FilmThe studio that mastered the art of the gleefully ghoulish cinematic short-story collection in the 60s and 70s is set to return. It may just raise a terrific genre from the dead
Although Hammer usually receives the bulk of the recognition, there would be no real British horror movie scene without Amicus Productions. Between 1962 and 1977, Amicus produced 28 movies, many of which have become cult classics. The Psychopath. The Deadly Bees. And Now the Screaming Starts! Fine films, all.
But where Amicus really sang was in its “portmanteau” films, made up of five or six short stories connected by a loose overarching theme. These films were not only masterpieces of creativity (after all, it’s much easier to string out one bad idea for 90 minutes than to cram in half a dozen) but also of marketing. Most of the seven Amicus anthologies were sold on the star power of one actor who, given the brevity of each story, might have only appeared on screen for a couple of minutes.
I’m telling you this because Amicus is back. According to Variety, its new president, Lawrie Brewster, has set the goal of re-establishing Amicus “as a beacon of independent British horror”. And it will try to achieve this by, you’ve guessed it, bringing back the portmanteau. The first new Amicus production will be In the Grip of Terror, a collection of four short spooky stories themed around the medical profession, with a cast including Megan Tremethick from Ghost Crew, Jonathan Hansler from The Devil’s Machine and The Human Centipede 2’s Laurence R Harvey. Not big names by any means, but big names would sort of defeat the purpose for something as cheap and nasty as this.
The promotional artwork for In the Grip of Terror is aggressively retro, all yellow font and vaguely Cushingesque portraits, deliberately harking back to the company’s 1970s heyday. The idea seems to be to appeal to nostalgists first and build from there. And that might be trickier than it seems, because the seven portmanteaus Amicus originally released are incredibly hard to beat.
There was Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors, a wonderful 1965 collection including stories about Roy Castle being traumatised by voodoo, Christopher Lee being bullied by the reanimated hand of a guy he murdered, and Donald Sutherland coming to the unfortunate conclusion that he accidentally married a vampire. There was Torture Garden (1965), in which a piano becomes violently jealous of Barbara Ewing, and Jack Palance inadvertently murders Edgar Allan Poe (it’s a long story). And in 1972’s Tales from the Crypt, Joan Collins gets chased about by a murderous Santa Claus and Peter Cushing comes back from the dead to punish an annoying neighbour, while – with the story Blind Alley – Amicus basically invents the entire Saw franchise.
These films are so beloved that the properties they influenced have arguably become more famous than the originals. Steve Coogan made an Amicus-riffing show in the 1990s called Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible. A few years later, Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness offered up the faux horror anthology Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. In 2010, Tommy Wiseau starred in a spoof of The House that Dripped Blood, entitled The House That Dripped Blood on Alex. And try to imagine what The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror episodes would be like without Amicus. It’s impossible.
So there’s hope for In the Grip of Terror, not least because the public seems to be yearning for new horror portmanteaus. The decade-spanning V/H/S series has helped bring the format back after some time in the doldrums, to considerable acclaim. And, beginning in early 2020, Full Moon Features managed to write, film, edit and release an entire Covid-themed horror anthology, Corona Zombies, that was released in the second week of April and was welcomed rapturously. Similarly, portmanteaus such as 2022’s Tales from the Other Side and 2018’s The Field Guide to Evil have shown that there is definitely an audience for this sort of thing.
So perhaps the resuscitation of Amicus might be the start of a full-on revival. If In the Grip of Terror lands as well as is hoped, maybe we’ll get a new run of fun, cheap and grotty British horror films. And if the new Amicus can land a cast like the old Amicus pulled together, who knows what might happen? At the very least we can hope for a film about Catherine Zeta-Jones being chased around a village by an evil foot.
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