Friday

Last night's horror movie: Hammer Films' silky psycho-scape Nightmare (1967).* This movie begins by chronicling the last several days before Janet's seventeenth birthday, which also happens to be the sixth anniversary of the day she stumbled upon her mother holding the bloody cake knife over her father's corpse. Amidst burgeoning concerns that she might have inherited, um, madness from her mother, Janet's having horrible nightmares every evening, making sleeping difficult for her nubile preparatory bunkmates. Frightened of being psychoanalyzed further by school doctors, she opts to return to the crime scene, retreating to her family home midway through winter semester. Before her sweet seventeen celebration, she'll endure a rapid disintegration of the wall between her reality and her nightmares. This time, Hammer forwent the usual period timestamp and palate, trading the pastel teddies for something in creamy high-contrast B&W, orange blood for black, really picking up the deep shadows of fallow Victorian places. Hammer cinematographer Freddie Francis (who lensed David Lynch's beautiful Elephant Man,* but who is also responsible for Trog*) stepped into the director's chair and did this right. This black and white photography is the prettiest I have seen in any Hammer Horror film: rich, silvery, and austere; the picture pops right out of the frame. The "Hammerscope" widescreen yawns so vast that quick pans suffer a carousel of parallax. The plot suffers from the occasional, what do you call it?, predictability, as it slides from psycho horror to psycho thriller in a fourth act of sheer Brit noir. No matter, the filmmaking itself more than makes up for the sops to rote "asylumed heiress" movie tropes: any freeze-frame can hang on a gallery wall. Oh, and it's scary too: headlights went by the window unexpectedly last night, and I almost jumped out of my headphones. [Cavin]