Despite boasting a name suggestive of pulpy gothic horror pleasures, ‘The Mark of Satan’ actually follows the pattern set by the preceding The Two Faces of Evil episode, easily beating it to the prize for the grimmest and most uncomfortable instalment of the series, even though it can’t quite match its predecessor in terms of dramatic power or overall quality.
Eschewing the bucolic Home Counties charm of most earlier episodes, Don Shaw’s script instead presents a grimy, impoverished and morally / emotionally stunted vision of working class England, wherein a weak-willed trainee hospital orderly (Edwyn Rord, played by Peter McEnery) suddenly finds himself afflicted by what we’re forced to assume is a sudden, catastrophic descent into paranoid schizophrenia.
Possibly reacting to the pressures of his overbearing mother, his absent father and his transfer to a gruesome and rather stressful new role in the hospital morgue - or possibly not - we join Edwyn as he becomes obsessively fixated on a series of synchronicities involving the number ‘9’, and, after being put to work on the corpse of a patient who seemingly died on the operating table after subjecting himself to a bit of DIY trepanation, he also begins to believe that he has contracted a “virus of evil” from the dead man.
Crackly police radio messages which Edwyn apparently receives from the weather vein above the hospital car park certainly don’t help, and in short, he is soon nursing one monster of a persecution complex, becoming convinced that his colleagues (including theatrically-minded Welsh pathologist Dr Harris, played with Pleasence-esque relish by Emrys James) are involved in an elaborate Satanic conspiracy against him - orchestrated, of course, by his nagging, rude and relentlessly abusive mother back home.
Things go from bad to worse for Edwyn once he becomes involved in the machinations of the family’s lodger Stella, played with truly bone-chilling, ‘10 Rillington Place’-esque understatement by Ken Russell regular Georgina Hale. A coldly self-serving single mother with a new baby and a psychopathic streak a mile wide, Stella sets about using Edwyn’s delusions to her own advantage in a horribly banal, small-minded fashion (she just wants her landlady out of the way so that she can sit in the front room, basically), exhibiting no recognisable human emotion whatsoever as the ensuing carnage plays out.
Managing to incorporate autopsies, surgical grue, old lady killing, self-trepanation and implied baby-eating, this is the probably the only episode of HHoH which I can really imagine incurring the wrath of whatever censorious bodies oversaw the content of ITV back in 1980, which is perhaps why they left it until last on the broadcast schedule for the series.
Certainly, it’s easy to imagine Mary Whitehouse and her ilk spontaneously combusting as soon as they got a load of this shit, callously pumped into the nation’s living rooms under the guise of family entertainment, but in tone as well as content, ‘The Mark of the Devil’ is some dark, mean-spirited business.
Full of lurid, fisheye-lensed psychotic freakouts, writhing tormented faces and other such OTT visuals, it is baroque, clammy, claustrophobic and nasty; curiously in view of Hale’s presence, it all feels a bit like the work of some pound shop Ken Russell substitute, letting loose in a really bad mood.
Plot-wise, Shaw’s churning brew of unappetising weirdness soon settles down into a ham-fisted and thoroughly exploitative take on the perils of mental illness which, in its own weird way, is probably about as close as anything on British TV ever came to the nihilistic spirit of the ‘70s American grindhouse.
Whether or not you choose to take any of this as a recommendation of course, is entirely down to you and your… aesthetic sensibility? (Doesn’t sound quite as good as ‘conscience’ that, does it, but no frowning judgement from me in these pages.)
So, er, thanks for that, Hammer House of Horror! See you all down the pub for a celebratory, post-series drink? Or, uh…. perhaps not?
No comments:
Post a Comment