Relative Cruelty

“They're creepy and they're kooky, Mysterious and spooky, They're all together ooky…

The Broughton family…”

Hold on, rewind – the what now? The Broughton family? Well yes. At the start of the 1960s British cinema was rife with weird clans, offering audiences several mixed-up monstrous groups of grasping relatives, and grasping in more ways than one.

And this all prior to the US TV debuts of the more celebrated and longer-lasting Addamses and Munsters in 1964. There were the mad Marleys from 1964’s THE HORROR OF IT ALL, directed by Hammer’s top horrormeister Terence Fisher on a rare excursion away from Bray Studios; the fearsome Femms, in Hammer’s own remake of THE OLD DARK HOUSE, directed by imported for the occasion king of the gimmick, William Castle; later, in 1966, the year that saw THE ADDAMS FAMILY and THE MUNSTERS both cancelled, at least temporarily, Britain ‘carried on’ celebrating the idea of the creepy clan via the wild, wild Watts in CARRY ON SCREAMING! Perhaps a near-incestuous relationship had spawned all of these monsters, back in 1960 when the sexually suspect Baron Meinster and his mum, the Baroness, usurped Christopher Lee’s vampire Count and took centre stage for a brief diversion in the 1960 classic THE BRIDES OF DRACULA. Imagine the kids, as they say – well you don’t have to, for by way of the Baron’s fangs and the assistance of cackling lady-in-waiting Freda Jackson, we get to see the Meinster ‘offspring’ of sorts erupting from the soil, one of them portrayed by the stunning Andree Melly, later to steal THE HORROR OF IT ALL from the rest of the Marley clan.

But what about those Broughtons mentioned at the start of my talk? Well, if you’re a literary type you may be familiar with the Winshaw family from Jonathan Coe’s prize-winning 1994 novel ‘What a Carve Up!’; and Coe, and his central character Michael Owen, were both inspired by a 1961 British comedy movie of the same title. It’s back to Carry On territory for the second time already tonight - as you can tell, I’m keeping this highbrow! - as WHAT A CARVE UP the movie pitched Carry On regulars Kenneth Connor and Sid James into the old dark household of the Broughton brood, with familiar horror faces such as Dennis Price, George Woodbridge, Michael Gwynn, Michael Gough, and Donald Pleasence appearing as either family members, staff, or close associates. It’s all classic reading of the will, secret passages, creepy butlers, locked rooms, knives in the back stuff, and it does that CAT AND THE CANARY thing whereby an established group of relatives, albeit a very odd one, is disrupted by the arrival of an innocent and unwitting outlier twig on the family tree, in this case the scared-stiff Kenneth Connor.

So yes, British cinema had a hankering for these macabre meetings of batty brothers and strange sisters, of arsenic-armed aunts and uncanny uncles, and where if the thing that goes bump in the night is simply your dad tumbling out of bed and putting on his slippers, chances are that even he is doing so with the aim of shuffling along a corridor and opening a creaking door and… well, it’s all too horrible to contemplate, really.

Of the film titles mentioned so far, none of them are reviewed in our book for Headpress, ‘Offbeat’, though they would all fit right in, and indeed a few of them do get brief passing mentions. But, since we are here to promote as well as hopefully to inform and entertain, let me move on to discuss a few of the freaky families who do feature throughout the book’s pages. And one of the first questions the British horror movie poses is, what precisely is the nature of a ‘family unit’? And as we’ve already suggested, there is no precision to it – so as well as talking about blood relatives, I’ll be incorporating a few examples where we see a closely-knit group who effectively act like and pass as a ‘family’, in the more open sense of the term. In this particular type of fiction, of course, it’s often the case that the narrative toys with the very notion – for shock or surprise value, we may discover at a late point in the drama that someone is a family member, or perhaps there will be a character revealed as not being part of the clan after all, or possibly having murdered, imitated, and replaced a sibling or nephew, so the genetics of the matter don’t really seem to matter. Perhaps that’s how life ought to be – as the old adage goes, you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family, and if that means associating with like-minded pals, and especially if it means avoiding a bunch of lunatics on Boxing Day or at wedding receptions, so much the better. So yes, family is a rather fluid notion here, but British horror cinema is particularly adept at using that fluidity.

I’m fond of pointing out that in the 2012 first edition of Offbeat, I reviewed two movies about paedophilia and one starring The Glitter Band. Indeed, among other music films covered in our book, the rock bands of LET IT BE and SLADE IN FLAME, and the hip 60s glamour girls of THE TOUCHABLES, who aren’t a pop group but who do act as if they are, form pretty weird faux-‘family’ units, with that famous bunch from Liverpool particularly notable in their falling out with one another as we gaze on aghast at their crumbling relationships. This has all been echoed recently in the latest British pop music cinematic offering, Peter Strickland’s idiosyncratically marvellous FLUX GOURMET.

The two paedophile dramas I mentioned were, firstly, Hammer Films’ daring NEVER TAKE SWEETS FROM A STRANGER, which pits two families against one another as the middle class Carters move to Canada only to face the might of the domineering, controlling Oldberry clan, who much like the one per cent today, appear to own everything and to be above the law – this extending to Oldberry senior’s perverted liking for little girls; and, secondly, yes it’s yet another mention for Carry On this evening, as the Carry On series producer Peter Rogers made 1971’s REVENGE, a real tawdry tabloid-style movie which, as you can tell from the title, is about a publican and his close family and friends meting out their own version of justice against the local weirdo, played by Kenneth Griffith in bottle bottom specs and stranger-danger chic, following a nearby spate of child murders, something of a major theme in a certain strand of British cinema at the time. My Offbeat piece compares REVENGE’s Radford family, and their set-up at the High Wycombe boozer they run, to Fawlty Towers – there’s a real Basil and Sybil-like bitterness and resentment between James Booth and Joan Collins here, and the plot sees their whole situation gradually unravel, exposing a few home truths and errors of judgement, in true Fawlty Towers style. So even the families who strive to do the right thing can be portrayed as monsters in British cinema of the Offbeat era.

From the bereaved children left to their own devices and undergoing a sort of indoor suburban 'Lord of the Flies', complete with strange rituals, and all leading to something rather shocking, in 1967’s OUR MOTHER’S HOUSE, to the fashionably weird twins played by Judy Geeson and Martin Potter in the equally ritualistic GOODBYE GEMINI, the late 60s offered several of the oddest clans in British cinema. Indeed, Judy had turned up as Joan Crawford’s daughter in the circus-set horror film BERSERK a couple of years earlier, a fevered freakshow of a movie that has all kinds of strange family units dotted throughout and intermingling. MUMSY NANNY SONNY & GIRLY, underrated and little seen for decades, has emerged as something of a favourite from the era among connoisseurs followings its rediscovery and rehabilitation – indeed, I’ve just celebrated my 60th birthday while staying at Oakley Court just outside Windsor, a familiar setting for many a strange movie and a location in which MUMSY was specifically designed to be staged. As many of you will know, and as is evident from the title, this one centres upon yet another odd and creepy family, with strange sexual undercurrents about them, as the ever so slightly too old ‘children’ played by Howard Trevor and Vanessa Howard sport school uniform, play with toys, and sleep in cots. So far so regressive, but the other side of their nature is that they use their wiles to lure what are termed as ‘new friends’, i.e. passing males tempted by the precocious charms of Miss Howard or possibly with certain other peccadilloes in mind, to stay in the house, these unwary guests not realising the family’s penchant for the lethal. Vanessa returned a couple of years later in a sadly neglected item from the Amicus Films’ catalogue, WHAT BECAME OF JACK AND JILL?, playing the scheming girlfriend of Paul Nicholas as he hatches a truly bizarre and convoluted plot to do in his granny, Mona Washbourne, for the inheritance money – an unusual case of the family members turning on each other throughout the storyline, rather than uniting to target outsiders or intruders.

If you have a copy of Offbeat, and we hope you have both editions, then read up too on the Taggarts from Hammer Films’ outrageous black comedy THE ANNIVERSARY, with Bette Davis apparently ruling the roost on screen and off, by all accounts of her man-chasing behaviour during the production; or see our pieces on DARK PLACES, with the Marrs, Mandevilles, and Fosters all chasing around after a hidden fortune in an inherited property in a heated horror drama featuring strangulation, swords, and pick axes; on another Oakley Court spectacular, the Frankie Howerd vehicle THE HOUSE IN NIGHTMARE PARK which also mixes an old-fashioned ‘heir to a missing fortune’ plot with all kinds of crazy weirdness surrounding the Henderson family, whose speciality is something called The Dance of the Dolls which you will not forget in a hurry – this movie is the best and most effective mixture of horror and comedy that I’ve ever seen; there’s THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA, transplanting Yukio Mishima’s Yokohama-set novel to Dartmouth, introducing merchant shipman on shoreleave Kris Kristofferson into the mix, where he becomes involved with the Osborne family, i.e. widow Anne played by Sarah Miles, and her teenage son Jonathan – Jonathan has a second family of sorts, however, a gang of superior school age sadists led by someone styling himself ‘Chief’, who all see themselves as budding Nietzschean supermen, and who set out to prove their worth via an unwatchable sequence of cat torture and with something less explicit but even more shocking right at the very end. Or how about that aristocratic shambles the Rawlinson clan, well-known to listeners of John Peel’s radio show where creator Viv Stanshall would regale us regularly with new tales of crumbling stately piles, oddball English tradition, and events that might be considered surreal were they not remarkably similar to the actual activities of our out of control upper classes. The Stanshall scripted 1980 movie version, SIR HENRY AT RAWLINSON END, is a thing of wonder, and if I tell you that Patrick Magee plays one of the most comparatively normal characters, that’s probably all you need to hear.

A few final favourites from me before we wrap up – these unfortunately aren’t reviewed in Offbeat, but maybe we can convince our editor Julian Upton that there is scope for an even more expanded edition in the future. If so, I hope it includes more on the topic of the strange British family, and the Grisbanes from HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS, played by Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, John Carradine, and Sheila Keith, no less, with Christopher Lee as a potential purchaser of their grand Welsh manor house, would be an essential inclusion, in yet another attempt to revive the orthodox old dark house thriller. Sheila of course had excelled as the matriarch of the cannibalistic Yates family in the savage British horror outrage FRIGHTMARE, released in late 1974 and very much our response to THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE which was changing the face of American cinema via its own killer clan at around the same time. The FRIGHTMARE bunch are a notably lower-class example of this particular subject – as you’ve been listening tonight, it may well have occurred to you already that many of the monstrous families in British cinema are of a decidedly high-falutin', blue-blooded bent. And make what you will of that.

The ultimate perhaps arrived as recently in 2021 via Pablo Larrain’s controversial movie SPENCER - far from the orthodox, conventional cosy biopic that mass audiences expected, SPENCER pitched itself somewhere between the ghostly visions of THE SHINING and the ‘innocent incarcerated female’ storyline of another horrifying Sheila Keith drama, HOUSE OF WHIPCORD. Yes, to the Broughtons and the Marleys and the Watts and the Taggarts and all of the other creepy clans I’ve referenced so far, you can add the Windsors. And for once in relation to British cinema, I’m not talking about Barbara, but about Liz and Phil and Charlie and Andy and Annie and Eddie.

Anyway, I’ve saved my own favourite for last - released in 1971, a near-Bunuellian satire with the very basic and stark title THE CORPSE does more to expose the stratas of British society and, in microcosm, of the home, than almost any other movie, and I include the likes of THE SERVANT or REBECCA in that assessment. An early project for the fledgling Cannon Films company, and sold as a cheap little horror item, put out on a double bill with something called PSYCHO KILLER, then inexplicably retitled CRUCIBLE OF HORROR for the American market, and again neglected for decades following its initial run, THE CORPSE is a film I cannot recommend highly enough. It involves the Eastwood family, nothing to do with Clint – instead we get Michael Gough, one of my very favourite actors, as Walter Eastwood, a sarcastic and controlling patriarchal figure, Gough’s own son Simon as Rupert Eastwood, a sort of simulacrum of his father, similarly smart-suited and employed in some prestigious stockbroker-style occupation and destined to follow in dad’s footsteps, though there is an air of sadness and a sense of him being trapped into this life, no chance of rebelling or developing his own interests and passions. But it is the women of the household on whom we chiefly focus – Yvonne Mitchell as wife Edith and Sharon Gurney as teenage daughter Jane, so very, very downtrodden, despised, treated with utter contempt and disdain by Walter, that the women plot to murder this bane of their lives. And yes, it all seems to be moving along the lines of something like LES DIABOLIQUES, as plots are hatched, complications ensue, things don’t quite go to plan, etc. But then events begin to take inexplicable turns, and it all goes a bit LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD as opposed to LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. You know how you often see online links and Google search suggestions with some self-appointed film expert offering to enlighten us with “MULHOLLAND DR. ending explained” or “VERTIGO ending explained” or “NOPE ending explained”? Well THE CORPSE merits such treatment, more than almost any other movie. I adore it, I’m constantly shocked by its depiction of psychological brutality against supposed loved ones, I rejoice in its use of traditional horror tropes to relay a socially conscious drama, I love its ‘PLAY FOR TODAY meets William Castle’ vibe. And I won’t spoil the devastating ending, but I will say two things about it. One, that it is perfect, an ideal capper to all that has preceded it, a brilliant way to climax this unpredictable chamber piece. And two, that I’m not at all sure that I understand what is happening. Do see THE CORPSE for yourselves - of all of the ‘weird family dramas’ I’ve discussed this evening, it is the deepest, most meaningful, best-acted, and will leave you with talking points galore on all manner of class-conscious subjects. Thank you for your time tonight – you probably think that your own family is strange, but you really ain’t seen nothing until you’ve spent some time watching the Offbeat clans I’ve mentioned here.