Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)

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

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.

creepytensemelodramaticsuspensefuldarkunsettlingcampyvisually striking

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)

Trailer

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