This was sort of the last of the Amicus portmanteau horror films, a series which started in 1965 with Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. I say sort of because whilst this was the last of the ones made by the company Amicus, the producer Milton Subotsky later made with other companies a couple more horror anthologies, The Uncanny and The Monster Club, so whether those count is a matter for debate. I just realised I'm going to have to do a whole season on those at some point, aren't I? Tell you what; next Halloween season, those will be a whole bundle of Blogtober posts!
There are many that say that Amicus ended on a high note, and I agree with that whole heartedly. Now given that the company was run by a pair of New Yorkers out of a shed in the back of Shepperton Studios, Amicus was always this slightly odd transatlantic thing; very British productions, but with an element of the Americas in the background. The previous anthologies had taken the works of Robert Bloch and E.C. Comics, and algicised them, often to good effect. With From Beyond the Grave though, the source material was thoroughly English, right down to the author's name; R. Chetwynd-Hayes. Hayes was a very accomplished horror writer and editor, with some of his stories often taking old stand-bys of traditional ghosts and monsters, but he had a knack of taking them in interesting new directions, like The Monster Club's whole monster genealogy. These stories are no exceptions; you could call of them ghost stories, but each is pretty different in their own way.
So for tales in this one, we have a very dark tale of David Warner getting possessed by a being trapped within an antique mirror, and being forced to give it blood sacrifices. Compared to the usual 70s middle class stylings of Amicus, this is pretty grim, gritty stuff, but not too much to make it unpleasant or to mess up the tone. Then there's the very strange tale of Ian Bannen's office worker odd kinship with Donald Pleasence's shoe-lace seller, which when his daughter Angela Pleasence enter's the picture gets very strange. I'd call this one the most unsettling of all Amicus' portmanteau stories, as it has this great quality of "where is this going?", before a great final reveal of what this has all been secretly about. That's followed by a more comedic tale of Ian Carmichael having a demon on his shoulder, and getting Margaret Leighton's somewhat batty medium to exorcise it. This one is a lot of fun, in that unlike some other comedy segments in these sorts of films it's genuinely funny, and there's a real sense of danger; it gets right that all of the comedy should come from the characters, and the horror aspect should be played dead straight. Finally, Ian Ogilvy (huh, a lot of guys called Ian acting in this one... appropriate for Hallo Ian) buys an antique door, which leads to a strange ghostly realm created by an ancient warlock. This is probably the simplest story of the bunch, but it's good one to end with as it's the most visually interesting, and has the biggest climax. Oh, and all the way through there's been the linking story of the shop Temptations Ltd. run by Peter Cushing, which all the leads visit, and it's implied that how well they get through their encounters with the supernatural depends a lot on whether they were good customers.
This is a lot of fun; about this time, when The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were being released, changing the whole horror landscape, there were a bunch of British productions that I look at as the last great hurrah of old school horror, such as The Legend of Hell House, Theatre of Blood, and this one. All the stories work brilliantly, the cast is remarkable, the direction and atmosphere for a teeny budget work great, it's a real gem of a film. Director Kevin Connor does fine work here, after this he'd helm what Amicus went into full time post horror, their Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations. This is a real favourite for many people; Mark Gatiss did a tribute to the haunted door segment in his BBC ghost story Crooked House, taking the idea of a door that opens to somewhere and somewhen it shouldn't in a very interesting new direction. This just got an all regions Blu Ray released in the states by Warner Archive Collection, I picked it up this weekend. If you can get a copy, it's a fantastic bit of old fashioned spooky fun, it's one of my favourites, go see it!
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