After working together on the great Christopher Lee horror film The City of the Dead in 1960, American producers and screenwriters Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg decided to establish their own film production company at Shepperton Studios in England. They named this company Amicus Productions – and even though it went dormant in 1977, it’s still remembered fondly by many horror fans, mainly due to their popular portmanteau (or anthology) films: Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Torture Garden, The House That Dripped Blood, Tales from the Crypt, Asylum, Vault of Horror, and From Beyond the Grave. An attempt to revive the brand as Amicus Entertainment in the ‘00s quickly sputtered out – but now, Amicus is back.
It was announced in 2023 that the Subotsky family would be working with Lawrie Brewster, Sarah Daly, and Megan Tremethick to “re-establish Amicus Productions as a beacon of independent British horror,” and the Subotskys couldn’t have found a better group of collaborators for this project, as Brewster, Daly, and Tremethick have already spent years establishing themselves in the genre world, resulting in some really interesting movies.
Of course, it was decided that Amicus should be revived with a new portmanteau film. The title In the Grip of Terror was chosen from a list of potential titles that had been left behind by the late Milton Subotsky, and his widow, Dr. Fiona Subotsky, suggested some of the stories that were brought to the screen. Drawing inspiration from the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Ambrose Bierce, writer/director Brewster crafted four segments: A Late Appointment, A Watcher by the Dead, The One-Way Ward, and A Diagnosis of Death.
A Late Appointment is the wrap-around story, and it gets things started off in classic anthology film fashion. A group of people find themselves in a strange location – an abandoned hospital, in this case – and, lanterns in hand, descend into the dark bowels of the place, where they find an odd stranger: Laurence R. Harvey as Dr. Graves. As Graves chats with this confused trio – Dorian Ashbourne as Mancher, Tremethick as Charlotte Gibbon, and Brewster as Mayley – their conversation leads us into each of the three other stories, which focuses on these three characters.
Mancher is at the heart of A Watcher by the Dead. A med student studying under a Dr. Helberson (Michael Daviot), Mancher objects to his superior’s idea that everyone has a such a deep superstitious fear of the dead that a man locked alone in a dark room with a corpse, with only a candle to see by, would go mad overnight. So he makes a bet with Helberson and has an acquaintance from his hometown (also played by Ashbourne) spend the night with a corpse in a dark room.
I can’t say I found it very interesting to watch this character sit in a room with a corpse and get increasingly freaked out as the night goes on. It’s a creepy set-up, but I’m not convinced that it needed to take up ten minutes of the movie. At 113 minutes, the film’s overall running time is a bit excessive (it’s longer, by at least 11 minutes and up to 25 minutes, than any previous Amicus anthology), and A Watcher by the Dead is a segment that I really felt could have been cut down.
The situation does turn out much worse than expected, and things get livelier and quite over-the-top once we move away from the corpse room.
The next segment, The One-Way Ward, focuses on Charlotte Gibbon – and this is, by far, the best part of the film. In her story, Charlotte is a terminally ill nurse who has just started working at a hospital that keeps its patients who don’t have long to live in an area that’s called “The One-Way Ward” because no one ever comes back from it. Understandably, she becomes fascinated with this part of the hospital... but when she starts working in the one-way ward alongside Doctor Walker (Jonathan Hansler), she discovers some strange things are going on in there.
Walker is pumping the terminal patients full of a mysterious compound and warns that if the temperature in the ward isn’t kept at a low (and always getting lower) temperature, the patients will die immediately. Of course, his experiments have some monstrous side effects, but if he could perfect his compound he could find a way to defeat death forever.
Overall, In the Grip of Terror is a very “heightened” movie with a lot of over-the-top moments that give the actors plenty of opportunities to ham it up. The One-Way Ward has its goofy, over-the-top elements as well, but they’re mixed with more grounded, emotional moments that give Tremethick the chance to show great range.
Figuring out the structure of an anthology can be complicated, and watching this movie had me thinking about the struggle to balance things. The One-Way Ward is so much more interesting than A Watcher by the Dead, it made me wonder if it should have been the first segment (aside from the wrap-around), as it would have done a better job of drawing me in right away than A Watcher by the Dead did. Or is it better that the second segment is a step up from the first, rather than the second being a step down?
We don’t have long to ponder that question, because it’s time for the next segment – and Mancher, Charlotte, and Mayley as joined in Graves’ chamber by a Doctor Hawyer (Nick Ford) just in time to hear a story that involves him and Mayley. A Diagnosis of Death.
This one sees Mayley and Hawyer digging into the research left behind by a professor who has been missing for years. His specialty was depression, insanity, and predicting death. The people who have been subjected to his experiments report seeing a man standing at the foot of their beds at night, pointing at them, indicating they’ll be dying soon. And then they die of sheer terror that’s so intense, their brains explode from inside.
It seems the professor created a machine to force depression out of a patient’s mind through color and music, which leads to a very unexpected sequence involving a rockabilly band. As mentioned, In the Grip of Terror has a tendency to be heightened and to go over the top, and A Diagnosis of Death is where it really goes off the rails into complete madness. Which is fitting, given the subject of the segment.
Even though some of this was too off-the-wall for me and I felt the pacing dragged at times, I did find In the Grip of Terror to be an entertaining movie, largely because the filmmakers were able to capture the look and feel of the movies that were released during the Amicus glory days. They didn’t just make a modern horror movie and slap the Amicus name on it. They did their best to resurrect Amicus as viewers know and love it. I appreciate that, and look forward to seeing where they’ll take Amicus from here.
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