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The Creeping Flesh (1973)

Dir: Freddie Francis

Professor Emmanuel Hildern (Peter Cushing) returns to Victorian London after a long trip New Guinea where he discovered, and has now brought back, a unique skeletal specimen, a huge animalistic skeleton that seems to be millions of years old and yet looks unusually advanced.

His Daughter, Penelope (Lorna Heilbron), is neglected by her workaholic Father, and yet at the same time she is being suffocated by his strict, though loving, overprotection.
With their money dwindling away Emmanuel has to work harder than ever, with the help of his assistant Waterlow (George Benson), at his theory on how to combat madness so he can win the prestigious ‘Rictor Prize‘ and the £10,000 that comes with it.

On his arrival home Emmanuel also receives news that his Wife, Marguerite (Jenny Runacre),
has died at the asylum she was committed to after she went mad years ago.
Penelope does not know about her Mother’s madness, and believes she actually died years ago, because Emmanuel lives in fear her Mother’s madness developing in her.

The asylum is run by Emmanuel’s cold, cruel, ruthlessly ambitious half-Brother James (Christopher Lee) who has been funding Emmanuel’s research trips but now tells the visiting Emmanuel that he refuses to do so anymore as he has a rival paper up for the ‘Rictor Prize’, which attempts a very scientific approach to conquering madness, but so far with little success.
While Emmanuel is there one of the most dangerous inmates, Charles Lenny (Kenneth J. Warren), escapes.

Back at his home Emmanuel washes the skeleton’s hand and notices that flesh miraculously forms on a moistened finger bone! He quickly removes the finger to study it.
Reading about ancient New Guinea beliefs he discovers that the bones may be a mystical creature whose blood is the very essence of pure ‘evil’.
When he discovers this Emmanuel puts a fateful plan into action…to create a serum against evil using the creature‘s infectious blood, a vaccine that will not only win him the prize but render mankind immune from evil itself. A vaccine he desperately uses on his Daughter.

Sure enough all does not go to plan and Emmanuel’s fears about Penelope’s sanity seem to be realised as an evil madness takes hold of her. But is it a madness, an evil, unwittingly unleashed on her by her own Father?….

Often wrongly labelled as a ‘Hammer’ production (it is in fact from the short lived ‘Tigon Pictures’, who gave us the supreme “Witchfinder General”) “The Creeping Flesh” does share a lot of similarities with ‘Hammer’s’ output.
Not only do we have ‘Hammer’ legends Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, sometime ‘Hammer’ director Freddie Francis (“Dr. Terror's House of Horrors”, “Dracula has Risen from the Grave”) at the helm and ‘Hammer’ stalwart Michael Ripper as a delivery man, but we also have a very similar feel to the proceedings as well as to the sets.
But where the film really deviates from most ‘Hammer’ films is that it’s far more a character driven study of madness, fear, ambition, deceit and personal tragedy than a straightforward horror/creature on the loose movie.

The screenplay by Peter Spenceley and Jonathan Rumbold not only gives us some fully rounded characters but also some thoughtful views on mental illness, the role of science in such complex issues as evil, the attitudes of Victorian society to the insane and how even the best and most loving of intentions can cause tragedy.

Cushing gives a strong, likeable performance (that mixes his version of ‘Dr Who’ with his Baron Frankenstein) of a kind man whose worst enemy is his remorseless drive and his deathly fear that madness will strike down his family. A fear so strong it actually becomes complicit in creating that which it dreads .
Emmanuel is wrong in many matters, but his intentions are good, and his obvious love for his Wife is superbly portrayed by Cushing in some genuinely moving scenes that bring to mind his extremely hard to watch performance of total heartbreak (to years later, after the death of his real Wife) in Francis’s “The Ghoul”.

Lee is of course a dab hand at the nasty guy roles and does a wonderfully evil turn as the scheming James (who has no compassion for the inmates in the slightest and uses them as guinea pigs) and delivers some choice ‘villain’ lines (“Unfortunately, in the state of society as it exists today, we are not permitted to experiment on human beings. Normal human beings”) with great aplomb. But his role is far less emotionally interesting than Cushing’s.

Special mention also has to be given to Lorna Heilbron, who moves from a typical sweet, well to do young lady to a sadistic, leering, murderous seductress with great skill. Her facial performance alone, during her moments of madness, is worth the price of admission. It’s a shame she never really did much else after this, with only José Ramón Larraz’s “Symptoms” being of any note, as she certainly brings more to her role than most of ‘Hammer’s’ actresses.

Kenneth J Warren (who died not long after filming this) also turns in a sympathetic performances as the escaped mental patient who thinks he has met a fellow traveller down the road of insanity in the shape of Penelope. One scene in particular, where he mutely pleads for help, remains very memorable.

Francis has never been the most exciting or dynamic of directors (seeming to put more effort into his Oscar winning career as a Cinematographer) but he does some great stuff here.
Sequences worth looking out for are the flashbacks of the wanton Marguerite slipping into madness, filmed with a very effective distorted picture as the frame warps along with her mind, a brilliantly creepy and gothic night time coach ride with the cloaked creature in the cab and a tour de force sequence of pure, old school creepy cinema as the creature (which actually has very little to do with the main plot and only really appears near the end) approaches a house to stalk those within. The superb visual of it’s huge shadow slowly creeping up and covering the house is one of the most memorable images in 70’s horror cinema in fact.

Another plus is the set design. Although the asylum is not the masterpiece of gothic atmosphere as the one seen in ‘Hammer‘s‘ “Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell”, it’s suitably bleak and stocked with some wonderful (and of course essential) screaming lunatics.
And the low rent London dives and taverns are full of that very British cinema atmosphere of polished dirtiness and cleaned-up sleaze that ‘Hammer’ themselves were so good at when it came to painting picture postcard versions of grime and poverty.

There is no real gore here but there is the odd bit of bloody violence and the creatures's fleshy finger (especially when being dissected) is delightfully gross.

Overall “The Creeping Flesh” is not only one of the finest Lee/Cushing collaborations and perhaps Freddie Francis’s best directorial achievement but also an exceptionally crafted and intelligent horror film that’s too often overlooked but actually remains a mini-gem in the crown of British horror. The wonderful and cruel twiat at the end is simply an added treat.