HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*

I include spoilers to give the movie its due: not having seen it in thirty or more years, I didn't twig to the Big Reveal at the end. I don't really think the deduction is all that hard to work out, though, 

The movie opens with its most famous bizarre crime: a young woman receives gimmicked binoculars in the mail, and when she first uses them, they kill her. This is one of several strange murders that have plagued London for weeks, though we never hear about the earlier ones. Scotland Yard detective Graham (Geoffrey Keen) finds himself under attack by journalists, particularly Edmond Bancroft (Michael Gough), a crime writer with a penchant for writing about weird murders. In fact, he scorns the real-life "Black Museum" of Scotland Yard, having built his own private museum of crime-curiosities (including, oddly enough, a 1950s idea of a mainframe computer). He explains his penchant to his work-assistant Rick, a young man with a girlfriend, Angela, who's perhaps a little too nosy about Bancroft's activities.

Bancroft's weird habits make it pretty evident that he's involved in the crimes somehow, and for a time, despite his age, it seems possible that he's committing the murders while wearing a fright-mask, But no, it turns out that he's placed Rick under hypnotic control and is using him as a catspaw. Both "monsters" die when Rick leaps from a great height and lands on Bancroft, which image probably reinforces the opinions of those who read the older man/younger man dynamic as homosexual.

Though producer Herman Cohen claimed he got the idea for the film by reading about the real Black Museum, I think he was probably more inspired by the success of the 1953 horror-film HOUSE OF WAX. But Cohen, co-writer Aben Kandel and director Arthur Crabtree do a mediocre job with these slightly sleazy horrors. One character talks about "the poetry of murder" in a light-hearted manner, but poetry was entirely absent from the docents of this particular museum.