The Man Who Scared Me Witless

I saw the other day that Don Sharp had died at the age of ninety. Now, unless, like me, you are an aficionado of low-budget British horror movies, the name won't mean anything to you. However, for some of us Don Sharp has a special place in our hearts. In horror-movie circles he is best remembered for the two Gothic horrors he made for Hammer in the 1960s: Kiss of the Vampire (1963) and Rasputin, The Mad Monk (1965). The former is generally considered his best film and is one of Hammer's most inventive and atmospheric vampire films, having started life as a Dracula film, before eventually emerging as an interesting out-of-series one-off. Sharp, a jobbing actor turned director, got the picture because, allegedly, Hammer's usual resident director of costume Gothic horrors, Terence Fisher, had temporarily fallen out of favour after the relative failure Phantom of the Opera (1962). Interestingly, despite the critical and commercial success of Kiss, Sharp didn't become a permanent fixture at Hammer, and Fisher returned to the fold in 1964, to resume his position, for the remainder of the sixties at least, as the company's top director. Sharp went on to direct many other, mainly low-budget films, including the bizarre cult favourite Psychomania (1972), which mixes together black magic, teenage bikers and the undead, and the 1978 remake of The Thirty Nine Steps, before finishing his directorial career in TV.

Whilst Kiss of The Vampire is regarded by many as Sharp's best film, it is one of his non-Hammer efforts that I best remember him for: Witchcraft (1964). This film, which he made directly after Kiss, is a relatively obscure item, made on a tiny budget for Lippert Films. It rarely shoes up on TV and, to the best of my knowledge, has never had a UK DVD release. Indeed, I've only ever seen it once, when I was a child, and it scared the Hell out of me. It's hard to why it scared me so much, and it might well be that if I was to see it as an adult, I'd be disappointed. However, something about its monochrome photography and pervading air of unease deeply disturbed me. It might have been down to the fact that it had a contemporary small-town UK setting which made it seem scarily plausible to my younger self. Or maybe it was the way in which the villainous revived witch Vanessa Whitlock dispatched her victims: I recall that one woman was pushed down the stairs to her doom. Most of all, I think, it was the way in which Vanessa had a habit of suddenly appearing on the backseat of potential victims' cars - they suddenly glimpse her in the rear view mirror and are so scared they crash the car. To this day, I always check the backseat of my car before I get behind the wheel - then I check again in the rear view mirror before I drive off. The fact that a cheap horror flick has instilled a pattern of behaviour into me which has persisted for decades, must surely be a tribute to Don Sharp's directorial skills.