than atmospherically mark time. It even manages some surprises, little inclusions of the unexpected. Befitting a genre predicated on warped psychologies, its foreseeable moves are all a little off the beam.
Part Gothic and part giallo, the screenplay by writer-director-producer Jimmy Sangster doesn't just forebode from the start with an eerily deserted glide through the autumn-blown grounds of a school concluding in the macabre enigma of a corpse by the football pitch, it scarcely bothers with establishing a premise when it can slap down its tropes like a misfortune of Tarot. Six months out from the breakdown whose psychiatric sessions intercut the present action like intrusive thoughts, newlywed Peggy Heller (Judy Geeson) hasn't even made it as far as the stockbroker Tudor of the public school where her husband Robert (Ralph Bates) contends with the lower fourth when her quiet evening of packing out her live-in situation is shattered by the terrifying break-in of a black-clad figure of whose assault no trace remains when she comes to, not even the prosthetic arm she wrenched off in her struggle. "No, it's not spoiled. It's just . . ." Not what she hoped for, this whirlwind honeymoon in a picturesquely mod-conned cottage when she wakes in the middle of the night to watch for movements in the ivy-wreathed shadows of the school she will explore by day, her champagne-soured choke-out memories tinting her encounters with the gentle-voiced headmaster Michael Carmichael (Peter Cushing) and his brusquer wife Molly (Joan Collins) whose violently avant-garde sculptures are the discordant note in all the mellow panelled oak and clerestory reflections of school cups. The sounds of a Latin lesson echoing from a classroom with no one in it nudges the question of her sanity, or perhaps only the supernatural. Worse yet, a second visitation by her nighttime strangler provides no vindication when once again she can offer no proof of the attack beyond her distress that does not equal the signs of forced entry or even bruising. Tear-shocked under the weight of her husband's concern, Peggy clings to her terror like dreadful wreckage, disturbed if she does, endangered if she doesn't: "My imagination . . . He kept saying it must have been my imagination. Well, it couldn't have been my imagination. Could it?"
Fear in the Night is far from a film noir, but it leans into much of the same chilly sense of nightmare, the superficially ordinary charged with indescribable dread. To say that the headmaster discoursed on the therapeutic value of knots before addressing himself to the kerchief tangled in the heroine's hair does not convey the disorientating infusion of eroticism and detached courtliness in his manner, the tender vagueness in speaking of his students which may unsettle the audience more than the reveal of his black-gloved artificial hand. "Do you know that is the most difficult part? To make them want to learn?" To call her near-fatal miss by the headmaster's wife out shooting a rude welcome to the rust-brushed parkland underrates the brazenly personal and unaccountable hostility of the interaction, as territorially intimidating as the housewarming gift of the gorily potted rabbit that could just as easily have been Peggy's shining blonde head. "Well, why didn't you say so, my dear? I nearly made a widower out of you, Robert." Despite repeated invitations to dinner, it is impossible to picture them at the same table, a cracked Crocker-Harris, a brutal Diana. Even the never-named school seems to squint in and out of focus, a neglected exterior of moss-sponged brick and discolored plaster, interiorly spotless down to the neatly laid china and the matron-cornered beds, dust-sheeted in the dead days between terms and worth a quarter of a million according to Robert, who jokes wistfully about his own work-shyness compared with his employer's dedication: "I wish I had just half Carmichael's money . . . You do that every time I go off to work and I shan't go off to work." A unicorn of a husband for a frightened woman in cinema, he's supportive despite his acknowledged skepticism of an intruder right out of a horror comic, decisively reaching to ring the police when she reiterates the reality of her attack, but the suspicious viewer could make something of his very attentiveness, especially when it comes with its own lacunae—he refers to the retired maths master who had the cottage before them, but what exactly does he himself teach? The possibility of another strike from a half-mechanical strangler hangs in Chekhov's plain sight like the loaded shotgun in the Land Rover, but the real tension hums through the bare-branched days because even normal human conversations have a habit of skewing off true as if the world itself is slipping like a badly pasted advertisement. Peggy herself makes an unusual choice of woman in peril: she fits the outward profile with her small, fair looks and huge celadon eyes, but she does not give off an automatic sense of fragility or helplessness—she worked successfully as a carer—which means that to watch her terrorized does not register as the natural condition of a horror heroine, it feels violatingly wrong. Under other circumstances, we would not at all be surprised to see her defend herself with the gun she expressed real distaste for, unloading both barrels at point-blank range as if she'd held her own in a slasher movie before. That her efforts against her own panic are rewarded with nothing more than the advance of an apparent dead man behind his glasses splintered blind as some specter out of M. R. James feels like cheating; the question is on whose part.
By the time all the secrets of shrouded furniture and the phantom voices of schoolboys have been thrown open like a spirit cabinet, the genre-savvy viewer should have been at least tempted to call gaslight on the proceedings, but the degree to which the narrative has built itself around the unreliable experiences of a woman—to the point that we seem intended to question the veracity of any event seen through her eyes—makes it all the more satisfying that its true engine turns out to be instead the instability of men. Michael is its clearest exponent, his lonely eccentricities poignantly exposed as aftershocks of the trauma that has recreated in ghost form his beloved school that was as devastated by fire in 1963 as its headmaster, the rebuilding of its charred east wing a haunted rhyme to his lost, prosthetic arm. How much he understands of the coping reality of his meticulously maintained terms and classes may be debatable, the one living man moving among recordings and memories as if stopped in that summer forever like a ghost himself, but it doesn't make him inherently scary, especially as it turns out to interfere very little with some of his other perceptions. "The parents will get to hear about it. It's surprising what boys write about in their letters home." The sneakier example is Robert, deliciously revealed as the kind of villain who disintegrates when outclassed no matter how sinisterly masterful he appeared to that point. That he and Molly are the classically adulterous, murderous lovers of so much crime fiction hardly counts as a twist by the standards of their genre, but the mille-feuille of machinations required to shock and coax and corner Peggy into pulling the trigger on Michael is rightly called out by both his lover and his rival for its labyrinthine over-egged precarity: "Our way is beginning to look a little sick now, don't you think?" Molly's the real deal, an impatient killer who approaches torture like sculpting and would have disposed of her husband as expediently as she broke a rabbit's neck if it wouldn't have left her the younger, restless, obvious beneficiary. Robert with his squeamishness that doesn't stretch as far as scruples actually convinces in his solicitous husband act right up until it gets away from him with the rest of the murder and then he can't quite lose his looks with that Byronic wing of black hair, but he looks cheaper and flimsier through them, a fantastically undercut trick—the Ketterley effect. "I wish now we'd left things as they were," he mutters angrily about his own plot. Goaded by his intended victim's electronically disembodied voice over the tannoy as he stumbles through the Halloween maze of the darkened school, he blasts away at the sheeted threats of chairs or busts or bodies far more recklessly than the obstinately silent catspaw he jerks with him, who had to be elaborately and relentlessly driven to it. "I knew you would do something foolish, and you did. And now you've done it again." As clinically as he selected his bride for her inpatient history, he may not even have succeeded in breaking her mind. Peggy has been so vividly transparent to us in her love and her fear that when she goes suddenly opaque, incuriously hazy when quizzed about bloodstains and discharged cartridges, then eerily direct about her husband's covert prodding of the leaf-littered river, we may worry about her and still wonder what she's up to. She gets nearly the last word after the long night of horrors, giving a straight answer that sounds like no such thing to the policemen who have arrived too late for rational explanations. "Yes, he's there. It's the start of a new term."
Sangster had done much to form the iconic image of Hammer in the '50's with his Technicolor-shocker rewrites of Frankenstein and Dracula and Fear in the Night as his last effort for the studio was a much more subdued affair, although not blandly so. Veteran Hammer DP Arthur Grant gives the school a curiously, simultaneously vacant and vigilant look, so inhabited by absence that it would feel just as natural if it flashed over to ghosts. Shooting in the last rags of fall in Aldenham Country Park and what was just about to become Bhaktivedanta Manor provided a breath-fogged, brackenish palette against which anything bright—like blood—stands sharply out. One early shot of a service station in the mist of a greyed-out day should be merely establishing and feels instead like dissociation on the northbound M1. It fits with the elliptical editing of Peter Weatherley, which cuts actions as closely into one another as lost time until it can catch up at last to that rook-cawed, corpse-cold open in the pure singing of a punch line. Aside from the fact that it was taken years ago by an American B-noir, the title is almost misleadingly irrelevant, but the commitment of the cast and the odd, bleak artistry of the picture more than compensate for the fact that I would have called it End of Term. I watched it on Tubi, but it can be found just as freely on YouTube and the Internet Archive; it had gotten onto my radar years ago for Peter Cushing and I was prompted more recently toward it by the presence of Judy Geeson and Ralph Bates. It is small and weird and both qualities count for a lot with me. This end brought to you by my surprising backers at Patreon.
Part Gothic and part giallo, the screenplay by writer-director-producer Jimmy Sangster doesn't just forebode from the start with an eerily deserted glide through the autumn-blown grounds of a school concluding in the macabre enigma of a corpse by the football pitch, it scarcely bothers with establishing a premise when it can slap down its tropes like a misfortune of Tarot. Six months out from the breakdown whose psychiatric sessions intercut the present action like intrusive thoughts, newlywed Peggy Heller (Judy Geeson) hasn't even made it as far as the stockbroker Tudor of the public school where her husband Robert (Ralph Bates) contends with the lower fourth when her quiet evening of packing out her live-in situation is shattered by the terrifying break-in of a black-clad figure of whose assault no trace remains when she comes to, not even the prosthetic arm she wrenched off in her struggle. "No, it's not spoiled. It's just . . ." Not what she hoped for, this whirlwind honeymoon in a picturesquely mod-conned cottage when she wakes in the middle of the night to watch for movements in the ivy-wreathed shadows of the school she will explore by day, her champagne-soured choke-out memories tinting her encounters with the gentle-voiced headmaster Michael Carmichael (Peter Cushing) and his brusquer wife Molly (Joan Collins) whose violently avant-garde sculptures are the discordant note in all the mellow panelled oak and clerestory reflections of school cups. The sounds of a Latin lesson echoing from a classroom with no one in it nudges the question of her sanity, or perhaps only the supernatural. Worse yet, a second visitation by her nighttime strangler provides no vindication when once again she can offer no proof of the attack beyond her distress that does not equal the signs of forced entry or even bruising. Tear-shocked under the weight of her husband's concern, Peggy clings to her terror like dreadful wreckage, disturbed if she does, endangered if she doesn't: "My imagination . . . He kept saying it must have been my imagination. Well, it couldn't have been my imagination. Could it?"
Fear in the Night is far from a film noir, but it leans into much of the same chilly sense of nightmare, the superficially ordinary charged with indescribable dread. To say that the headmaster discoursed on the therapeutic value of knots before addressing himself to the kerchief tangled in the heroine's hair does not convey the disorientating infusion of eroticism and detached courtliness in his manner, the tender vagueness in speaking of his students which may unsettle the audience more than the reveal of his black-gloved artificial hand. "Do you know that is the most difficult part? To make them want to learn?" To call her near-fatal miss by the headmaster's wife out shooting a rude welcome to the rust-brushed parkland underrates the brazenly personal and unaccountable hostility of the interaction, as territorially intimidating as the housewarming gift of the gorily potted rabbit that could just as easily have been Peggy's shining blonde head. "Well, why didn't you say so, my dear? I nearly made a widower out of you, Robert." Despite repeated invitations to dinner, it is impossible to picture them at the same table, a cracked Crocker-Harris, a brutal Diana. Even the never-named school seems to squint in and out of focus, a neglected exterior of moss-sponged brick and discolored plaster, interiorly spotless down to the neatly laid china and the matron-cornered beds, dust-sheeted in the dead days between terms and worth a quarter of a million according to Robert, who jokes wistfully about his own work-shyness compared with his employer's dedication: "I wish I had just half Carmichael's money . . . You do that every time I go off to work and I shan't go off to work." A unicorn of a husband for a frightened woman in cinema, he's supportive despite his acknowledged skepticism of an intruder right out of a horror comic, decisively reaching to ring the police when she reiterates the reality of her attack, but the suspicious viewer could make something of his very attentiveness, especially when it comes with its own lacunae—he refers to the retired maths master who had the cottage before them, but what exactly does he himself teach? The possibility of another strike from a half-mechanical strangler hangs in Chekhov's plain sight like the loaded shotgun in the Land Rover, but the real tension hums through the bare-branched days because even normal human conversations have a habit of skewing off true as if the world itself is slipping like a badly pasted advertisement. Peggy herself makes an unusual choice of woman in peril: she fits the outward profile with her small, fair looks and huge celadon eyes, but she does not give off an automatic sense of fragility or helplessness—she worked successfully as a carer—which means that to watch her terrorized does not register as the natural condition of a horror heroine, it feels violatingly wrong. Under other circumstances, we would not at all be surprised to see her defend herself with the gun she expressed real distaste for, unloading both barrels at point-blank range as if she'd held her own in a slasher movie before. That her efforts against her own panic are rewarded with nothing more than the advance of an apparent dead man behind his glasses splintered blind as some specter out of M. R. James feels like cheating; the question is on whose part.
By the time all the secrets of shrouded furniture and the phantom voices of schoolboys have been thrown open like a spirit cabinet, the genre-savvy viewer should have been at least tempted to call gaslight on the proceedings, but the degree to which the narrative has built itself around the unreliable experiences of a woman—to the point that we seem intended to question the veracity of any event seen through her eyes—makes it all the more satisfying that its true engine turns out to be instead the instability of men. Michael is its clearest exponent, his lonely eccentricities poignantly exposed as aftershocks of the trauma that has recreated in ghost form his beloved school that was as devastated by fire in 1963 as its headmaster, the rebuilding of its charred east wing a haunted rhyme to his lost, prosthetic arm. How much he understands of the coping reality of his meticulously maintained terms and classes may be debatable, the one living man moving among recordings and memories as if stopped in that summer forever like a ghost himself, but it doesn't make him inherently scary, especially as it turns out to interfere very little with some of his other perceptions. "The parents will get to hear about it. It's surprising what boys write about in their letters home." The sneakier example is Robert, deliciously revealed as the kind of villain who disintegrates when outclassed no matter how sinisterly masterful he appeared to that point. That he and Molly are the classically adulterous, murderous lovers of so much crime fiction hardly counts as a twist by the standards of their genre, but the mille-feuille of machinations required to shock and coax and corner Peggy into pulling the trigger on Michael is rightly called out by both his lover and his rival for its labyrinthine over-egged precarity: "Our way is beginning to look a little sick now, don't you think?" Molly's the real deal, an impatient killer who approaches torture like sculpting and would have disposed of her husband as expediently as she broke a rabbit's neck if it wouldn't have left her the younger, restless, obvious beneficiary. Robert with his squeamishness that doesn't stretch as far as scruples actually convinces in his solicitous husband act right up until it gets away from him with the rest of the murder and then he can't quite lose his looks with that Byronic wing of black hair, but he looks cheaper and flimsier through them, a fantastically undercut trick—the Ketterley effect. "I wish now we'd left things as they were," he mutters angrily about his own plot. Goaded by his intended victim's electronically disembodied voice over the tannoy as he stumbles through the Halloween maze of the darkened school, he blasts away at the sheeted threats of chairs or busts or bodies far more recklessly than the obstinately silent catspaw he jerks with him, who had to be elaborately and relentlessly driven to it. "I knew you would do something foolish, and you did. And now you've done it again." As clinically as he selected his bride for her inpatient history, he may not even have succeeded in breaking her mind. Peggy has been so vividly transparent to us in her love and her fear that when she goes suddenly opaque, incuriously hazy when quizzed about bloodstains and discharged cartridges, then eerily direct about her husband's covert prodding of the leaf-littered river, we may worry about her and still wonder what she's up to. She gets nearly the last word after the long night of horrors, giving a straight answer that sounds like no such thing to the policemen who have arrived too late for rational explanations. "Yes, he's there. It's the start of a new term."
Sangster had done much to form the iconic image of Hammer in the '50's with his Technicolor-shocker rewrites of Frankenstein and Dracula and Fear in the Night as his last effort for the studio was a much more subdued affair, although not blandly so. Veteran Hammer DP Arthur Grant gives the school a curiously, simultaneously vacant and vigilant look, so inhabited by absence that it would feel just as natural if it flashed over to ghosts. Shooting in the last rags of fall in Aldenham Country Park and what was just about to become Bhaktivedanta Manor provided a breath-fogged, brackenish palette against which anything bright—like blood—stands sharply out. One early shot of a service station in the mist of a greyed-out day should be merely establishing and feels instead like dissociation on the northbound M1. It fits with the elliptical editing of Peter Weatherley, which cuts actions as closely into one another as lost time until it can catch up at last to that rook-cawed, corpse-cold open in the pure singing of a punch line. Aside from the fact that it was taken years ago by an American B-noir, the title is almost misleadingly irrelevant, but the commitment of the cast and the odd, bleak artistry of the picture more than compensate for the fact that I would have called it End of Term. I watched it on Tubi, but it can be found just as freely on YouTube and the Internet Archive; it had gotten onto my radar years ago for Peter Cushing and I was prompted more recently toward it by the presence of Judy Geeson and Ralph Bates. It is small and weird and both qualities count for a lot with me. This end brought to you by my surprising backers at Patreon.
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Aw, you're still enjoying the Poldark cast, then? <3
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Hasn't let me down lately!
(Not to be relied on with serial television, synchronicity also so far working out when over in the eighteenth century I have just watched Ralph Bates lose a tavern brawl about as badly as anyone who ever bounced off a table on their way down.)
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Oh, ha, yes the really bad (complimentary) tavern brawl is great! XD
As I am neither temperamentally nor technologically constituted for the reaction video
—Francis Poldark to Demelza Carne, Episode 13
"Yes, if there's deep water to be found, you'll find it."
—Charles Poldark to Francis Poldark, Episode 1
a) DAMMIT FRANCIS
b) And stone cold sober, too.
c) On the one hand it is my general preference for complicated characters to survive because of their potential in a narrative, but I cannot deny the emotional impact crater left on the audience by the timing, because in the entire series I don't think we ever see him as happy as that last scene with Demelza, as unselfconsciously generous, beside himself already with his discovery and then the bonus reward of finding himself loved after the ordeal of being very mortifyingly known and able to return something of the favor with that always surprising insight of his that traditionally comes out in bitterness and here is poignantly kind, recognizing the treasure that she is and meaning her to believe it. That beautiful quirk of a smile as he takes his leave of her. He's never even turned down a drink before. It was fairly foreshadowed and it isn't fair.
d) Ironically this is the kind of exit that Kevin McNally made in Turn and I'm not over it, either. I spent decades getting over my early belief that all my favorite characters were doomed and there doesn't seem to have been much point to it. It's a recurrent narrative strategy because it works.
e) That last damned shot of the watch and the decanter.
tl;dr I recognize that anyone who had seen the 1975 Poldark and known me for five minutes could have told me that Francis would corkscrew himself into my id in two scenes, but I didn't know it and I am experiencing the predictable emotions. At least I got to see his actor get an HEA in something else first.
Re: As I am neither temperamentally nor technologically constituted for the reaction video
Aww, I'm sorry! <3<3<3
I wondered when you were going to get to it. It is such a good/heartbreaking way to go, and CF plays it so beautifully.
I did gif this scene years ago because of that, so:
here and here, if you want to relieve the pain.
Plus some reactions, in reblogs, which I hope you may be able to see:
https://missanthropicprinciple.tumblr.com/post/759826150184927232/thisbluespirit-ive-always-envied-ross-but-no
https://missanthropicprinciple.tumblr.com/post/759826126722973696/thisbluespirit-ive-found-copper-all-the
https://www.tumblr.com/llywela13/671086737443962880/ive-found-copper-all-the-copper-in-the-world
(He does get to marry Angharad Rees in the BBC's As You Like It a couple of years later, because, as you have clearly noticed, the Poldark crew do seem to congregate an unusual amount both before and after, even given the odds re. any set of UK 1970s actors).
It may not be much consolation, but in terms of point, pretty much none of the whole narrative of the remaining books & TV from this moment on would have happened if Francis had lived, so the fallout will carry on throughout.
But, yeah - I wondered what you'd make of it! It's awful and heartbreaking and unfair and perfect and he does it so well. I'm glad it was this, and not any of the earlier times he nearly managed to destroy himself, accidentally or deliberately. *hugs*
Re: As I am neither temperamentally nor technologically constituted for the reaction video
Yeah, no, full marks for scripting and performance, an entire viewership in the winter of 1975 probably walked around shell-shocked for a week.
I did gif this scene years ago because of that, so
Oh, good, there's the smile. And short of Ross' homecoming and some scenes with his son, I don't think we see him touch anyone as giddily as he swings Demelza around or as seriously as he kisses her forehead. All those connections and no more time to make them.
Plus some reactions, in reblogs, which I hope you may be able to see
Appreciated! The first two were accessible without having to be on Tumblr.
(He does get to marry Angharad Rees in the BBC's As You Like It a couple of years later, because, as you have clearly noticed, the Poldark crew do seem to congregate an unusual amount both before and after, even given the odds re. any set of UK 1970s actors).
Well, as I haven't watched anything for Angharad Rees yet, presumably I should get on that.
(To further your point, Donald Douglas, i.e. Captain McNeil is one of the other romantic heroes of the 1968 Middlemarch.)
It may not be much consolation, but in terms of point, pretty much none of the whole narrative of the remaining books & TV from this moment on would have happened if Francis had lived, so the fallout will carry on throughout.
I did worry he would be inconvenient.
But, yeah - I wondered what you'd make of it! It's awful and heartbreaking and unfair and perfect and he does it so well. I'm glad it was this, and not any of the earlier times he nearly managed to destroy himself, accidentally or deliberately.
Yes; earlier it would have been sad, but it wouldn't have had the same punch of loss because over the last few episodes he came so much into focus as himself, still a drink in his hand most scenes and too easily drawn and he never got rid of the leftovers of that cough, but even before his suicide attempt literally misfired on him he was starting to try to do better and it paid off. It wasn't even like watching him turn a corner, just take up the right kind of space in his own life. Which never gets a person a free pass on irony from the universe, which is where we came in.
Re: As I am neither temperamentally nor technologically constituted for the reaction video
<3<3<3 (Btw, I meant "relive the pain" not "relieve the pain" because I don't feel the latter is the point of that kind of gif, but I didn't notice the typo until too late).
To further your point, Donald Douglas, i.e. Captain McNeil is one of the other romantic heroes of the 1968 Middlemarch.
But of course. That lot just cannot avoid each other!
still a drink in his hand most scenes and too easily drawn and he never got rid of the leftovers of that cough, but even before his suicide attempt literally misfired on him he was starting to try to do better and it paid off. It wasn't even like watching him turn a corner, just take up the right kind of space in his own life. Which never gets a person a free pass on irony from the universe, which is where we came in.
I'd forgotten how many options he had for dying, lol You describe him so well again! And, yeah, it's got a real punch. Francis! *nods* *hugs*
Re: As I am neither temperamentally nor technologically constituted for the reaction video
No worries! The intended spelling was clear from context.
I'd forgotten how many options he had for dying, lol You describe him so well again! And, yeah, it's got a real punch. Francis!
Thank you! *hugs*
And to circle back around to Ralph Bates, now that I've reached the end of the first series: damn, George, Francis may have let Trenwith run down and mortgaged it to the proverbial hilt, but he never got it set on fire by an actually torch-wielding mob. Hold my cider indeed.
Re: As I am neither temperamentally nor technologically constituted for the reaction video
Yes, and it was totally Ralph Bates's fault, because that didn't happen in the books! XD
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it scarcely bothers with establishing a premise when it can slap down its tropes like a misfortune of Tarot. --love this so much. A misfortune of Tarot. What a perfect collective noun.
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Enjoy! It went over well with
--love this so much. A misfortune of Tarot. What a perfect collective noun.
Thank you!
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I found it worth the time to think about! I can't believe it finally occurred to me that it probably is the closest I will see to Peter Cushing's Andrew Crocker-Harris.
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Yes! It looked like such a simpler kind of film than it turned out to be. I could have appreciated that one for its style and its cast—fifteen years ago it was instantly clear that I would watch Peter Cushing read the phone book, silently, to himself—but I wouldn't have enjoyed it anywhere near as much.