“There's no peace for a dead man..."
Yes, it’s another old adaptation of an old horror short story tonight- this time it’s The Highwayman, by Lord Dunsany, who comes well recommended by no less a figure than Neil Gaiman. You will find the original story here: this is a fairly straight retelling.
And yet... the plot is hardly the point. The original vignette is all mood, atmosphere, dread. Very little happens, but we feel a kind of existential terror.Soit is with this shorty film, with its grainy cinematography and moody moorlands... and the horrible corpsecswinging on the gallows, decaying more and more with every shot, its lips forever stuck in a cry of pain and its mouth swimming with maggots.
Effectively, we see short scenes from Tom's ill-fated life, of rape, of robbery, of murder.And we hear his death sentence as we see the horrid corpse swing from side to side.
This is twenty short minutes. Yet it's a real triumph of moody, visual horror.
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