The Face of Darkness (1976)

The Face of Darkness (1976) is a real oddity, a British horror short that originally went out as support to Death Weekend, (which was later branded a 'video nasty' when released for home video), then apparently vanished without trace.  Until, that is, the BFI resurrected it and included it on a Blu Ray collection of short films.  It is one of those films that you have to be a dedicated aficionado of obscure horror films to even know of its existence: I only knew of it from a brief (and fairly dismissive) entry in Alan Frank's Horror Films Handbook that piqued my interest and led me an apparently fruitless quest to see it.  Which I finally have, not because of the BFI release, (which I wasn't aware of), but because someone has posted it on YouTube.  As I've noted before, when finally caught up with, elusive movies like this sometimes turn out to be disappointing.  The Face of Darkness, however, turned out to be even more intriguing than I expected.  Not to mention far better made.  Falling more into the 'folk horror' tradition of British cinema, rather than the full blooded Gothic of Hammer or the proto slasher and splatter movies of Pete Walker, the film packs a lot of ideas into just under an hour's running time.  Which is one of its problems - it often feels too crowded in terms of story elements and unable to properly develop them.  A longer running time, taking it to feature length, would not only have allowed these ideas to be more fully explored, but also would perhaps have given it a shot at better distribution and a more lasting legacy.

As it stands, the film uses as its background the politics of crime and punishment, most particularly the debate over capital punishment, and how best to respond to terrorist outrages, in order to develop an examination of the nature of evil.  All of which makes it sound very contemporary in its concerns but, of course, the terrorism it had in mind in 1976 were IRA bombings rater than al Queda.  Although the storyline of The Face of Darkness seems straightforward - right-wing MP revives a buried alive medieval heretic (billed simply as 'The Undead') and uses him to commit an atrocity which will create the public backlash he needs to pass his repressive private members bill, which includes restoration of the death penalty, through parliament - the narrative shifts constantly between two time periods, with actors doubling up to play roles in both, constantly drawing parallels between the Middle Ages and modern world.  The MP's motivation for his 'moral' crusade is the murder of his wife, apparently as part of a black magic ritual, but his vengeful quest for 'justice is contrasted with the more muted reaction of the mother of one of the children killed in the atrocity he stages, ('The Undead' bombs a school playground), her life destroyed by incomprehensible violence, revenge is the furthest thing from her mind.  The central hypocrisy of the MP's position - as if using the very thing that killed his wife, 'black magic', to engineer his revenge wasn't hypocritical enough - is underlined by his attempts to have 'The Undead' declared insane so as to spare him the death penalty: an admission that capital punishment can never deter those possessed, either by evil or fantacism, from committing murder.  Indeed, the torture and 'execution', by being buried alive, of 'The Undead' in the past doesn't deter him from killing in the present.

The scenes of 'The Undead' under psychoanalysis in the present are contrasted with his inquisition and torture in the Middle Ages, (the psychoanalyst and inquisitor being played by the same actor), emphasising the point that neither science nor religion has a neat solution for existential evil.  The final scenes between the MP and 'The Undead', which mirror those earlier in the film, when the MP revived 'The Undead' with a 'kiss of life', bring things full circle, with the MP finally realising that he has become what he purports to despise.  The Face of Darkness is permeated by a sense of constant unease rather than attempting to deliver sudden shocks - everything seems slightly off-kilter but is still firmly set in the very real world of 1976.  At the centre of the unease, of course, is 'The Undead' himself, whether seducing the mother of one of his victims-to-be in order to establish a connection with the pain he causes, or dance he performs in the school playground to to the school children before setting the bomb.  (A reminder that we are in 1976 - nowadays it would be near impossible for a stranger to walk into a school playground directly from the street).  The cast is made up of familiar British TV faces, with David Allister, as 'The Undead', gives an effectively understated performance in a role where it would have been all too easy to go over the top, instead opting for a quiet other worldliness.  Gwyneth Powell, (best remembered as Mrs McClusky, the head mistress in Grange Hill), is excellent as the victim's mother, a portrait of ordinariness who finds their life suddenly and inexplicably shattered by forces beyond her comprehension.  The stand-out performance is Lennard Pearce as Langdon, the MP, a world away from his best known role of Grandad in Only Fools and Horses, he is the epitome of respectable reactionary, facilitating evil under the cloak of reasonableness and moral concern.

The Face of Darkness was written and directed by Ian F H Lloyd, for whom I can find no other cinematic credits.  Which would seem surprising, as his handling of the film is very assured,getting over his lack of budget for actually staging things like the explosion in the playground by instead showiig public reaction via faux vox pop style street interviews which punctuate his narrative.  The stillness which he imbues the medieval scenes with contrasts effectively with the hustle of modern day London.  The main criticism which can be leveled at his direction are the lapses in pace which occur every so often, with some scenes playing on too long.  All in all, The Face of Darkness stands as a fascinating curio which, one can't help but suspect, if had been made as a feature rather than a short, might well enjoy a cult following as a fine example of British folk horror.  

I should also thank Gav Crimson for alerting me to the film's presence on You Tube, as he has previously with various rare and obscure items.