Jennie Linden is having recurring nightmares about her insane mother, a woman currently committed to an asylum after stabbing to death Linden’s father on the girl’s birthday several years ago.  Now Linden is seeing what appears to be the woman out and about and, on a particular night, walking around the family mansion.  Linden follows the ghostly woman to a bedroom, where she finds mum lying on the bed with a knife in her chest, a birthday cake with lit candles close by.  The young woman doesn’t blow out the candles or even use that knife to cut the cake, which just seems rude after all the trouble somebody has gone through.

This is in Hammer’s Nightmare from 1964, yet another black-and-white psychological horror picture trying to channel some of the magic of Psycho.  There were a lot of movies like this at the time and, like those, this has a twist in the middle, though nothing as shocking as that other film’s shower scene is for the uninitiated. 

I should preface the rest of this essay with a spoiler alert, except you have doubtlessly seen one or more movies like this, and it is reeeally easy to guess that midpoint twist.  Nor is a second twist at the end unprecedented, yet I won’t go anywhere near revealing that.

What changes the direction of the picture is when it is revealed Linden’s mother is still safely in the sanitarium, and that there are others who are orchestrating this attempt at manipulating the girl.  That Moira Redmond, as a nurse appointed to monitor Linden, is involved is to be expected.  That she is in cahoots with the devious David Knight, with whom Linden is enamored, is something else that isn’t a surprise. 

But what is startling is Knight’s wife, Clytie Jessop, has been playing the role of Linden’s mother and the girl ends up stabbing her to death on her birthday.  I wonder how Knight’s and Redmond’s plan would have gone if Linden hadn’t stabbed Jessop, as that seems like an unlikely element on which to hinge your plot.  Also, I believe you get to make a wish when you stab somebody on your birthday, so I wonder what Linden wished for.

So, Linden is sent off to the asylum, but it doesn’t seem she was bunked together with her mother, which seems like a missed opportunity.  What is interesting is we’re not even halfway through the runtime and Linden, who was presented as the lead, is literally out of the picture.  She doesn’t return, which is a bit like Janet Leigh in Psycho, though I’m rather glad we don’t see any more of Leigh after she died. Linden on the other hand, will still be alive, though absent, at the end credits.

Redmond and Knight proceed to set up house in the mansion, though the place bothers her conscience.  The rest of the movie largely has Redmond seeing things, whether real or imagined.  It might be a good idea if she stopped having loud arguments with Knight in front of the household help, at least when the topic is their duplicity.

As for the technical aspects, the photography effectively suggests a gothic ghost story.  The cast is solid, especially Brenda Bruce as the schoolmistress who accompanies Linden home from school. 

Alas, Linden turns in the least convincing performance in Nighmare, though it isn’t necessarily a bad one.  Really, it isn’t a role with much meat on the bone, so I suspect some of the bizarre traits the film gives her are presumably to give her more depth.  She has a very creepy doll with legs about four times as long as its torso.  I wasn’t surprised when Redmond eventually punches that doll, though I wondered if one day a welfare worker would be asking her to show on another doll where she hurt Linden’s doll.  Another affectation is Linden is always listening to an all-Dixieland station, and I can’t imagine that was ever a going concern, even in the UK.  Even though she stabs a woman to death, I was still hedging my bets as to whether Linden was crazy.  But Dixieland?  That’s when I knew she was insane.

Dir: Freddie Francis

Starring David Knight, Moira Redmond, Jennie Linden, Brenda Bruce

Watched as part of the Powerhouse/Indicator UK (region B) blu-ray box set Hammer Volume Six: Night Shadows