The House That Dripped Blood

Third in the Amicus portmanteau horror series, incorporating four stories by Robert Bloch and marking Duffell's highly promising debut as a director. Three of the episodes are rough-and-ready but vigorous Grand Guignol fun, involving Elliott as a novelist confronted by the mad strangler created for his latest yarn; Cushing as a retired stockbroker whose head lands up in the hands of a waxworks Salome, image of his long-lost love; and Pertwee (it should have been Vincent Price) as a veteran star of horror movies who finds himself inexplicably in the grip of a vampiric urge. The fourth is something else again, a marvellous mood piece of chilling intensity about a lonely, angelic child (the remarkable Chloë Franks) who compensates rather nastily - with wax image and pins - for the neglect to which she has been condemned, not without cause, by her widowed father (Lee).