Despite popular wisdom on the subject, neither Halloween nor Friday The Thirteenth was the first "slasher film."  In fact, the first such "slasher film" that has all the elements we now associate with that horror film subgenre may have been a well-made, if overall modest, British film that likely created a whole new class of fright flick purely by accident.  Surprised?  Well, read on and learn more about this scary and "wet" horror movie, which may well have been more appropriately titled as...

By HANK REARDON

Tower Of Evil (aka Horror Of Snape Island and Beyond The Fog) is a crap classic from 1972, the heyday of British exploitation. Produced by Grenadier Films, it’s a sick but slick film, blending a 1950s gothic sensibility with the baroque sex-and-violence excesses of the swinging seventies counterculture.

Director Jim O’Connolly’s previous effort was The Valley Of Gwangi (1968), Ray Harryhausen’s dinosaur-Western. After Tower Of Evil, O’Connolly would direct only one more film (the erotic Mistress Pamela in 1974) before disappearing from the world of cinema.

Tower Of Evil was based on a script by George Baxt, who penned screenplays for the genre classics Circus Of Horrors, Horror Hotel, and Burn, Witch, Burn! The producer was Richard Gordon, an Anglo-American pioneer in low-budget horror filmmaking who also bankrolled Horror Hospital, Island Of Terror, Inseminoid, and Fiend Without A Face.

Mostly shot on soundstages at Shepperton Studios, Tower Of Evil lies smack dab in the middle ground between old-fashioned Hammer horrors and eighties splatter movies. Traces of gothic atmosphere (such as an obviously fake model of a lighthouse in a dry-ice fog) exist alongside vicious shock effects (grisly dismemberment and decapitation scenes, and shots of badly decomposed human leftovers). The repeated sight of crabs skittering over corpses is quite unnerving.

In a nod to the new permissiveness, the attractive young cast members are willing to shed their bell-bottoms, mini-skirts and skin-tight flares at the drop of an axe. Tower of Evil has enough nudity and gore to go around, but also enough substance and decent acting to satisfy more demanding tastes.

In the macabre opening sequence, fishermen John Gurney (George Coulouris) and his son Hamp (Jack Watson) sail to fog-shrouded Snape Island, where they stumble upon several naked and hacked-up dead bodies. Old John happens upon a crazy young hippie girl, who stabs him to death. Hamp clobbers the girl (Penny) and she later "awakens" in a psychiatric hospital, in a semi-catatonic state and in the care of an effete psychiatrist, played by plummy-voiced Anthony Valentine.

The good doctor stimulates Penny’s memory with powerful psychotropic drugs and interviews her in front of panels of flashing lights, in a determined effort to extract the truth from his unwilling patient.

Emerging from her torpor, Penny mutters the name "Baal"--the Phoenician god of fertility. The cult of Baal celebrated the deity’s death and resurrection each year as a part of the Canaanites’ fertility rituals--an eerie forerunner of the Christ mythos. The Baal ceremonies often included human sacrifice and temple prostitution. The officiating priests danced around the altars, chanting frantically and cutting themselves with knives to inspire the god’s compassion. Small wonder that in the Bible, Baal became Beelzebub, one of Satan’s fallen angels--a devil.

Since the Phoenicians of 3,000 years ago were superb shipbuilders and sailors, the cult of Baal spread throughout the Mediterranean and (as is Tower of Evil’s conceit) to ancient Britain. The lighthouse is built atop the grave of a Phoenician chief and the statue of Baal that guards his tomb. Whether the proximity of this idol had any evil influence on Saul, the harmless lighthouse keeper who devolves into an eccentric hermit and later into a psycho killer, is never revealed.

Penny is charged with the murder of three friends who camped with her on the remote rocky island. [Seeking solitude, the four friends chose this desolate spot to vacation in after attending a crowded "jazz festival."] Penny’s parents (who are never seen) hire a private eye named Brent (Bryant Haliday, an excellent leading man whose last film this was) to clear her name.

Brent joins four archaeologists as they set off for Snape Island in search of a Phoenician treasure thought to be lost in hidden caves. A Phoenician spear made of gold, used to impale one of the hippies, sparks their interest. The archaeologists (who all have a tangled romantic history) believe that this artifact could lead them to a treasure trove from antiquity in the caves that run through the island.

Standing in the way of their goal is an unknown cackling killer who kills off the visitors one by one after isolating them from the mainland by destroying their boat and mobile radio set. The archaeologists eventually encounter a savage caveman, so diseased, filthy and suppurating that he brings to mind the lonely cannibal in Death Line, also filmed in London in 1972. This island grotesque has talon-like nails, grime-encrusted skin, wild filthy hair and twisted lips. He is strong enough to break a man’s neck like a twig.

A highlight of Tower Of Evil are the brilliantly conceived sets--the decaying lighthouse and subterranean temple to Baal are very impressive and quite forbidding.

Surprisingly, this low-budgeter was photographed by veteran cinematographer Desmond Dickinson, whose credits include Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948), The Importance Of Being Earnest (1952), Horrors Of The Black Museum (1959) and A Study In Terror (1965). Not even Dickinson can save a scene on the open sea that uses the clumsiest back projection this side of Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966). The boat christened The Sea Ghost must be hovering 30 feet over the brine.

Candace Glandenning (Penny), Seretta Wilson (the other hippie girl) and the mature Anna Palk (a sexually voracious anthropologist) are good-looking women, and the murderer (Fredric Abbott) is genuinely repulsive and frightening. Also featured in the cast are a wan Jill Haworth (a long way down from Exodus, but a step up from The Haunted House of Horror) and, in the role of an art dealer, a puffy but apparently sober Dennis Price (the fallen-on-hard-times star of Kind Hearts And Coronets died of alcoholism in 1973, shortly after playing Van Helsing in Son Of Dracula).

Tower of Evil is pure horror at its most basic. All the elements are there for a shuddering good time: a deserted island; a dark tower on a mist-shrouded, rocky landscape; lost, abandoned and threatened people; ritual killings; spooky caves; and the menacing presence of a barely glimpsed monster. O’Connolly’s inspired compositions and unusual camera angles infuse the film with an unearthly and surreal atmosphere.

There is an overwhelming sense of loneliness, paranoia and claustrophobia in this picture, helped immeasurably by evocative second unit shots of the island. Sound design is used well to enhance the sinister mood: the soft eerie whistle every time something scary is about to happen; the long slow walks through dim caverns; the muffled screams and infernal cackling of the insane stalker; and the lonely wailing wind just outside the lighthouse window.

Kudos to Elite Entertainment for doing such a wonderful job on the DVD transfer of Tower Of Evil. The print quality of this 33-year-old film is surprisingly good. One wouldn’t expect so much care to be lavished on a movie that (however enjoyable) is essentially a potboiler--and an obscure one at that, though well deserving of a Baalian resurrection for contemporary audiences.

A pity there are no extra features, other than a theatrical trailer. A "making of" featurette might have included interviews with Gordon and the surviving English cast members--namely Jill Haworth, now 60 and long retired from acting; 66-year-old Anthony Valentine, a series regular on The Commander crime drama; and 68-year-old Derek Fowlds, star of the long-running Heartbeat dramedy.

For good or ill, Tower Of Evil set the tone for the Eighties slasher craze. Male and female characters who party and fornicate in the great outdoors are the ones who get chopped up. The sole survivor from among the first set of young visitors to the island does not have sexual intercourse with her boyfriend, but willingly indulges in fellatio instead because she "knows how to take care of her man."

Thanks, Hank.  Sure enough, Tower Of Evil did help usher in the "slasher" films that so plagued the Eighties and also provided what would become the "Slasher Creed": Sex between attractive young people earns them a disembowlment.  It also provided the prototype Slasher Beast--the creepy killer who was rendered that way because of some deep, dark family scandal.  Of course, despite its "body count," the film really is an "old dark house" type of film (this time, the "house" is a "tower," but still...), one that was spiced with generous splashes of gore for good box-office.  So, it has some familiar elements for classic horror fans, as long as they can stomach the bloody makeup effects.

Article copyright © Hank Reardon

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