Being a fan of Hammer Horror and the Giallo sub-genre I started talking to a friend about Horror flicks to view in October. Whilst being aware of Hammer's late Psycho-Thriller/Giallo era,I was surprised to get told of a Hammer psycho which co-starred Peter Cushing,which led to me fearing the night.The plot:Preparing to move to a secluded boys' boarding school that her husband Robert Heller will be working at,Peggy is attacked by a stranger wearing black gloves.Waking up from the attack,Peggy finds no proof that an attacker was in the house,and starts to wonder if she is imagining things. Going to the school with Robert,Peggy meets headmaster Michael Carmichael,whose quiet behaviour puts Peggy on edge. Attacked (and knocked out) again,Peggy wakes up to find Robert asking what she thinks might be causing her to faint.Fearing her sanity,Peggy decides to relax and walk round the school.Hearing the sound of school children,Peggy walks into the school and is horrified,when she finds it to be completely empty of kids.View on the film:Reaching the screen after originally being written in 1963,co- writer/(along with Michael Syson) director Jimmy Sangster gives the horror a sly middle class shell,dressed in crisp surroundings and prim clothes which allow for the psychological terror to lurk underneath. Dissecting Hammer studios major theme of female hysteria with Giallo black gloves,the writers brilliantly mix haunted Gothic Horror memories of a past that has long gone with a rich Film Noir pessimism.Tearing Peggy Heller away from being a "Scream Queen",the writers use the disbelief in Peggy's visions to cast her as a Film Noir loner,whose hysteria over what she is experiencing is clouded by the meek middle class façade Robert covers her eyes with.For the final Hammer Horror he would direct, Sangster and cinematographer Arthur Grant set the mood tranquillity,by giving the opening morbid,stilted camera moves casting a shadow of something long forgotten. Cosying up in the Heller's house, Sangster sits in with corned shots on the household which lock Peggy in and make the sudden shots of violence smash the image of Peggy's life with a mighty Hammer.Also making his final Hammer outing, Ralph Bates gives a wonderful performance as Robert,whose mature manner Bates makes just that bit eerily off. Joining in on the Giallo Horror game, Peter Cushing walks a fine line in his performance as "The Headmaster" whose gentlemen manner is undermined by Cushing blinding him with shards of cold emotion across his black glasses.Delivering a scream with fear to match the best of Hammer's Girls,the elegant Judy Geeson wonderfully turns Peggy into a burnt-out Film Noir loner,whose chirpy middle class heart is worn down by Geeson into a hysteria which leads to Peggy being numb to the outside world,as Peggy discovers that fear is the key.

This is a fairly low-key mystery-thriller from Hammer. It's about a troubled young woman who experiences attacks from an unknown assailant. She and her teacher husband move to an isolated off-term public school, while there she comes into contact with an odd school-master and the situation escalates…Anyone who is familiar with the 50's French thriller classic Les Diaboliques will notice a few borrowed ideas in this one, although it's only fair to say that this is a clearly inferior shadow of that film. Having said all that, this doesn't necessarily make Fear In The Night a poor film; it's actually a solid little thriller with a few well-handled suspenseful scenes. Clearly a very low-budget production – it barely has half-a-dozen characters – it nevertheless makes use of its limited resources fairly well, as did all Hammer productions in general. Also, in keeping with films from this studio, there is a good selection of actors and actresses on display – Judy Geeson is the psychologically troubled wife, Ralph Bates is her teacher husband, while Peter Cushing plays the strange school headmaster and Joan Collins is his bitchy younger wife. It's the efforts of these four, as well as the intriguing deserted private school setting, that ensures that this thriller remains interesting, as the hackneyed and predictable plot-line are serviceable but not especially inspired. Fear In The Night almost feels like a TV play at times, the sort of thing you might have seen on an episode of Armchair Thriller in the 70's. But to be fair, there's nothing wrong with that.

Pretty, neurotic newlywed Peggy (Judy Geeson) survives an attack by a leather-gloved, one-armed assailant the day before she is due to leave London to live with her husband Robert (Ralph Bates) who teaches at a posh boys school in the country owned by sinister headmaster Michael Carmichael (Peter Cushing) and his bitchy young wife (the lovely Joan Collins).Once there, though, poor Peggy soon realises that, even though she is now miles from the city, she still isn't safe: the one-armed maniac appears to have followed her to her new home...It shouldn't take seasoned fans of psychological thrillers very long to suss that the mysterious goings on in Hammer's Fear In the Night are intended to turn the protagonist completely insane, drive her to murder, or both. But although the film's plot doesn't earn many points for originality, being heavily reminiscent of the French thriller Les Diaboliques, director Jimmy Sangster delivers enough startling imagery (Cushing's shattered glasses; a gloved prosthetic arm) and well-handled scenes of suspense to ensure that the film is certainly never dull: from its wonderful opening credits sequence, in which the camera pans across the school to eventually reveal the legs of a man hanging from a tree, to its tense denouement, Fear in the Night is a solid slice of macabre entertainment.

Although this is certainly not one of their more famous titles, I was actually quite impressed with this Hammer movie which is an interesting variation on the famous French thriller "Diabolique" but with four main characters instead of three. Judy Geeson is a naive schoolmarm who marries a man (Ralph Bates) who she thinks is also a schoolteacher but actually turns out to be the caretaker of an abandoned boys' school and its mentally unstable former headmaster (Peter Cushing). The headmaster in turn has a shrewish, grasping wife (Joan Collins)who spends her time cruelly blasting cute bunnies with a double-barreled shotgun. Without giving too much of the plot away, two of the characters are having an affair and scheme to drive another of the characters insane so he/she will kill the fourth character. But as usually happens, the plan goes horribly awry for almost everyone involved.This is one of the more interesting 70's Hammer films because it actually tries to do something new rather than just mining the old Gothic formulas and monsters that served them so well in the 60's. Hammer had of course done psychological thrillers like this as early as "Scream of Fear" in 1961, but this is one kind of film that they actually refined and perfected in the 1970's (rather than beat like dead horse)with entries like this, "Straight on Until Morning", and the Gothic/psycho-thriller "Demons of the Mind". It was definitely better than Jimmy Sangster's first directorial effort "Lust for a Vampire", even though the latter was much more famous (probably owing to Yutte Stensgaard pulling her two Danishes out every five minutes). It will probably never be regarded as a Hammer classic, but is interesting film at least, which is more than can be said of a lot of their 70's product