Hammer House of Horror: The Two Faces of Evil

 "You're perfectly safe, my dear..."

This episode, while perhaps a little slow, is splendidly and uncannily directed and uses a simple central idea- a family holiday goes wrong when a hitchhiker attacks Martin, but turns out to be his doppelganger- to maximum effect, wringing  huge amounts of tension out of whether the dead man or the survivor is Janet's husband.

It helps that so many of the cast, including the ward sister, are pleasingly sinister, as is the way everything is shot. The slow pace allows the episode to wallow in the uncanny mood and Janet's unease. The hospital itself is creepy, and from the moment Janet wakes everything feels off-kilter.

Anna Calder-Marshall is superb in the central role, but Gary Raymond is equally superb in a necessarily ambiguous part where you are never quite sure whether he's evil or not. Then there's Pauline Delaney, who is far too good here for me never to have heard of.

A quietly excellent episode.

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)

"There'll be no morning for us!"

Christopher Lee is the nominal star of this film, but he doesn't get to do much other than be a frightening presence: his only line is "Go on!", twice, and that's only to horses. He doesn't even appear until halfway through the film, and his appearances are rationed. Nevertheless, this is a splendid example of mid-'60s Hammer, with Terence Fisher providing atmosphere aplenty and superb performances from Barbara Shelley and Andrew Keir.

We begin with a flashback, glossing over the fact that this is the second sequel, after Brides of Dracula, to Hammer's original Dracula, but we move swiftly on to our new take, centred on four English travellers and a substitute for Peter Cushing's absent Van Helsing in the person of Keir's Father Sandor.

The eerie mystery of the castle is well-set up and well developed to maximise. Both effects and the  an early sense of foreboding. A young Philip Latham (we Doctor Who fans know him as President Borusa from The Five Doctors) is superb as a sinister butler in the early part of the film, but Thorley Walters also puts in a strong turn as Ludwig, an obvious Renfield substitute.

The central scene of the film- Dracula's resurrection- is superb, comparable I. Effect to a regeneration in Doctor Who. Both the effects and the framing of the scene are utterly masterful. Sufficiently so, in fact, as to successfully gloss over how easy it is for the supposedly dead vampire to be revived.

The ending is sudden, perhaps, but better this than it outstay its welcome. This is an excellent example of Hammer during its golden years.