Frightmare

Few movies stick in mind, especially when it comes to horror. I was given a somewhat liberal upbringing in which from a very early age I was allowed to see horror movies. As a result by the time I reached my mid-teens I was immune to the effects of visual movie horror. But in the early 1990’s I remember classic TV station showing the world premiere of a movie by unusual director Pete Walker called Frightmare, although made nearly 22 years earlier it was the first time that the movie had been allowed to be seen in the UK since its release, the governing body (the BBFC) deciding it was too much for innocent eyes and ears to be subjected too.

 

Frightmare begins as it means to go on with the death of onetime Fawlty Towers star Andrew Sachs, killed after a visit to a funfair to see a clairvoyant. This opening scene was a shot in colour but later turned to black and white because the vision of gore you see was just too much for that moment in time.  This event sees the condemning to prison of an unknown party, and at this point the movie moves forward from the 1950’s to the 1970’s. Frightmare is all about extreme family secrets and a thirst for something that you really are not meant to have, cannibalism.

 

Of all the Pete Walker movies of this time, Frightmare offers the most striking vision with some of the worst acting. The memories of Frightmare really stayed with me for years after seeing it, and were given a stark reminder when I made my most recent return to this horror movie as part of a self imposed Pete Walker season.

 

The story of Frightmare is incredibly slow moving, but this is not a criticism; because this slow delivery makes the terror at the end all the more striking. But don’t be fooled into thinking the movie is about build up, all the way through there is an unhealthy amount of deaths to contend with, and some really quite extreme gore.

 

It is rumoured that director Abel Ferrara took a liking to this movie when conjuring up the story to his long banned movie Driller Killer, and as the movies killer moves through a choice of weaponry onto the electric drill you can see some real similarities, hard to believe that a small budget movie not really seen in America would be responsible for such a thing.

 

Pete Walker’s regular cast favourite Sheila Keith plays Dorothy Yates the movies cannibal and drill obsessive, I have ruined nothing in this reveal, it’s made blatantly obvious from the movies offset just who the villain of the piece is. But in Dorothy you feel a touch of sadness because the character is a victim of mental illness, and it’s this slow development and understanding of mental illness that give Frightmare its extreme but winning formula. Upon first sight this aging woman seems charming, but as the “headaches” occur you can see the delivery of messages into Dorothy’s head. Sheila Keith was the sort of actress that could be both charming and menacing, an aspect that director was more than aware of casting her more often than not in his movies as the villain.

 

Where you get this tug of love situation with the movie is in her husband Edmund Yates played by Rupert Davies, you discover that despite the fact that he never committed murder, that he shared the same sentence in prison as Dorothy for being fully in the knowledge of her actions. As the movie progresses your heart does go out to Edmund as you can see the years of recovery that he believes Dorothy has had falling around his feet. You see him wrestling with his emotions as he tries to prevent the inevitable all the time just thinking it’s on the horizon, unaware this time that Dorothy is actually killing.

 

But this is not a two way relationship Jackie (Deborah Fairfax) and Debbie (Kim Butcher) are the grown up children of the couple, and it seems that Debbie the younger of the two sisters has the same sort of diabolical thirst for blood and raw meat that her mother has.

 

Frightmare is 34 years on (at the time of writing) pretty extreme, in fact it’s not an uneven offering to partner off with movies like Saw and Hostel, if you have seen either they you might be just starting to get a feel of exactly how hardcore this movie was for the time.

 

While I cannot say that Frightmare scared me, I can easily see it scaring some, yes the acting is terrible, but the gore is extreme and although I was not frightened by the movie it is one that I will never forget for as long as I live.