Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again host a fundraiser for Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and finding them happy homes.
Today’s theme: Black and White
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Connelly is a lifelong genre film fan living in New Jersey. His Letterboxd profile is https://letterboxd.com/johnconn/
I can understand the math of how Terence Fisher ended up directing the 1964 Pat Boone vehicle The Horror of It All. By this time, Lippert Pictures would have been very familiar with his work at Hammer: Dracula, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Curse of the Werewolf, and the Phantom of the Opera all are the work of a director who clearly knew how to update Gothic chills to run swiftly down modern spines. What those films are not, for the most part, is funny. Thankfully, the result of handing Fisher a gothic horror comedy aren’t disastrous, but this will never be considered among his best work.
Stop me if you heard this one before: A handsome if fairly boring American (pop star Pat Boone) falls for a British woman (played by Erica Rogers, who would have minor roles in several other films, including River of Death). Our boring Yank is intent on meeting his Brit betrothed’s family before they are wed. Following some physical comedy involving his broken down car, he arrives at a creepy old manor, only to find it is the ancestral home of his beloved. Once inside, he begins to understand why she was reluctant for him to meet the family: they range in demeanor from the charmingly eccentric to the criminally insane.
This sort of “old dark house” film had been done and done well already, and not just in The Old Dark House. A recurring gag of an inventor whose “inventions” are several decades too late reminds me of the similarly delusional Teddy Baxter, played by John Alexander in Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace. Vincent Price had already welcomed audiences to the House on Haunted Hill. Martin and Jerry Lewis were scared stiff about a decade before the Horror of it All in a flick called -fittingly enough- Scared Stiff. Bob Hope cracked wise through The Ghost Breakers and The Cat and the Canary — two films I couldn’t help but think of while watching this one. Pat Boone could have used a bit of Hope’s sardonic charm. This would also, obviously, not be the end of the subgenre. Two years later, Don Knotts would star in one of my favorite of the bunch, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Erica Rogers’ character -the sole “normal one” in a clan of cuckoos- calls to mind Beverly Owens as Marilyn Munster.
The real stand out of the show is Andrée Melly, the Marley who may or may not be a vampire. Melly had worked with Fisher before in The Brides of Dracula, she was a stage actress who had performed in Romeo and Juliet, but it is a shame she didn’t do more horror as she clearly had a knack for it. Here she is the Lilly to Roger’s Marilyn Munster: dropping morbid one liners and demanding the camera’s attention, as if through dark magic she were able to mesmerize the audience through it. Boone is fine in this film (he’s better in 1959’s Journey to the Center of the Earth). But there is a reason that the extent this film is remembered, it’s for the hot goth cousin.
The film is under 90 minutes, and moves quickly enough that its flaws do not linger. If its plot is predictable, there is a kind of comfort to be found in that. The Horror of It All is cozy. It’s the cinematic equivalent of drinking warmed apple cider and watching TV on my gramma’s living room floor. There are several versions posted on youtube in varying degrees of quality. The film currently has under 400 views on Letterboxd, so if you can’t watch it for “Black and White” day, consider it for your “Unsung Horrors” pick.
