It is a time of great change, the hated production code has been slain, replaced with the MPAA ratings system and movies have gotten more daring and explicit which for Hammer Studios, facing falling enthusiasm for their gothic horror, means more salacious content, more bare flesh, and Playboy models leading their horror films. In this tumult they produce and release Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde.

Confession, this move never climbed high in my desire to see it because I fully expected it to be in the same vein as The Vampire Lovers where not only is lesbianism used to titillate the audience, but the vampire have moved their feeding from the neck to the ladies’ naked breasts. That is, I thought of this movie as purely exploitive.

Recently on the Pure Cinema podcast, filmmaker Edgar Wright recounts many of his favorite underrated British horror movies and this one was among them. S quick search located the movie on a commercial-support streaming service, Shout Factory!

Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde is a grand goulash of well-worn setting and themes. Of course, it’s principal ingredient is the adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic story The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, not content with one tale of Victorian madness and murder the film also folds into its plot the notorious murders in Whit Chapple, yes Jack the Ripper is part of this film.  Because unscrupulous doctors have to obtain corpses for their experimentations the historic case of Burke and Hare, though displace about 70 years from the 1820s to the 1890s, complete this dish adding in additional murder because old jack simply wasn’t enough for a film this colorful movie.

In this version Henry Jekyll, frustrated that his life span will be far too short to eradicate all disease from humanity, turns his research to find an elixir of life and naturally the source of such agelessness must be found in the hormones of women. However, testing the concoction on himself doesn’t produce youth but rather transforms Henry Jekyll into a woman whom he explains away to his neighbors as his sister Mrs. Hyde.

Mrs. Hyde has her own desires and will, complete with a powerful sexual attraction to one of the handsome neighbors. An attraction is blurs between the two identities, while Jekyll remains attracted to the neighbor’s comely sister. (There are a lot of sisters in this film.)

 The film is well cast, all of the actors credible and entertaining in their role but the outstanding achievement in the casting is Ralph Bates as Jekyll and Martine Beswick as Mrs. Hyde. Not only did both perform quite well but the similarity of their faces added an extra level of credibility to the transformation.

Digital ‘morphing’ lay decades off in the future from this film and rather than utilizing lapse-dissolves for the transformation the filmmakers used mirrors, cuts, and ingenious framing with distorting colored glass, creating an impression of in-camera changing.

Unlike many other versions of the classic story, Jekyll isn’t presented as purely noble and good. Neither is Hyde the epitome of evil. Both characters have blood, literally, on their hands, and both invoke a sense of sympathy.

Aside from some gratuitous nudity this film holds up rather well with more interesting characters and questions about identity than shock or scares.

After watching The Keep a film with a troubled production I followed up the next feature film with a movie that possessed and even more troubled history Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist.

1973 saw the release of The Exorcist adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own novel, directed by William Friedkin, and a massive box-office smash, launching a troubled franchise of horror movies. Four years after the original Exorcist II: The Heretic failed to reproduce the first film’s success and the franchise lay fallow for 13 years until Blatty, ignoring the sequel, write and directed one of his own, The Exorcist III. (While Blatty pretended the second one didn’t exist the studio pointedly did not.) This film also failed to find the level of success desired by the studio.

More than a decade passed before Paul Schrader was brought aboard to help a prequel for the backstory on the original films exorcist Father Lankester Merrin. Schrader’s film so disappointed the studio that he was fired from the production, twelve weeks of additional shooting and with an almost entirely new cast and a new director, Renny Harlin, a new film with more violence, gore, and jump scares was crafter and released as The Exorcist: The Beginning, which failed with both audiences and critics. Seeking to salvage something from the plane crash of a production, the studio brought Schrader back to the film and provided funds to allow him to complete his vision which was released and also failed as Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist.

Father Merrin, (Stellan Skarsgard) after witnessing and being forced to participate in Nazi atrocities in his native Holland in his post-war and devoid of faith, now focusing on archelogy, is excavating a buried 5th century church in Kenya, an important find as the first evidence that the early Christian Church had reached this part of the world so early. The Turkana locals, predominantly non-Christian, view the church as a source of evil. A British garrison is posted to protect the site from looters escalating tension with the locals. Merrin discovers the church, which anomalous architecture was built atop an older non-Christian site of worship where human sacrifices were performed. After unsealing the hidden site, the hostility between the British occupiers and the locals intensifies carrying echoes of the war crimes in Merrin’s past. The local missionary, Father Francis, believes an evil spirit has been released but Merrin’s lack faith forces him to find ‘rational’ explanations for the strange events. With war brewing and people torments by their haunted terrible pasts, Merrin is forced to confront the facts of his belief and find his faith again if the unearthed evil is to be vanquished.

What Works For Me:

There’s a lot in this film that is aimed at my particular tastes in horror movies. I am more partial to atmosphere and mood with a slow burn in horror than I am to a killer slashing their way through a bevy for generic and forgettable teens.

Dominion is a slow burn psychological horror film where for most of the movie’s run time the spreading evil is subtle and ambiguous. It is left to the audience to determine for themselves just how much of the cruelty and violence is a result of a demonic presence and how much is simply human nature.

Threats in the movie are more suggested than explicit with only occasional burst of shocking violence, including the slaughter of children at school. The acting is on point and credible and wisely, in my opinion, Skarsgard made no attempt to mimic Max Von Sydow’s distinctive voice and cadence but rather made his own interpretation of Merrin.

What Didn’t Work For Me:

Once the possession is fully revealed and though this is meant to be the same demonic force that nearly thirty years later will possess Reagan, that is no continuity in the possession, its manner, or effects. While there is a strong suggestion that the demon is using various characters’ guilt and shame against them, this is played for more subtly than when it taunted characters in the original film and having a strong continuity in the demon would have tied to two films together.

The digital effects are weak and often ejected me out of my willing suspension of disbelief. The threatening hyenas rarely were credible and instead of increasing tension the effect undercut the threat, lowering the emotional sense of the stake.

Overall while a flawed film and one that never fully recovered from its production woes Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist is an attempt at a thoughtful introspective horror film that dares to ask is evil a force from without or something within all of us.

Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist is currently streaming on Peacock.

So, for the edition of Spooky Films I’m going to discuss three short film that I really enjoyed. Two of these I had the pleasure of seeing on the big screen at a horror film festival and the final one on-line.

Short films can be a great medium for horror. Get in, get to your central concept, and get back out again.

The Call Of Charlie

A married. couple about to host an intimate dinner/blind date for another couple are surprised by the wife’s old college roommate sudden arrival with her spouse. When the final guest arrives his usual appearance and nature sparks fear and unease in the uninvited guests.

This is a horror comedy and hits both notes dead-on. If there is a lesson to be learned here it is do not ‘just drop in’ unexpectedly one people

My Dinner With Werner

A fictionalized story of iconoclast and filmmaker Werner Herzog on a blind date while his former star and now enemy Klaus Kinski attempts to murder him. The impersonations of Herzog and Kinski are pitch-perfect. The more you know the history of these unique men the funnier the short becomes.

AM 1200

An embezzler, wrecked with guilt, on a lonely and deserted highway hears a call for help from a fading AM radio station but the cosmic horror he discovers there is far deep and far more terrible than his own petty crimes.

The longest of these short films Am 1200 was director David Prior, director of the feature The Empty Man.