City of the Dead is a
surprisingly good little film from 1960. It’s in black and white, unlike
Hammer’s horror fare which by this time was in full colour, and the director
makes best use of his palette of greys, creating a brooding, hypnotic landscape
through which the characters stumble ...
The plot is tried
and tested: a witch, Elizabeth Selwyn (Patricia Jessel) is burnt at the stake
in the past, and curses the village and those who killed her ... flash forward
to the present, and Christopher Lee plays a creepy professor, Driscoll, who
recommends that one of his students, Nan (Venetia Stevenson), heads off to the
village of Whitewood to investigate the myths firsthand. The village seems constantly wreathed in
low-lying mists and darkness, and of course everyone is behaving suspiciously ...
until all is revealed that creepy Mrs Newless (Patricia Jessel again) is the
reincarnation of the original witch. And that Nan is the next sacrifice ...
Except this isn’t the end of the story ... It’s
somewhat shocking that Nan is killed half way through the film – shades of
Janet Leigh in Psycho, which also came out in 1960. It’s up to Nan’s brother
Richard (Dennis Lotis) and boyfriend Bill (Tom Naylor) to come looking for her
... retracing
her steps, right down to discovering the underground tunnels and witches’ lair
... before all is resolved by a neat bit of invented legend, that the shadow of
a cross causes witches to burst into flame!
It’s a fun film,
and the performances are all pretty much first rate. Christopher Lee is great
as the professor, and the rest of the cast seem to reach for the bar that he
sets. The film also seems ahead of its time in terms of the look and feel of
the settings, and the handling of the witchcraft element is similarly well
done. A superior example.
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