Founded by American producers and screenwriters Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg in 1962, Amicus was a British film production company which was mostly associated with horror, and in particular with horror portmanteaux like Freddie Francis’ Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), Torture Garden (1965) and Tales From the Crypt (1972), Peter Duffell’s The House That Dripped Blood (1971), Ray Ward Baker’s Asylum (1972) and Vault of Horror (1973), and Kevin Connor’s From Beyond the Grave (1974). Amicus was a rival to Hammer, yet often confused with it, not least because both companies were drawing from the same pool of actors. Amicus closed shop in 1977, and despite a very brief resurrection in the US as Amicus Entertainment producing Stuart Gordon’s Stuck (2007) and Josef Rusnak’s remake It’s Alive (2009), they have remained inactive – until now. For with support from the Subotsky family, Hex Media’s Lawrie Brewster, Sarah Daly and Megan Tremethick have revived the label as an outlet for independent British horror – and the first film released under this umbrella is writer/director Brewster’s In the Grip of Terror.
In its opening credits, In the Grip of Terror is expressly designated “an Amicus Production” and “dedicated to the memory of Milton Subotsky” – but this is more than a mere appropriation of a pre-existing label, but also a loving homage, bordering on parody, to all things Amicus. For a start, it follows Amicus’ preferred anthology form (and indeed takes its name from a popular literary horror anthology from 1951). For here three stories are held together by a wraparound narrative (A Late Appointment) in which the medical intern Mancher (Dorian Ashbourne), the resident Dr Mayley (Brewster) and the nurse Charlotte Gibbon (Tremethick) – all appearing a little confused as to what they are doing in the same hospital or what has happened there before this – are summoned by tannoy to meet Dr Graves (Laurence R. Harvey) in the basement, where he will tell them and later the American Dr Hawyer (Nick Ford) who joins them, infernal tales of the hospital’s history intimately entwined with their own recent pasts.
In the first of these stories, A Watcher by the Dead, Mancher (Ashbourne) takes a wager from his supervisor Dr Helberson (Michael Daviot) to spend a night in the dark watching over a corpse, but after having second thoughts about this Viy-like scenario, sends old acquaintance and lookalike Jarette (also played by Ashbourne) in his stead – except that the corpse too has also been replaced. So this is a tale of nocturnal terrors and maddening substitutions. In the second, The One Way Ward (inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s Cool Air; other stories are adapted from the works of Ambrose Bierce), terminally ill nurse Charlotte (Tremethick) joins sickly Dr Gregory Walker (Jonathan Hansler) as he races to find a cure for the peculiar ailment afflicting the hospital’s patients – a cure which may just confer immortality on its cold-hearted users. The third, the deliriously overdetermined A Diagnosis of Death, leaves Dr Mayley (Brewster), Dr Hawyer (Ford) and a whole ward of folk (including many other doctors) unsure whether they are psychiatric patients, victims of occult experiments, or the living dead. Here madness, morbidity and mortality make strange bedfellows, even as a ghostly physician keeps materialising,
All three stories (and the wraparound) are set in the same hospital, all feature Nurse Charlotte, and all, with their valves and switches and analogue equipment, seem to be set in the early Sixties. This distinguishes the film from the original Amicus output, whose stories, unlike Hammer’s, were broadly contemporary – but it does create a bridge between Brewster’s work and the period when Amicus first came into existence. The affected and – dare one say it? – cheesy presentation is also an exaggerated throwback to the original Amicus’ house style. Here lines come with over-enunciated delivery, pantomime postures and histrionic pauses. Here heightened melodrama is loudly underscored by horn blasts on the soundtrack. Here, in the total absence of CGI or VFX, simple makeup, practical props and careful lighting suffice to conjure the uncanny.
The result is a strange merger, arguably itself uncanny, between paean to, and pastiche of, the classic Amicus anthology film. For even as the hospital setting, the mannered performances, and the bizarrely localised bedlam, if not to say full-on pandemonium, may at times come across a little like Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, this is also arch and ambiguous, and at times unnerving. In Latin, amicus means ‘friend’ – and In the Grip of Terror feels like a belated yet fond reunion with a cherished old acquaintance. For the film is an apt and affectionate tribute to Amicus and to the distinctive kind of horror in which it specialised, as well as a promise that the production house’s spirit lives on, even from beyond the grave.
strap: Oh you are sick: Lawrie Brewster’s old-school hospital-set horror anthology resurrects the modes and mannerisms of Amicus Productions
© Anton Bitel
