One of the most distinctive British directors to emerge in the 1950s, Terence Fisher built a cinematic world around the Frankenstein syndrome – duplication through irresponsible science. In this key manifestation of that theme, Freud, the Holy Scriptures, and pulp literature form an unholy alliance. Based on a 1949 novel by William F. Temple, the narrative is addressed directly to camera (breaking the fourth wall) and told in flashback, the latter being a favourite device of Fisher’s in the 1950s. It follows two Cambridge graduates who build a replication machine. When the woman they both love – American blonde Barbara Payton – chooses one of them, the other scientist clones her. Of course, the experiment goes horribly wrong. Early Fisher is a melodrama of extremes, with a perverse depiction of the violence inherent in loving too much, loving unknowingly, loving in the dark. The usual Cold War concerns prevalent in American sci-fi films of the 50s are not relevant here. The British were more preoccupied with the (in)humanist questions raised by new science than with its political or hysterical implications. Yet, made just a year after the UK developed its own atomic bomb, Four Sided Triangle inevitably conveys a sense of post-Oppenheimer angst. Fisher’s obsessive attention to the dials and buttons of machines and the electrophysiology of the body – connecting the world of knowledge to the unknown – reveals the exhilaration of rebirth, but also a Britain that has acquired unwarranted godly powers. Both a Christian scientist and a voyeur, Fisher takes on the task of delineating the shortcut from the physical to the metaphysical. A title card at the end of the film quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: “You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.” Fisher seems to be having both. That’s what Hammer films were for.

Ehsan Khoshbakht

Few things can strike the heart with fear quite like 1970s cuisine. Who better, then, than the Master of Menace, Vincent Price, to instruct us in the wonders of cheese soufflé, novelty party snacks and Manhattan Vichyssoise? The actor was also a celebrated gourmet, who had published several bestselling cookery books with his wife Mary by the time he came to film Cooking Price-Wise, a six-part series made for Thames Television. Filmed over a couple of days in 1970 while the actor was in the UK filming Robert Fuest’s The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Cooking Price-Wise is clearly a labour of love made by a man who loves to eat and then tell you all about it. But for all its retro-kitsch aesthetics, the show takes its directive – to open the minds of British housewives to “foreign food” – quite seriously … Cooking Price-Wise is both a cookery crash-course and a whistle-stop tour of the history of common ingredients like potatoes and cream.
Wearing his customary dandy’s neck-tie, Price is a natural host, with easy quips and helpful asides. There are remarkably few references to his horror career, until we arrive at the cheese episode. Price is going to create a monster, something he is familiar with: “That is, if I’m not playing the monster myself”. The result is the cucumber crocodile, a dish I hope to see blowing up on Instagram, and which I can only describe as the party goth’s answer to the cheese and pineapple hedgehog. Party snacks aside, the closest we get in this show to heart-stopping fear is the epic quantities of cream and butter Price uses.

Sophia Satchell Baeza, “Sight and Sound”, vol. 35, n. 1, Winter 2024.