Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)
Directed by Arthur Crabtree

Film Review

After the British company Hammer had effectively revived the classic horror movie in the late 1950s with its series of Gothic horror films, Anglo-Amalgamated gave the genre a further shot in the arm when it released three films which later came to be dubbed the 'Sadean Trilogy' on account of their sadistic portrayal of physical violence.  Horrors of the Black Museum was the first out of the bag, followed by Sidney Hayers' Circus of Horrors (1960) and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), each film depicting a maniac who goes on a killing spree as a result of a twisted personal obsession.  At the time, all three of these films were fiercely lambasted by the critics for their sensationalist depiction of cruelly executed murders that were accompanied by large amounts of gore and more than a smattering of tawdry eroticism.  Whereas Powell's film struggled to find an audience (after the critics had pretty well destroyed the director's reputation and ended his career), the other two were phenomenally successful and brought about the craze for exploitation horror which took off with a vengeance in the early 1960s and continues to this day.

By today's standards, Horrors of the Black Museum is ludicrously mild.  Each brutal killing is staged as a piece of Grand Guignol theatre that is more comical than frightening, but audiences at the time were pleasurably shocked by what they saw.  The film begins with a seemingly innocuous scene which ends with a woman having her eyes and brain pierced by spikes springing from an ordinary looking pair of binoculars.  Later on, a buxom blonde is guillotined in her bed, and then an unsuspecting doctor is reduced to a skeleton after being electrocuted and immersed in a bubbling vat of acid.  Mostly it is horror by suggestion, with just a fleeting glimpse of something nasty, but the gruesome nature of the killings gave the horror film a more sadistic and exploitative edge than the genre had ever known before.  It's interesting that the next film in the sequence, Circus of Horrors, should be set in a circus big top, with each of the murders played out before an enthusiastic crowd of onlookers.  In bygone centuries, crowds flocked to watch a public execution and now cinema was performing the same role, providing a forum where human beings could wallow in the suffering of others.  The more horrific the spectacle of murder and mutilation, the more authentic the suffering experienced by the victim, the greater is our sense of enjoyment.  We are all voyeuristic little sadists at heart.

Horrors of the Black Museum lacks the flamboyance of Circus of Horrors and terrifying reality of Peeping Tom, and despite its obvious horror trappings it feels more like a deranged black comedy than an example of the genre it helped to spawn.  Were it not for Michael Gough's riveting central performance as a sensation-hungry writer morbidly obsessed with murder the film would be pretty mundane, just a pantomimic succession of implausible killings lined up to titillate a cinema audience comprised mostly of easily pleased Neanderthals.  The script is dire and Arthur Crabtree directs the film (his last) with an obvious lack of enthusiasm and artistry.  Crabtree, who had once scripted several Will Hay comedies and many of Gainsborough's popular period melodramas, was drafted in to direct the film after his previous directorial assignment for Anglo-Amalgamated - the sci-fi shocker Fiend Without a Face (1958) - had made the company a small fortune.

Attractively photographed in CinemaScope and vibrant colour, Horrors of the Black Museum gets away with its cheap theatricality through some memorable visuals and a shamelessly scene-stealing performance from Michael Gough, who positively revels in his first leading film role.  Gough would become closely associated with British horror in the sixties and seventies, through appearances in such films as The Phantom of the Opera (1962), Black Zoo (1963), Horror Hospital (1973) and Satan's Slave (1976), but he is now more famous for playing Alfred Pennyworth in four of the Batman films directed by Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher from the late 1980s.  Like Vincent Price, one of the actors who was considered for the lead role of Bancroft, Gough possesses a natural aura of malevolence that is completely belied by his cultivated and gentlemanly persona.  As soon as he appears in shot, it is at once evident that he is the villain of the piece - and this is one of biggest failings of Horrors of the Black Museum.  Gough never gives us cause to doubt that he is the man behind the killings - the only real surprise is how far his own particular brand of homicidal lunacy will take him as he makes a four course meal of every bit of scenery he can find.

Like Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom and Dr Rossiter in Circus of Horrors, Michael Gough's Edmond Bancroft is a charming and seemingly benign man of immense social worth who is driven to murderous extremes by an all-consuming obsession stemming from his sexual inadequacy.  He doesn't just kill for profit (creating news stories from which he will benefit as an author of sensationalist reports); he does so in response to a primal urge to assert his masculine authority over the women he cannot control.  He finds a willing substitute for the subservient female in Rick, a susceptible young man whom he can readily hypnotise into carrying out his crimes and other household duties (we can only guess at what this might entail).  What Bancroft cannot have he destroys, with somewhat more in the way of maniacal fervour than his counterparts in Powell and Hayers' films.  Gough's chilling portrayal of Civilised Man succumbing to his bestial insticts provided a template for all those maniacs who would hack their way through the unending slew of psycho-thrillers after the success of Hitchcock's Psycho (1960).  Film horror was starting to live up to its name.

Film Synopsis

Inspector Lodge of Scotland Yard is investigating a series of gruesome murders of women, aware that these are being reported in lurid detail by the celebrity crime writer Edmond Bancroft.  The latest victim is a young woman who was stabbed through the eyes by a pair of binoculars she had just received through the post.  Bancroft's personal physician, Dr Ballan, is concerned that he is showing signs of extreme stress after each killing and advises him to take a rest.  Bancroft does more than write about the murders - he is the force behind them, hypnotising his faithful assistant Rick into carrying out the killings with weapons and other instruments of death obtained from a nearby antiques shop.  When Dr Ballan learns the truth Bancroft has no other option but to silence him - as a skeleton he will make a nice adornment to Bancroft's private black museum.   Concerned that Rick's girlfriend Angela may reveal his dark secret, Bancroft decides that she too must die...