"Gentlemen- the brain!"
And so we come to the final episode of Hammer House of Horror- and it may very well be one of the finest, a fascinating (and timely, in 2021 with all these anti-vaxxer nutters), study of an individual who falls way down into the pit of conspiracy theories and magical thinking by way of his obsession with the number nine.
And yet this works so very well as serious drama. It's certainly superbly directed, with the unsettling visual grammar of a horror film, and the cast is equally superb- Peter McEnery is reminiscent of a young John Hurt here, Emrys James steals his scenes as an eccentric surgeon superbly, and Georgina Hale shows all the naturalistic subtlety that made Ken Russell cast her so very often.
Yet it's the writing that makes this such a triumph. From the plot, to the subject matter- arguably there's nothing supernatural here; the only evil is the fatal temptation of conspiratorial thinking. Even the priest here sees fit to quote from Iron Maiden's favourite bit of the Book of Revelation, a part of the Bible that a large proportion even of Christians seem to think is, well, on drugs. There's a mood of paranoia and claustrophobia throughout, evokes by a perfect marriage of character, direction and dialogue. There's humour, too: Edwyn's mum's last words when stabbed are "Oh dear", while Stella- a surprisingly nuanced and realistic character- responds to his expounding of conspiracy theory nonsense with "Do you take sugar?".
The series really is ending on a high.
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