Director: Freddie Francis
Writer: Jimmy Sangster
Stars: David Knight, Moira Redmond, Jennie Linden
Run Time: 1 Hour, 23 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/2HbnIFr
Synopsis
Janet’s having a nightmare as the credits pop up. She’s walking down a dark hallway and approaching a locked door. She slides open the bolt and opens the door. Inside, she finds her mother, who laughs when the door traps her inside. “We’re both mad!” screams the other woman. Janet wakes up screaming.
Janet lives in a boarding school, and she desperately wants her guardian, Mr. Baxter, a lawyer, to come take her away. The school headmistress wants her to go home as well. The driver comes to pick her up, and she sees someplace she wants to visit on the road on the way home, but the driver refuses to stop for it.
Mary asks Mrs. Gibbs about Janet’s mother. She went insane, and she’s in the asylum they passed on the road. When Janet was little, she walked in and found her mother stabbing her father to death. Janet had a nervous breakdown, and then went to live with Mr. Baxter. Janet constantly worries that she might be insane too.
Janet dreams that there was a woman in her room that night. Mary, the school’s headmistress, gives her some advice, but Mary has to go home in the morning.
Mary leaves, and Janet is left alone with Mrs. Gibbs and Grace. That night, a strange woman with a scar on her face wanders into Janet’s room, and Janet follows her. She finds the woman stabbed on a bed with a birthday cake nearby. The doctor wants to put Janet in an asylum, but Mr. Baxter doesn’t think it’s that bad. Yet.
Baxter assures Janet that she’s not going to be locked up. That night, Janet locks her bedroom door, but when she hears a noise, she opens it. She follows the shadow down the hall, just like the previous night. She finds the woman dead again.
She sees the woman again, and after a bunch of screaming, breaks a mirror and cuts her own wrists. Baxter still doesn’t think she needs the asylum. He throws her a birthday party, and introduces his new wife, Helen. It’s the woman with the scarred face. Janet stabs her repeatedly.
The medics carry out Helen’s dead body. Then they carry out Janet, on her way to the asylum. We see the scarred woman in the window again, and this time she pulls her face off. It’s Grace in a mask!
Grace and Baxter talk about their three months of planning for Janet to kill Baxter’s wife, Helen. It worked beautifully. Soon, Grace starts finding discrepancies and lies in Baxter’s behavior. Baxter wants to live in Janet’s house, but Grace is dead set against it. She accuses him of having another woman, and they slap each other.
That night, Grace sees the woman walking the halls. She screams that she’s not going to fall for that trick. She calls the sanitarium and learns that Janet escaped three days ago and is considered dangerous. Now Grace is worried.
An unseen woman leaves a huge knife in Grace’s room that night. She starts following the woman regularly, but can never find her. She fights some more with Baxter, and she stabs him repeatedly.
Grace goes to call the police, and she’s stopped by Mary the teacher, along with Mrs. Gibbs and John the chauffeur. Grace insists that Janet is the killer, but when they call the asylum, Janet’s been there all along and doing very well. The three of them decided to get revenge on Grace and Baxter for what they did to Janet. Finally, they call the police to come and arrest Grace.
Commentary
There’s too much screaming in this film, and for a horror film, that’s saying something. It got really annoying.
The music here is very bland and generic. The old house is very bland and generic. The actors are very bland and generic. The cinematography is b;and and boring. The plot is, well, you get the idea.
It seems like half the horror films of the 60s and 70s were about trying to get some nervous person locked up for going insane. Psychiatry, in the popular mindset, was a fairly recent thing, and I suppose a lot of people really feared it.