October Horrors # 7: Hammer House of Horror: The Two Faces of Evil (Alan Gibson, TV, 1980)

The 12th, and penultimate, episode of the ‘Hammer House of Horror’ may not necessarily be the best, or most entertaining, of the series - but it is almost certainly the most unsettling, rivalled only by The Silent Scream (also directed by dark horse Alan Gibson, who arguably offered better proof of his talents here than in the theatrical features he made for Hammer during the early ‘70s).

Ranald Graham’s story begins in what by this point has become conventional HHoH fashion, with a well-to-do family (mother, father and one young child) driving through rural Surrey on their way to a holiday cottage. (Location freaks and aficionados of provisional British oddness will delight in the prominence afforded to a battered signpost specifying the distances to Aylesbury, Stoke Manderville and High Wycombe.)

In the midst of a rainstorm however, whilst traversing what looks very much like the same dark stretch of woodland road previously seen in the Children of the Full Moon episode, they pick up a tall hitchhiker, his face obscured by an over-sized yellow rain mac. Alarmingly, the stranger immediately attacks the father, throttling him and and stabbing him with a sharpened fingernail, causing the car to crash and overturn in the process.

Awakening in a suspiciously clean and idyllic country hospital, the mother of the family (Janet, played by Anna Calder-Marshall) learns that her son has survived unharmed, but that her husband (Gary Raymond) has sustained a number of injuries, and is recuperating following an emergency operation to remove fragments of glass from his throat. The evil hitchhiker, seemingly, is dead, following what the police tell Janet appears to have been an extended struggle with her husband following the accident.

Immediately, the ostensibly quiet and orderly world into which Janet has reawakened is painted by Gibson’s direction as treacherous and threatening. In a Polanski-like manner, perfectly innocent supporting characters (nurses, doctors, policemen) appear sinister and untrustworthy.

Seemingly innocuous dialogue (eg, several unrelated characters making reference to “foxes and badgers”) begins to imply a conspiratorial undertone, whilst a sense of Janet’s post-traumatic shock is very effectively conveyed, as she is assailed by momentary flashbacks to the accident and the violence which followed. This culminates in a harrowing sequence in which - dragging her son behind her - she insists on laboriously collecting the ruined remains of the family’s possessions into overstuffed plastic bags, dragging them back to the holiday cottage and burning them, as if to erase the memory of the accident and the inexplicable assault which caused it.

Subsequently, Nightmare Logic takes hold, as the identity of Janet’s “husband” becomes confused with that of the deceased “hitchhiker”, whose facial features, in defiance of all reason, appear to be identical. Other distinguishing features seem split unevenly between the two bodies, with neither quite matching the characteristics of the husband, and, when the surviving man - bandaged and still unable to speak - is discharged back into her care, Janet notices his sharpened fingernail…

Eventually taking a full on supernatural turn (although gratuitous ‘explanations’ are wisely avoided, allowing the sense of irrational nightmarishness to remain undiminished), ‘The Two Faces of Evil’ is a visceral and uncompromising update on the theme of the doppelganger. Evidently inspired to some extent by ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, it proceeds to add a more psychotic/barbaric edge to the material, anticipating Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ by four decades as it disturbingly fuses the disintegration of personal identity with an imminent threat of bloody violence.

Brief, minimally staged and seemingly made with a somewhat lower budget than many of the other episodes in the series, it nonetheless makes for memorable and uncomfortable viewing.