MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*
Many years ago, I read Robert Bloch's short story "The Skull of the Marquis de Sade," in which a collector of rare objects gets hold of said skeletal remnant. It was a good, rousing story, even though I recognized that its premise-- that the skull was haunted by the Marquis' evil spirit, due to his having been a demon-worshipping sorcerer-- was nonsense. The prose story worked because so much of it took place within the head of the protagonist, slowly becoming aware of his curio's threat.
There are many good short stories that can be fruitfully expanded into feature-length movies, but "Skull" was not one of them. The studio Amicus had some luck with anthology movies, and I suspect that SKULL might have started out with someone tagging the Bloch story for anthology-adaptation. But someone else decided that it could be expanded into the feature-film and even hired Bloch to turn his tale into a screenplay, with input from Amicus producer Milton Subotsky.
But the story "Skull" has nothing to it beyond another iteration of "He meddled with forbidden things," and if you take away the intensity of the protagonist's growing fear of the growing menace, what you have is a talky story about art collectors putzing around looking for objets d'art, and sometimes dealing with skeevy, illicit dealers. Collector Maitland (Peter Cushing) has no particular reason for collecting occult objects; he does so just because the story says that he does so. The script might have worked had the Skull manipulated Maitland into becoming a pitiless murderer, anxious to protect his "precious." But in one of the few moments where Maitland commits murder-- killing an old friend (Christopher Lee) -- director Freddie Francis seems to underplay the scene, robbing it of any emotional intensity.
SKULL's only good scene appears halfway through the film. For some reason the Skull, apparently possessed of its late owner's malevolent intelligence, puts Maitland through a nightmare in which he's arrested by policemen and taken before a judge who forces the collector to play a game of Russian roulette. But this one scene is not enough to pull THE SKULL out of its slough of despond.
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