Underplayed Gems

Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)

Horrors of the Black Museum poster
Directed by
Arthur Crabtree
Genre
horror film
Country
United Kingdom
Runtime
1h 35m
Rated
NR
Rating
5.9 of 10 from 46 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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How it feels

A crime writer uses a private museum of torture devices to inspire a series of murders. He manipulates his assistant into carrying out the killings for research.

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What happens

Horrors of the Black Museum is a 1959 British horror film directed by Arthur Crabtree and starring Michael Gough, June Cunningham, Graham Curnow and Shirley Anne Field. It was filmed in Color and CinemaScope, and most of the financing came from the United States. The credited producer was Jack Greenwood, but Herman Cohen says this came about to ensure the film qualified for the Eady levy, and in fact, Greenwood was more of an associate producer assisting Cohen. The film was released in the US on April 22, 1959, on a double feature with The Headless Ghost (1959). It was the first film in what film critic David Pirie dubbed Anglo-Amalgamated's "Sadian trilogy" (the other two being Circus of Horrors (1960) and Peeping Tom (1960)), with an emphasis on sadism, cruelty and violence (with sexual undertones), in contrast to the supernatural horror of the Hammer films of the same era. Cohen says when the movie was released years later on television, they had to take off the hypnotism prologue "because it does hypnotize some people." (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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