Teresa wanted to watch a Hammer horror film. But we could’nae find one we hadn’t seen before. So we went with this Amicus Productions number, as it stars the deadly duo, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.
The Skull has a pretty silly plot, concerning the evil possessive influence of the titular skull, formerly the cranial property (accommodation?) of the infamous Marquis de Sade.
But despite the superstitious hokum it’s a rollicking good Hammer style fright-fest, in which Cushing, Lee, and a panoply of great actors – inc Peter ‘Gollum’ Woodthorpe, Nigel ‘Zulu’ Green and others (inc the lovely April Orlich!) – serve up lashings of prime ’60s/’70s style spookiness.
The visual design aspect is great, in ghoulish technicolour, and the music, by Elizabeth Lutyens (daughter of the famed architect), is powerful and effective. By the standards of modern horror this sort of thing is now quaint, or even inadvertently hilarious, occasionally. But if your inner child lives on, as ours most definitely do, it’s vintage horror fun of a very particular kind.
Silly in extremis, but we loved it.