Hammer House of Horror: Witching Time (Don Leaver, 1980)

For reasons of pure cinephile snobbishness, I have never previously bothered to watch the thirteen episodes of the ‘Hammer House of Horror’ TV series first broadcast on ITV in 1980.

My feeling, I suppose, was that this series would almost certainly prove a tacky and opportunistic post-script to the great studio’s legacy, best avoided for fear of disappointment.

But, contemplating this decision few months back, it occurred to me that these episodes were shot on 35mm (meaning that they pretty much, almost, look like movies in the new blu-ray restorations). They did reunite at least some significant figures from Hammer’s golden era, and…. well, basically I love shoddy British horror anthologies and ‘70s TV, so what the hell is my problem, anyway?

As such, this autumn has presented the perfect opportunity for me to pause my ongoing attempt to watch the entire run of ‘The Sweeney’ and instead get stuck into the best stab at Hammer grandeur that the combined forces of Roy Skeggs, ITC and ITV could muster at the dark dawn of Thatcherism.

First stop: the awkwardly named ‘Witching Time’! (Do you think maybe they were going for ‘Witching Hour’, but then some smartarse pointed out that nothing in the script actually happens at midnight, so…?)

Anyway! After noting how uncharacteristically contemporary and cool James Bernard’s pop/library-influenced theme for ‘Hammer House of Horror’ sounds, my first thought here was: boy, Jon Finch had certainly taken a tumble since his glowering, Byronic glory days in Polanski’s ‘Macbeth’ and Robert Fuest’s ‘The Final Programme’ (not to mention ‘The Vampire Lovers’, which presumably helped to get him this gig).

Instead, we here find him sporting a ratty-looking proto-mullet with a horrendous, Ian Dury-style kiss curl, resplendent in a grubby green polo shirt for his role as cuckolded horror movie soundtrack composer David Winter. Little wonder that he has lost the affections of his wife Mary, a triumphant exemplar of horse-riding, champagne-quaffing, upwardly mobile ‘80s womanhood, played to perfection by the fittingly named Prunella Gee.

Mary is an actress (she appears in the horror movie David is busy scoring), and I suppose she must be a fairly successful one, because I don’t think anyone ever acquired a renovated 17th century farmhouse with a Ferrari in the garage off the back of recording synth music for ‘80s British horror films. Indeed, Mary’s social aspirations are made clear by the fact that, when we first meet her, she is in bed with the smug, tweed-clad local doctor, played by Ian McCulloch (the star of ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’ and ‘Contamination’, not the Echo & The Bunnymen bloke, obvs). Phwoar!

As David sits home alone, sipping Chivas Regal and trying out some primo elbows-on-the-keyboard drones as he ruminates on his marital failures, an unscheduled lightning storm and subsequent power failure heralds the arrival of Lucinda Jessup (Patricia Quinn from ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’), a 17th century witch who has escaped a grisly death at the stake by travelling through time, somehow arriving in the 20th century sporting an awful chemical-hued perm, looking rather like Saxana’s embarrassing backwoods auntie or something.

Clearly the weak link here in terms of acting, Quinn enunciates her lines in overstated, am-dram fashion with an affected West Country drawl, making her less the seductive, menacing supernatural presence the script presumably intended and more, just, well… really annoying. In fact, there are sections of ‘Witching Time’ in which Finch and Gee seem more as if they’re dealing with an especially irksome houseguest than the spirit of a malign, vengeful witch.

Having said that though, we can’t really blame Quinn for these failings, as evidently no one on either side of the camera was really taking this shit seriously. The cast seem to have been instructed to play it for pure camp, and are happy to oblige, with Gee in particular going for gold; her gurning and eye-rolling as she extracts nails from a voodoo doll modelled on herself must be seen to be believed.

Equally fruity, Lennard Pearce (Granddad from the early series’ of ‘Only Fools & Horses’, no less) pops up for a great cameo, distantly reminding me of Ernest Thesinger or Graham Crowden in the role of a helpful local rector who fills Mary in with the necessary dose of exposition re: historical witch trials and so forth.

Meanwhile, I also very much enjoyed McCulloch’s turn as one of those great movie doctors who speaks to his patients on a first name basis and is always happy to make house calls in the middle of the night on the vaguest of pretexts, whether to dispense handfuls of potentially hallucinogenic pills or to deal with time-travelling lunatics locked in the spare bedroom. (Not an NHS man then, I’m assuming.)

Somewhat more explicit than anything I would have expected to see on UK TV in 1980, ‘Witching Time’ also boasts brief yet utterly gratuitous nudity from both its female leads, along with more than respectable quotient of blood, thunder and general hullaballoo, along with spirited use of broadcast acceptable not-quite-swear words like “STRUMPET” and “WHORE” - both of which which scriptwriter Anthony Read seems to have enjoyed so much that they even get scrawled on the walls in lipstick by our errant witch.

Though not in any sense a good tale well told, ‘Witching Time’ is nonetheless an uproariously entertaining bit of pulp horror nonsense, snappily directed by TV veteran Don Leaver, who avoids both artistry and boredom in equal measure. Its absurdist vision of demonic domestic melodrama actually rather put me in mind of Peter Sasdy’s I Don’t Want To Be Born / The Devil Within Her - which, around here at least, stands as a compliment.

It would have been all too easy for ‘Hammer House of Horror’ to veer straight toward stodgy, respectable drawing room Victoriana, so I heartily commend the team behind this debut episode for steering things in completely the opposite direction, offering up a shamelessly prurient and cartoon-ish vision of 1980s Home Counties exploitation, guaranteed to disgust those fuddie-duddies at the Radio Times and leave the Mary Whitehouse brigade spitting feathers.

The fact that ‘Hammer House of Horror’ was broadcast just on the cusp of the Thatcherite resurgence of social conservatism, and several years before the “Video Nasties” furore, is hopefully instructive in this regard - but I suppose we’ll find out in due course whether future episodes in the series followed Leaver & Read’s lead and matched the kind of dizzying heights scaled / depths plumbed here. Watch this space!