Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, or, Strangers on a Train

I heard about the inaccurately-yet-awesomely-titled horror anthology Dr Terror’s House of Horrors from my friend Rain’s Maniacal Movie Countdown, and I immediately knew I had to see it.

It’s from Amicus Productions, the studio that made almost-but-not-quite Hammer Horror movies, including my undeserved favorite, The Beast Must Die. I’ve mentioned several times how much I love that movie, even though I can never articulate exactly why, and even though it’s kind of boring and not really objectively good by any measure. But even without its signature gimmick Werewolf Break — the single greatest creation in 20th century cinema — it’s such a weird combination of Agatha Christie murder mystery, blacksploitation movie, and werewolf horror that I can’t not love it.

There’s a similar vibe in Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, although its format inherently makes it faster-paced and less dull. It involves a group of five men all sharing a train car from London (the House of Horrors promised by the title appears nowhere in the movie), who are joined by the mysterious Dr Shreck and his deck of tarot cards.

Dr Shreck is played by Peter Cushing, with a real beard, fake eyebrows, and an even more fake German accent. He invites each of the men to tap his deck of cards and he’ll draw four cards to foretell their future. We see each future play out in a short horror story.

In one, not-quite Joseph Cotten with a kind-of-Scottish accent plays an architect having to deal with a curse on his ancestral home and wolves howling in the distance at night. (If you think you know how this one’s going to play out, just you wait… to find out that you were exactly right!)

Another has a family man returning from vacation and enlisting M from MI6 (Bernard Lee) to help him with some landscaping problems. Another has a jazz musician going to the West Indies and doing some ill-advised cultural appropriation, in an almost-comedy vignette that has a moral about being respectful of other cultures but still manages to be extremely offensive to other cultures.

Then there’s Christopher Lee gleefully hamming it up as an insufferably pretentious art critic getting one-upped by an artist played by Michael Gough. Finally, Donald Sutherland plays an American doctor who brings his new French bride home to the states at the worst possible time, right when children in town start to come down sick with anemia and mysterious bite marks on their necks.

All of the stories are slight, completely predictable, charmingly corny, and not scary by even the most generous definition. The look and feel is a bit like Night Gallery sanded down to remove all of its scariness or sharp edges, plus the horror anthology comics Creepy and Eerie. Those comics had top-tier artists applying their talent to trash, short stories churned out so quickly to meet a quota that they invariably settle into a last-page reveal of “for you see I am also a werewolf/ghoul/vampire/choose one! BWA HA HA HA!”

It’s the “top-tier artists” that make these things impossible not to love. It is immediately apparent that Cushing and Lee (and Gough, another Hammer frequent player) are having fun with this and not taking even a single moment of it seriously, and yet it doesn’t read as camp. Meanwhile, Sutherland is bringing a more modern and naturalistic style of acting to a story, genre, and style that steadfastly refuses to be modernized — and it’s somehow both jarring and appropriate at the same time. None of it reads as “slumming” but as kind of “elevated horror” in the literal sense instead of the contemporary sense: talented people committed to the earnest execution of trash.

Which means that it’s all pretty fun. I’m committed to checking out more Amicus horror movies now, since I’ve now seen two that are so much more appealing than they have any right to be. There’s such a lack of pretense that they seem to treat the whole question of art vs. trash as completely irrelevant. “What do you mean? I don’t understand the question. These are movies, my dear boy.”