Continuing last October’s trawl through the ‘Hammer House of Horror’ archives where we left off, here we go with episode # 7, originally broadcast on ITV on 25th October 1980.
Probably the most unsettling and seriously intentioned instalment of the series thus far, this one tells the tale of a feckless safebreaker (Chuck, played by Brian Cox), who, having just completed a debilitating prison sentence, grudgingly accepts a part-time job offered by sinister pet shop owner Martin Blueck, played by your friend and mine, Mr Peter Cushing.
Beginning with the unfortunate death-by-electrocution of a caged tiger, followed by Chuck’s return to the isolated roadside cottage he shares with his wife Annie (Elaine Donnelly), the first half of Francis Essex’s script is almost comically over-loaded with themes and imagery related to imprisonment and confinement.
Upon his return home, Chuck tells Elaine that she can’t possibly understand the misery he has experienced as a result of being incarcerated, causing her in turn to point to the virtual imprisonment she has faced while he was inside, as a result of poverty, isolation and societal disapproval. (To hammer home the point, her introductory shots are even framed through the bar-like partitions on the kitchen window.)
When Chuck visits Blueck’s shop, initially to thank him for visiting him in prison and gifting him with some money as part of a charitable programme, he scarcely finds much reassurance. Backed by the budgerigars and puppies he keeps caged in the shabby, public facing front room of his shop, Blueck quietly acknowledges his history as a concentration camp survivor, before inviting Chuck into the secret back room where his real work is done.
Therein, we find an appalling mockery of a zoo, in which a variety of flagrantly illegal animals (a panther, a leopard, assorted other big cats, a few apes and even a wallaby) subsist in cramped, bare cages, trained via the application of massive electric shocks to remain within their allotted spaces until a bell is sounded to let them know the circuits have been disengaged, at which point the sorry creatures can poke out their heads and gobble up the raw meat which comprises their chow.
For any animal lovers in the audience, the footage of these obviously unhappy beasts prowling around their tiny cages will prove immediately upsetting, whilst the idea that a veteran of the holocaust has become obsessed with imprisoning and controlling his fellow creatures - like a victim of familial abuse growing up to perpetrate the same cycle over again - is horribly perverse and disturbing.
As you’d imagine, it doesn’t take a huge leap of logic for us to realise that Blueck is set upon expanding his unsavoury “research” to human subjects, and that his motives in offering a questionable job to a hapless ex-con - and placing a very tempting safe in plain view when he leaves Chuck to look after the joint - are less than wholly philanthropic.
In fact, Blueck makes this fairly plain from the outset, expounding upon his Orwellian dream of creating “prisons without bars”, in which the terror-stricken inmates are ostensibly free, but paralysed by mind-destroying Pavlovian conditioning - a concept which pushes the story into the realm of the truly nightmarish. (Again, note the insane perversity of a man who finds the physical paraphernalia of imprisonment so repugnant, he is fixated on removing it, even as he craves the power of control over others which it represents.)
Perhaps inevitably given that we’re watching a mainstream TV production here, Essex’s script rather sidesteps the darker psychological implications of this tale, downplaying the whole concentration camp angle just, just as Cushing likewise rather downplays his characterisation of Blueck. Providing something of a call back to his always fascinating portrayals of Baron Frankenstein in previous decades, he keeps the character soft-spoken, slow and pointedly non-emphatic in his gestures, allowing his evil and mental instability to reveal themselves more in his actions than through any displays of cackling villainy, but still managing to radiate a certain, implacable coldness.
As his fans will be aware, accents could sometimes prove Cushing’s Achilles’ heel as an actor, but he handles this one very well, betraying just a hint of Blueck’s Eastern European origins, gradually eroded over decades spent settled in a particularly seedy corner of England, allowing him to add just the right amount of unholy relish to his dialogue.
(There’s scarcely a bigger chill in the whole episode meanwhile than the lazy, off-hand cruelty Cushing manages to inject into his character’s tired attempts to fob off an investigating police officer visiting his shop with “..a hamster for the boy, perhaps?”)
Relatively few of the big-hitters from Hammer’s feature film era deigned to lend their talents to Roy Skeggs’ venture into TV, so it is of course wonderful to see the ever-loyal Cushing stepping up for what I believe was his penultimate horror role (followed up only by his touching farewell to the genre in Pete Walker’s ‘House of Long Shadows’ two years later). Needless to say, the producers of the series could scarcely have found a better, more challenging role for him to get his teeth into.
Cox and Donnelly are both excellent too (the former doing a fine thick-yet-sympathetic turn, the latter convincing as the brains of their marital operation), allowing ‘The Silent Scream’ to develop into a strongly played three-hander drama, lending these characters a sense of realism which transcends the excesses of the increasingly far-fetched premise.
Perhaps mercifully, the second half of the episode becomes slightly less distressing, as the script concentrates more on the nuts-and-bolts survival horror of Chuck and Annie’s attempt to contend with the fiendish travails Blueck has devised for them, temporarily turning ‘The Silent Scream’ into what feels perhaps like an early prototype for the ‘Cube’-style “puzzle box” horror film.
A less high profile veteran of Hammer’s feature film era, Alan Gibson directs efficiently, with a certain amount of style, as befits the voluminous CV of TV work he’d racked up since helming the last two Christopher Lee Dracula movies in the early ’70s. Rather ironically in view of the episode’s subject matter, there is also some very nice location work to enjoy here; both Chuck and Annie’s remote rural cottage, lonely and isolated just off the motorway, and the thoroughly seedy row of commuter-belt businesses which houses Cushing’s shop (perhaps just a few doors down from Denholm Elliot’s estate agents from Rude Awakening), are very well chosen.
In view of my above observations on Cushing’s character however, I can't help but feel that Essex fumbles the ball rather dreadfully in the final act, when he drops what is clearly intended to be the blood-and-thunder revelation that Blueck was not actually a prisoner within the concentration camp, but a captor.
As well as stealing the punch-line to my all-time favourite bad taste gag, this misfiring twist actually succeeds in making the story far less disturbing than would otherwise have been the case. (After all, a mad Nazi on the loose is a far easier threat to deal with than that of a traumatised victim becoming secretly obsessed with exercising control over others.)
Sadly, this casual revelation also robs Cushing of the opportunity to give Blueck a touch of that sublime, sympathy-for-the-devil pathos he always did so well in his villainous roles - or indeed to invest the character with any of the knotty complexity we may have hoped for. (It’s perhaps no coincidence that the scene in which this twist is revealed is also that in which Blueck finally bursts out in a fit of ol’ fashioned villainous cackling.)
An unfortunate misstep, this can’t help but make the episode’s conclusion feel a little flat in dramatic terms, but regardless - on the surface of it, we still get a satisfyingly nasty and hopeless denouement, worthy of any grimy ‘70s British horror shocker, cementing ‘The Silent Scream’s place as easily the best episode of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ I’ve watched thus far.
Be sure to tune in this time next week, and we’ll learn whether episode # 8 proves a contender to the throne…
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