By Roy Mathur, on 2024-07-28, at 23:36:45 to 00:23:50 BST, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
This is it. This is my final revisit of Hammer House of Horror. If you want to listen to the previous revisits, they began last year. I might consider a separate feed in future.
As you may know, I am fond of The Doors, but instead of the quoting the cliched, "Beautiful friend" line from The End (1966), here are the never quoted last two lines of the song:
The end of nights we tried to die
This is the end
Notable Cast: Edwyn: Peter McEnery; very little genre, but Morse, Stella: Georgina Hale; Daisy K in Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol, Doreen in Cockneys vs Zombies
Director: Don Leaver; Witching Time and The Avengers
Writer: Don Shaw; Survivors, Doomwatch
Producer: Roy Skeggs; ex-Hammer Films, formed spin-off Cinema Arts, returned to Hammer, moved production to Buckinghamshire and created Hammer House of Horror.
Locations: 1980 in and around Buckinghamshire... except not in this case. Edwyn and his mother's Home: Heathfield Road, Acton, London, Hospital: Hillingdon Hospital, Uxbridge, Middlesex, Church: Holy Cross Church, Ferrymead Gardens, Greenford, Middlesex, Library: St Ives Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire
Production: Hammer Films, Cinema Arts, and ITC Entertainment
Distribution: ITV
Music: The memorable theme music was composed by ex-Jazz pianist Roger Webb.
Broadcast: Episode 13 of 13, first broadcast 6 December 1980, c. 54 minute running time (c. 1 hr inc. ads), following The Two Faces of Evil (pod 550).
Media: DVD Hammer House of Horror: The Complete Collection (2002), DVD 5 disk special edition in (2012), Blu-ray Hammer House of Horror: The Complete Series (2017) may be worth buying because the series was shot on 35 mm film (addendum: unless it's been digitally remastered with too much smoothing, then don't bother; that is the reason I only buy Disney old DVDs, rather than Blu-rays), Streaming on ITVX in the UK (2023) and Apple TV
43 years, 7 months and 22 days from the time I am speaking to you, Abba's Super Trouper was still number one in the UK, as it was during our revisit of The Two Faces of Evil.
In the midst of having his brain operated upon, a man called Holt says, "Leave my soul alone".
Edwyn, a new mortuary attendant, learns from his boss that Holt drilled a hole through his head to let out an evil virus.
The cumulative mental effects of a needlestick injury while sewing up Holt, his propensity for hearing radio-like transmissions around weathervanes, and a string of previous coincidences involving the number 9; including his 9 pound sweepstake winning and Holt's body he is instructed to place in drawer 9, convinces Edwyn that he has become infected with the same evil virus. He seeks help from a priest, but flees when he sees the readings board displaying the numbers 36, 18, and 9.
He later finds out that Holt was about to eat an innocent baby, in the belief that it would cure his affliction, before being stopped by the police.
Edwyn believes everyone around him is conspiring against him, including his mother, who he stabs to death and hides in a chest freezer with the help of his lodger.
He collapses after his delusions peak and awakes in hospital, where he is told that drug therapy has cured him of his paranoia. He returns to his old operating theatre job, but the radio transmissions persist and he rapidly declines when he discovers his mother's body in the freezer.
Finally, he copies Holt and drills a hole into his own skull. In the closing scene, we see him operated on similarly to Holt. Like Holt, he says, "Leave my soul alone".
Trepanation to let out evil spirits is one of those dodgy ancient practices that actually existed.
Surgical poking about in the black box of the brain can cause unpredictable damage, which is why operations are sometimes carried out on concious patients, who occasionally display strange behaviour (not a good sign).
I felt sorry for single mother Stella the lodger, living with such a hostile landlady and her dangerously delusional son, until it became apparent that she wanted Edywn's mother out of the way to secure her own future. Her kindness to Edwyn is merely a ploy.
Poor Edwyn has the full Monty: life stress, pre-existing psychosis, and delusional paranoia. I felt upset for Edwyn, rather than dread horror. This is a lurid, grim, and depressing story about a severely mentally ill man. It makes Jim Carrey's The Number 23 look like Play School in comparison.
Though I've seen this multiple times, not voluntarily, but coincidentally, I do not suspect the hand of Satan.
Give Hammer their due, this was the only occasion I remember spotting the overhead boom mic in frame.
For it's September to December run, the weekly series hit almost every horror trope: a time travelling witch, cannibals, inescapable nightmares, mad botany, fakery and it's traumatic bloody consequences, sinister idols, a Nazi mad scientist, werewolves, a psychotic biographical author who over-identifies with her murderous subjects, a demon worshipping cult, evil alien doppelgangers, and a Satanic virus. Vampires are the only thing missing, but given Hammer's heritage, perhaps that would have been a cliche too far.
The series was sometimes poorly executed and unintentionally funny. Who can forget the time travelling Witch's abject terror of the modern flushing toilet in Witching Time? There's also Growing Pain's Benny Hill chase of a crazed dog around the garden and an inappropriately long, echoing scream as a man faceplants to his death, after a deadly plunging fall of... about three feet.
Thera are star and guest appearances on a scale rivalling that of Amicus (or USA Network's Monk's "Characters Welcome" tagline), including Jon Finch (Jerry Cornelius from The Final Programme), Patricia Quinn (Magenta from The Rocky Horror Picture Show), Brian Croucher, Paul Darrow, and Gareth Thomas from Blake's 7, and Peter Cushing's last work for Hammer as Nazi scientist Martin Blueck in episode 7 The Silent Scream, which also starred Brian Cox.
Paul Moody, for BFI Screen Online, wrote:
Despite ceasing horror film production with To the Devil a Daughter (d. Peter Sykes, 1976), the studio resurrected itself in the early 1980s with the TV series Hammer House of Horror (ITV, 1980-81), featuring several directors and writers synonymous with the company. The demands of small screen production revived much of the atmosphere of Hammer's early period at Bray, and the resultant success of many of these episodes, both artistically and commercially, led to the subsequent Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense (ITV, 1984-85).
In 2020, in an article by Nick Ruskell in The Guardian wrote:
Its bloody instalments turned provincial towns into places where fear was never far away. 40 years on, it remains one of the creepiest, strangest shows ever shown on British TV.
IMDB rating: 7.5/10, 90% liked. Possibly the most unpleasant episode, Peter Cushing's The Silent Scream, is rated at 7.3/10.
My personal opinion is that the series was a very 80s schlocky and throughly nasty modern horror anthology, with none of that gothic flouncing that Hammer was previously famous for. Almost too unpleasant in places, to the point where it becomes occasionally disgusting, rather than thrilling.
To surmise, I enjoyed this trepidatious tip-toe down to the basement, where gods only know what is about to transpire to turn one's perfectly ordinary life topsy-turvy.
Expect an everything episode soon, then the usual random messy schedule, which includes my ongoing classic Doctor Who revisit, continuing with Colin Baker, the psychopath in a clown suit.
I hope you enjoyed the last HHOH revisit, but now it's finished. Fade to black and that's a wrap, folks.