Format: Streaming video from Mometu on Fire!
Things have changed in the movie business. I mean, we know that, but a film like Frightmare (the one from 1974, not the one from the early ‘80s) is clear evidence of those changes. Viewed today, this movie is a bit extreme in terms of its subject matter, but anyone who has watched some modern horror movies has seen things that go a lot further. In fact, the basic subject matter (cannibalism) isn’t that different from something like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, even if this one is a lot more graphic. This was given an X rating when it was first released. Today, it would certainly be R-rated, but five minutes of cuts would drop it to a PG-13.
Any film that touches on a subject like cannibalism is going to be potentially offensive. In the case of Frightmare, the offense isn’t specifically the cannibalism, but the depiction of the person who is the cannibal. In short, this is a film that stigmatizes the mentally ill, something that wasn’t that uncommon 50 years ago. I’m not saying that someone who is a cannibal doesn’t have a problem; I’m saying that the film is essentially depicting anyone with a mental illness as being someone who is dangerous, and that it’s evidently really easy to fake being severely mentally ill.
Anyway, we’re going to start with the release of Dorothy and Edmund Yates (Sheila Keith and Rupert Davies) from a 15+-year stay in a mental institution. The pair was sentenced in 1957 when it was discovered that Dorothy was a cannibal who killed and partially ate six people, with the crimes covered up by her husband. Jackie (Deborah Fairfax) lives in London, a little more than an hour from the Surrey home of Dorothy and Edmund. Jackie is Edmund’s daughter from a previous marriage. She is aware that Dorothy is starting to backslide into her old ways, so every week Jackie drives out to Surrey and delivers her parcels of animal brains, essentially pretending to carry on Dorothy’s murders, bringing her the edible results.
Jackie’s life, as it turns out, is incredibly complicated. In addition to delivering animal brains to her step-mother, she also has custody of Debbie (Kim Butcher), her 15-year-old half-sister, the child of her father Edmund and the murderous Dorothy. Debbie has been booted out of the orphanage she was in and now causes trouble with her boyfriend Alec (Edward Kalinski). In fact, when a barman denies her a drink because she is obviously underage, Alec starts a fight with him. Later, Alec and his biker gang ambush the barman and kill him, and Debbie hides the body in the trunk of a car before the police show up.
Meanwhile, Dorothy has gone into full relapse. She offers taro readings to young women who are unattached and have no family, ending the session by murdering them (in one case by stabbing the victim with a red hot poker) and then doing her cannibalism thing on the corpse. Edmund is unaware of this initially, but eventually discovers what is happening, and learns that the barn has a number of bodies buried under the hay. It’s also revealed to us that Edmund was never insane—he faked it so that he could continue to be with his wife.
All of this is going to come out eventually, of course, and it’s going to be forced out into the open thanks to Graham Heller (Paul Greenwood), the psychiatrist boyfriend of Jackie. He starts digging into exactly what is going on with Jackie’s father and step-mother and starts to see some odd behavior in Debbie as well, essentially giving the impression that Dorothy’s specific cannibalistic madness is somehow heritable.
Is Frightmare a good movie? It is not. It is schlocky and fully grindhouse, and it makes no bones about this. We’re going to see Dorothy go after people with pokers and dig into bodies with power drills, although admittedly, as in keeping with the time, most of what we are going to see is either hinted at or after the fact.
But it is interesting to see what earned an X rating 50 years ago in the days before X became synonymous with pornography. It’s clearly both about the gore (there are a lot of mutilated bodies in this) and the subject matter (cannibalism is not polite, after all). There’s no way this would be rated anything other than R today. This wouldn’t sniff an NC-17 rating today.
I can’t imagine wanting to watch this a second time. It’s fine, but nothing more.
Why to watch Frightmare: How can you resist a film this notorious?
Why not to watch: None of the mental illness stuff hangs together at all.
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