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Royds wants to buy a property that has been empty for twenty years and has a sinister past. He insists on spending the night in the wedding chamber. He dies from fright during an apparently solitary night-time vigil. It transpires that he was the original owner of the house who murdered his wife twenty years previously.

Invited to dine at the home of a boy he's schooling, tutor Harker Brayton (John Fraser) is given a full introduction to his host Dr. Druring's (Andre Morell) unusual hobby as an amateur zoologist. He's absolutely smitten with the slithering species, keeping numerous examples both poisonous and benign in his private "snakery." At the dinner table, another visitor relates a story raising an interesting question: we know a man can "charm" a snake, but can a snake hypnotize a man? That matter takes on an unpleasant, unexpected urgency once young Mr. Brayton retires to his guest room for the night. A slow-burning thriller with a most effective climax and big parting twist, this featurette is a companion piece to THE RETURN, director Sture Rydman's other adaptation of a macabre Victorian-era story by Ambrose Bierce. - Dennis Harvey