Tochter der Finsternis

Siobhan McKenna is the lead in this extraordinary film and yet the IMDB does not give her top billing. I wonder if they could rectify this. The last film I saw was directed by Lance Comfort and I was able to see another of his films. It is truly terrifying because it shows how not so long ago, and even now, how men want to possess a woman's body simply for sexual gratification and are allowed to do so. Ireland and the UK are presented as having a lynch mob mentality towards any woman who has a naturally strong sexuality to be hunted down for it, and left literally to be mauled by a dog. The girl Emmie played beautifully by the fine actress Siobhan McKenna is the young woman and because she is considered sexually dangerous ( mainly by conformist and possibly sexually repressed women ) she is driven out of Ireland to England. Here the pattern begins again, and her own internalised fear that she is ' evil ' causes her to repulse and kill the seducer who has followed her and even the men she either likes or desires. Again the women in this scenario sense her ' wickedness ' and one of them takes a final and horrifying revenge from a church which Lance Comfort maybe hinting is a place worthy of causing sexual repression and non-conformity. My one criticism is that possibly because of the censors the supposed evil is given too strong a Gothic feel and as much as I like the genre it seems at the same time to be undermining the premise that all this does not come from the young woman, but the societies in which she has been thrown into by life itself. The acting is good and as in a previous review of a Lance Comfort film accentuate how excellent he could be. An uncomfortable film for some, but it is unique in portraying ( for 1948 ) how destructive men's desires can be when unleased from their choirboy clothes. Literally so in this forgotten and fine film.

The story sees an Irish girl Emmie (Siobhan McKenna) driven from her community and relocated with a farm family in England. Other women can sense evil around her yet she seems innocent to the viewer. However, by the end of the film, it's pretty clear that Emmie is bad news as the body count increases! Throughout the film, Bess (Anne Crawford) senses that there is something wrong about the girl. She finally fires her to which the response is "You'll be sorry". You just know that there is going to be a repercussion .... and there is.....

Siobhan McKenna is creepy in the lead role - she looks weird. The English family that she stays with is pretty ghastly with their extremely posh accents and enthusiasm for everything (among the guilty for inappropriate posh dialect is Honor Blackman) yet this doesn't distract from the story. It's a good film with some genuinely creepy scenes.

The servant girl most of the women hate but all the men cannot resist is neither especially pretty or flirtatious...she does not even wear provocative clothes and the film never really explains why she is supposedly so evil. Based on her interactions with men in the movie, it seems like each man tried to rape her and thus they got what they deserved. I was expecting she was a vampire/Dracula's daughter but no such thing. I felt sorry for her. Having said that, the movie was quite suspenseful and well photographed...it just made little sense without any explanation of her "evil" and why men were drawn to her.

This is quite an effectively creepy crime drama - all centring around "Emmie" (Siobhan McKenna). She arrives from Ireland at the farm owned by the "Tallent" family where she soon gains a reputation as a bit of a flirt, an instant success with the local men but less so with the ladies - especially the suspicious "Bess" (Anne Crawford). It's a this point that the roguish boxer "Dan" (Maxwell Reed) appears on the scene. Now he knows a thing or two about "Emmie" and so when he is found face down in a ditch, the fingers of suspicion all point at their newcomer. Did she do it, though? What is her mysterious secret? The story is tensely directed by Lance Comfort with two strong performances from McKenna and Crawford that go some way to demonstrating the position of women in society at the time, and of the attitudes of their menfolk. The cinematography makes good use of light and shade techniques to enhance the sense of menace that does, gradually, accrue as the story heads towards it's quite exciting denouement, too. Unlike many films of this genre, it thrives as much on what we don't know as what we do; there are gaps - like a jigsaw with missing pieces, and that adds nicely to this short but sweet intrigue. Maxwell Reed adds little, but Liam Redmond and Barry Morse prop up well from a familiar-looking supporting cast and present us with a surprisingly good watch.

Daughter of Darkness is directed by Lance Comfort and adapted to screenplay by Max Catto from his own play titled They Walk Alone. It stars Anne Crawford, Maxwell Reed, Siobhan McKenna, George Thorpe, Barry Morse, Liam Redmond, Cyril Smith and Honor Blackman. Music is by Clifton Parker and cinematography by Stanley Pavey.

Emmie Beaudine (McKenna) isn't liked by the women folk of the Irish village community where she lives. There's something about her that riles them, frightens them even. So when the women of the village round up on her keeper, the priest, she is sent off to live on a farm in a North Yorkshire county of England. Which is timely as she has had an altercation with one of the men from a travelling fair. Once at the "Tallent" family farm, Emmie settles in well and seems genuinely happy, but still some of the women folk in the vicinity view her with suspicion, and when a face from Emmie's past shows up, it's the catalyst for doom and desperation.

It's an odd chiller of a movie, something of an acquired taste, it's hard to pigeonhole. Never overtly horror, noir or otherwise, it's not hard to see why some specialist genre fans have found it a disappointment. Yet if you can buy into Comfort and Catto's ethereal world there's a picture of great rewards here, a complex character study mingling with asides on sexual empowerment, even a story with supernatural leanings, the edges of which are deliberately shaded in grey. And of course there's the crime factor bulging at the seams, Emmie Beaudine a cold murderess, her rhyme and reason for being so repulsed by male sexual contact is again deliberately left floating in an emotionally distorted purgatory.

Nicely photographed in black and white, the visual atmosphere is very tight to the murky themes swirling around the plot. There's also a number of memorable scenes, the hurly burly of the carnival sequences, the hauntingly troubling playing of an organ, and some super scenes featuring Thorn the Alsatian dog, a real life war hero (look him up, amazing animal) who is also very much a key character here. Strong acting performances around McKenna are a bonus (including the beautiful Blackman in her first credited role), but it is the Northern Irish actress who spellbindingly holds court, with much of her visual acting stunning in its execution.

Love it or hate it, you wont be able to ignore it. 9/10