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Nightmare (1964)

Dir: Freddie Francis

As a child Janet (Jennie Linden) saw her Mother murder her Father. Her Mother was then locked away in the nearby Asylum.
Janet is now at a private boarding school but is still haunted by nightmares and a constant fear that she is really insane like her Mother.
So bad has she become she chooses to go back home, where she is looked after by her guardian Henry Baxter (David Knight), with Mary Lewis (Brenda Bruce), one of her teachers, as her chaperone.

When she arrives back Janet finds a woman named Grace Maddox (Moira Redmond) has been moved in by Henry (who is away) to keep her company. Grace lets slip to Mary that she is really a Nurse.
But home does not bring peace for Janet and soon she is sees a strange woman, with a scarred face, haunting the house and lying on her parent’s bed with a knife in her chest.
Slowly Janet starts to unravel and the insanity she feared was always in her would seem to be materialising…

 

Directed by horror stalwart Freddie Francis (“The Ghoul”) and scripted by the prolific Jimmy Sangster (“The Revenge of Frankenstein”) “Nightmare” is an almost forgotten early effort from ‘Hammer’ that has recently been given a new lease of life on DVD via the ‘Hammer Horror Series’ box set.

The black and white Cinematography by John Wilcox (“The Deadly Bees”) is what hits the viewer first. The crisp wintery outdoor scenes at the school are wonderful enough but as the film enters Janet’s house it becomes exceptional, adding a superbly haunting atmosphere to the film’s superior first half as some suitably surrealistic and haunting angles, set-ups and lighting (especially in the opening nightmare scene in the Asylum) unfurl before us.

So far so good then as the intriguing screenplay combines with the visuals to give us a gem of a first half.
There is one genuinely unexpected shock moment that ends this first part as well which truly delivers in the way it is shot and edited, and although it does rather rely too much on luck and contrivance as a truly effective sinister scheme, it makes for a great, frantic, unexpected outburst of violence .
The horror elements take a dip later on though as we move into more conventional thriller mode and as such the film loses much of it’s cloying atmosphere, as the script starts to repeat itself to play out the next twist, but without the same level of macabre dread.
The scripting also dips into contrivance again for long periods now and the viewer has to take the way the final revelations play out with a pinch of salt, and parts of the ending are a bit too cosy and pat as well. And how someone found out the truth about what was going on, with such certainty to go on and carry out their complicated plan, is never explained.

The murders, given the film’s age, are quite meaty and bloody and add a nice tint of in your face violence to the more atmospheric main body of the film. Like “Psycho” they also show how a well executed knife attack can be really effective even in black and white.
The acting ranges from the good (especially Brenda Bruce), to the rather overwrought and melodramatic, but this does not grate as much as it could because of the gothic melodrama plot and although the finale is rather too neat, the second half more pedestrian and some of the schemes rather reliant on too much luck, the Cinematography and wonderful first half mean that “Nightmare” certainly deserves a wider audience.