Short Sharp Shocks
Vol 4 BFI 2 x Disc set Blu Ray
Well, the BFI keep finding these obscure brief shorts and longer shorts in their archive. Are they worth reviving? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, when we get shocks, atmosphere and a creepy frisson from films going out on a limb (no pun intended). No, when even the description short is mistaken and the odd or experimental film soon feels overlong, pedestrian and clunky. Overall it’s fascinating to see what kind of films the BFI once commissioned and TV stations slipped onto their schedules.
Mario Zampi’s reputation rests on three classic comedies, The Naked Truth, Laughter in Paradise and Too Many Crooks. Yet in 1948 he directed and produced a 50 minute horror film called One Fatal Night. It’s a well worn idea of two friends persuading another friend to spend a night in a supposed haunted house. This is the kind of story that used to appear in paperback fiction like The Pan Book of Horror Stories of the nineteen sixties. But here we have a period tale of two women, one murdered and the other sent crazy by their intruder, inserted into the main plot. Before going asleep the sceptical ghost tester has read of the women’s story in a bedside book.
One Fatal Night maintains an atmosphere and suspense that rarely flags. There’s some impressive, menacing and bleary photography as an indeterminate human shape approaches the victim and the sound of footsteps fatefully coming up the stairs is potently done. I didn’t think the Victorian tale was fully incorporated into the contemporary. Yet the ending (despite some melodramatic over-acting) is abruptly violent and surprising after we learn from a local policeman what ‘homicidal maniacs’ can get up too. I will say no more about an effective and oddly chilling film.
Death in the Hand 1948 (43 mins) tackles the subject of palmistry. Cosmo Vaughan (a part touching and part sinister performance from Esme Percy) is a palmist with a guilty conscience who reads the hand life line of four people on a train and predicts they will die in a crash. His presence is made even more unsettling by the fact he’s defensive, hyper sensitive and the actor has a glass left eye. The after effect of Vaughan telling his story, to two boarding house guests, then informed by a waiter, that Vaughan is a compulsive fantasist, doesn’t detract, or belie the forceful pre-ordained rail tragedy they’ve just listened too. The film begins and ends with an eerie shot of a hand, first open then clenched. Death in the Hand is a cosy but well made tale of the semi-uncanny.
Strange Experiences: Halloween Party (3 mins) and Strange Experiences: The Laughing Clown (4 mins) are episodes of a TV series screened in 1955 / 56. The first Experience is a very slight drama of deception, coincidence and theft. However the second Experience is genuinely creepy and sad. Harry Barton’s laugh was noted, recorded and used for a clown mannequin at a fairground in Brighton. He makes a lot of money from this, then loses everything and falls ill and dies. Barton’s laughter turns, through a sound mix with the clown, into one of pain and suffering. A very sharp horror anecdote!
Night Ride 1967 (19 mins) is rough and ready stuff about the robbery and murder of a reclusive and eccentric author, with the ability to read minds, who lives in the country. It’s shot in colour on a battered 8mm. Now restored but remaining suitably raw and bloody – there’s a raw energy in its pounding close-ups, filtering and psychedelic visuals of occult art. Amateur filmmaking: confident and expressive if finally let down by some stilted acting.
Unfortunately Mirror, Mirror 1969 (8 mins) was far too amateurish for me. Nice idea about seeing another reality, from another century, being played out in a mirror. But the mirror episode from the classic Dead of Night (1948) realised this so much better!
On to Scarecrow 1972 (17mins) A simple story, set in rural Ireland in 1931, of a terrible drought affecting the lives of a farmer and his wife. The husband goes out each day to shoot at scarecrows attacking his exposed crop seeds. Every attack inevitably reminds you of the influence of Hitchcock’s The Birds made nine years earlier. Violent, sweaty, intense, even gruelling and without human speech Scarecrow’s focus is unerring. Narrowly concentrating on landscape and a burning sun, proving to be as much an enemy as the crow, this is a memorable folk horror poem.
Red 1976 (24mins) was written and directed by Astrid Frank who says, “Red was a short horror film that startled many with its unapologetic blend of sexuality and fear. It was provocative, taboo, and unashamedly so. At its core, it was about the female body as both subject and site of terror.” Set in the eighteenth century England Red concerns an artist whose lost his way in the countryside and seeks shelter for the night in a house where there lives a maid and three young actors. During the night he fantasises that he sees the naked female actor being ritually be-headed by the two men.
What begins as a potential TV M.R.James, combined with Schalcklen the Painter, turns into something more personal. No ghosts but horror through the lens of a feminist critique: though I felt it bore the gory fingerprint of Hammer Films (The Gorgon?) without ever being exploitative. Fascinating.
Sanctum 1976 (19 mins). I’d sooner sit through the bad bits (there aren’t many) of Kenneth Anger or Ken Russell (a bit more here) than watch again the feverish, underground movie looking Sanctum. An anguished, naked man torn between accepting a gay lover and rejecting his religion where he sucks the statuette of the virgin Mary and masturbates with it proved not to be shocking (perhaps so in the 1970s) but boringly self indulgent, over wrought masochism. Embarrassingly bad and easily the worst film in this collection.
Public Information Films of the late seventies were generally scary and packed with horror movie punches. Here are two examples, Play Safe: Frisbee 1978 (1 mins) and Play Safe: Electricity 1978 (11 mins). Their power to convey a health and safety message rested on their brevity. Of the two films I preferred Frisbee’s sixty seconds warning of the dangers of kids playing near live electricity. The other film has a strong dark moment about an accident for a girl on a bike but goes on too long in a preachy manner using some twee and unfunny animation.
And finally Black Angel 1980 (25 mins) which is a mythic and moody piece centred round Sir Maddox returning from war. It appears he drowns in a lake but then doesn’t and is presented with a quest to duel with the Black Angel warrior (or death itself) and save a maiden. Technically a lot of care and professionalism went into the making of Black Angel. It was chosen as the short film to accompany The Empire Strikes Back (1981). The director Roger Christian speaks of the influence of Bergman, Tarkovsky and Kurosawa. It’s visually beautiful and well crafted. But given that he had 25 minutes then there could have been less build up and atmosphere and more plot development. As it is it takes the film’s now obvious near-death experience reflection to echo what was achieved in say Robert Enrico’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962) without that film’s sense of intense shock.
Volume 4 of Short Sharp Shocks is much better than Vol 3. But not as interesting as Vol 1 & 2: though if you are collecting the box sets you’ll also want to acquire this one. And I’m sure that the BFI are planning more shocking instalments.
Alan Price©2025
Short Sharp Shocks
Vol 4 BFI 2 x Disc set Blu Ray
Well, the BFI keep finding these obscure brief shorts and longer shorts in their archive. Are they worth reviving? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, when we get shocks, atmosphere and a creepy frisson from films going out on a limb (no pun intended). No, when even the description short is mistaken and the odd or experimental film soon feels overlong, pedestrian and clunky. Overall it’s fascinating to see what kind of films the BFI once commissioned and TV stations slipped onto their schedules.
Mario Zampi’s reputation rests on three classic comedies, The Naked Truth, Laughter in Paradise and Too Many Crooks. Yet in 1948 he directed and produced a 50 minute horror film called One Fatal Night. It’s a well worn idea of two friends persuading another friend to spend a night in a supposed haunted house. This is the kind of story that used to appear in paperback fiction like The Pan Book of Horror Stories of the nineteen sixties. But here we have a period tale of two women, one murdered and the other sent crazy by their intruder, inserted into the main plot. Before going asleep the sceptical ghost tester has read of the women’s story in a bedside book.
One Fatal Night maintains an atmosphere and suspense that rarely flags. There’s some impressive, menacing and bleary photography as an indeterminate human shape approaches the victim and the sound of footsteps fatefully coming up the stairs is potently done. I didn’t think the Victorian tale was fully incorporated into the contemporary. Yet the ending (despite some melodramatic over-acting) is abruptly violent and surprising after we learn from a local policeman what ‘homicidal maniacs’ can get up too. I will say no more about an effective and oddly chilling film.
Death in the Hand 1948 (43 mins) tackles the subject of palmistry. Cosmo Vaughan (a part touching and part sinister performance from Esme Percy) is a palmist with a guilty conscience who reads the hand life line of four people on a train and predicts they will die in a crash. His presence is made even more unsettling by the fact he’s defensive, hyper sensitive and the actor has a glass left eye. The after effect of Vaughan telling his story, to two boarding house guests, then informed by a waiter, that Vaughan is a compulsive fantasist, doesn’t detract, or belie the forceful pre-ordained rail tragedy they’ve just listened too. The film begins and ends with an eerie shot of a hand, first open then clenched. Death in the Hand is a cosy but well made tale of the semi-uncanny.
Strange Experiences: Halloween Party (3 mins) and Strange Experiences: The Laughing Clown (4 mins) are episodes of a TV series screened in 1955 / 56. The first Experience is a very slight drama of deception, coincidence and theft. However the second Experience is genuinely creepy and sad. Harry Barton’s laugh was noted, recorded and used for a clown mannequin at a fairground in Brighton. He makes a lot of money from this, then loses everything and falls ill and dies. Barton’s laughter turns, through a sound mix with the clown, into one of pain and suffering. A very sharp horror anecdote!
Night Ride 1967 (19 mins) is rough and ready stuff about the robbery and murder of a reclusive and eccentric author, with the ability to read minds, who lives in the country. It’s shot in colour on a battered 8mm. Now restored but remaining suitably raw and bloody – there’s a raw energy in its pounding close-ups, filtering and psychedelic visuals of occult art. Amateur filmmaking: confident and expressive if finally let down by some stilted acting.
Unfortunately Mirror, Mirror 1969 (8 mins) was far too amateurish for me. Nice idea about seeing another reality, from another century, being played out in a mirror. But the mirror episode from the classic Dead of Night (1948) realised this so much better!
On to Scarecrow 1972 (17mins) A simple story, set in rural Ireland in 1931, of a terrible drought affecting the lives of a farmer and his wife. The husband goes out each day to shoot at scarecrows attacking his exposed crop seeds. Every attack inevitably reminds you of the influence of Hitchcock’s The Birds made nine years earlier. Violent, sweaty, intense, even gruelling and without human speech Scarecrow’s focus is unerring. Narrowly concentrating on landscape and a burning sun, proving to be as much an enemy as the crow, this is a memorable folk horror poem.
Red 1976 (24mins) was written and directed by Astrid Frank who says, “Red was a short horror film that startled many with its unapologetic blend of sexuality and fear. It was provocative, taboo, and unashamedly so. At its core, it was about the female body as both subject and site of terror.” Set in the eighteenth century England Red concerns an artist whose lost his way in the countryside and seeks shelter for the night in a house where there lives a maid and three young actors. During the night he fantasises that he sees the naked female actor being ritually be-headed by the two men.
What begins as a potential TV M.R.James, combined with Schalcklen the Painter, turns into something more personal. No ghosts but horror through the lens of a feminist critique: though I felt it bore the gory fingerprint of Hammer Films (The Gorgon?) without ever being exploitative. Fascinating.
Sanctum 1976 (19 mins). I’d sooner sit through the bad bits (there aren’t many) of Kenneth Anger or Ken Russell (a bit more here) than watch again the feverish, underground movie looking Sanctum. An anguished, naked man torn between accepting a gay lover and rejecting his religion where he sucks the statuette of the virgin Mary and masturbates with it proved not to be shocking (perhaps so in the 1970s) but boringly self indulgent, over wrought masochism. Embarrassingly bad and easily the worst film in this collection.
Public Information Films of the late seventies were generally scary and packed with horror movie punches. Here are two examples, Play Safe: Frisbee 1978 (1 mins) and Play Safe: Electricity 1978 (11 mins). Their power to convey a health and safety message rested on their brevity. Of the two films I preferred Frisbee’s sixty seconds warning of the dangers of kids playing near live electricity. The other film has a strong dark moment about an accident for a girl on a bike but goes on too long in a preachy manner using some twee and unfunny animation.
And finally Black Angel 1980 (25 mins) which is a mythic and moody piece centred round Sir Maddox returning from war. It appears he drowns in a lake but then doesn’t and is presented with a quest to duel with the Black Angel warrior (or death itself) and save a maiden. Technically a lot of care and professionalism went into the making of Black Angel. It was chosen as the short film to accompany The Empire Strikes Back (1981). The director Roger Christian speaks of the influence of Bergman, Tarkovsky and Kurosawa. It’s visually beautiful and well crafted. But given that he had 25 minutes then there could have been less build up and atmosphere and more plot development. As it is it takes the film’s now obvious near-death experience reflection to echo what was achieved in say Robert Enrico’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962) without that film’s sense of intense shock.
Volume 4 of Short Sharp Shocks is much better than Vol 3. But not as interesting as Vol 1 & 2: though if you are collecting the box sets you’ll also want to acquire this one. And I’m sure that the BFI are planning more shocking instalments.
Alan Price©2025
By Alan Price • added recently on London Grip, film • Tags: Alan Price, film