"You want me to burn!"
This is the first of thirteen episodes made in 1980, a few years after Hammer stopped making films, and all of which I shall be blogging. Superficially, given the age of the production and both the directorial style and the period's signature switching between videotape and film for location sequences (as Monty Python said, "This building is entirely surrounded by film"), this feels a bit like those '70s BBC M.R. James adaptations, a couple of which I've blogged.
Except this is Hammer, and things are not taken anywhere near as seriously. This is how you do it: with that nicely ambiguous gap between high and low camp that the later Hammer films did so well.
So we have an affluent, upper class couple working in the media, probably in the Home Counties, alng with a tawdry yet rather ho-hum affair of a very middle class kind. And into this we throw the magnificent Patricia Quinn to ham it up gloriously as the out-of-time seventeenth century witch Lucinda. There ensues some highly enjoyable set pieces, from poltergeist-type stuff to a pyre to a vicar played by Grandad from Only Fools and Horses talking about exorcism.
Looking forward to the rest of these...
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