I Just Saw

Tonight at my local arts centre I saw The Skull, a 1965 British film starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, as part of its classic horror nights. Based on a short story called “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade” by Robert Bloch, it begins with a 19th-century grave robber who brings the titular skull home to perform diabolism with it when he’s interrupted by his mistress.

We then cut to the present day as Lee and Cushing are bidding on occult objects at an auction overseen by Michael Gough. (Best known to wider audiences as Alfred in Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher’s Batman films.) Later that night, Cushing is visited by a pedlar (Patrick Wymark, who played Oliver Cromwell in Blood on Satan’s Claw) who offers him the skull for £1000, but seems curiously eager to be rid of it…

This is an odd one. My local arts centre is in a deconsecrated church so the atmosphere was right, although my experience was a little affected by sitting right up against the venue’s speaker system. The film is fun, has some effective moments, and is elevated by the presence of old pros Cushing and Lee.

The plot is fairly flimsy, constructed out of scenes that are vague and illusory. The horror nights host described it as like a silent movie, but that feels like a generous interpretation. It’s more just light on story, and therefore reliant on dream sequences, flashbacks, and “atmospheric” material.

The historical scenes and all of the stuff about the Marquis de Sade, a real French writer from whose name the term “sadism” is derived, is really just so much window dressing. It is perhaps telling that the film is based on a short story. Its simplistic title gives the game away: the plot is really just “an evil skull makes people do bad things”.

The title was a shortened version of Bloch’s original, “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade”, truncated because de Sade’s descendants threatened to sue. Defending the name of a man whose sexual abuses are so well-storied, partly by himself, was perhaps ill-advised. But it’s a moot point anyway since the de Sade of this story has so little relation to real history that he might as well be called Gabriel Martin.

Some beats in the narrative don’t make much sense, like when a character dies in a noisy and destructive way that would have been heard by the other residents of their house. The third act is a lot of Cushing just wandering between two or three rooms of his house being menaced by the skull.

On the upside, some of this material is compelling in isolated sequences. A scene where Cushing is brought to a strange house and forced into a red room with constricting walls is haunting and surreal, not to mention reminiscent of the trash compactor scene in another of his films that you might have heard of, Star Wars. 

Although the skull isn’t clearly defined as an antagonist, moments where it floats towards the camera can raise a tingle. The Skull isn’t a classic; it is, however, enjoyable if you’re a fan of Cushing, Lee, and ‘60s occult horror.