Tochter der Finsternis

For a film of absolutely no reputation, with zero out of four in Halliwell's, directed by a man regarded with as much respect as Ed Wood, this Gothic psychodrama is really rather good. I'm not suggesting that it's in any way a classic - the acting , if I may say so under IMDb guidelines, is indifferent, the pacing in the second half is less than exciting - but as far as scope, subject matter and ambition are concerned, there are few low-budget British films to match it. Imagine a more modestly skilled admirer trying to make a B-movie Powell and Pressburger film replacing genius with added hysteria, then you've some idea of this amazing oddity.

The film opens at a febrile pitch, and barely relents. The opening credits, accompanied by a highly strung score, features Gothic tableaux that give a grotesque precis of the subsequent story - distorted, sharp-edged follies with witchlike fingers, ancient houses, Leroux-like organs, frenzied screams, rabid religious imagery.

The action proper begins in a church, the departing congregation unaccountably demanding the removal from the village of a young woman, Emmie, who remains behind praying. The irrational hatred in their demands is shocking - all we can glean is the supposed effect on men. Two spinster matrons demand her exile from a priest who seems neurotically ragged, probably because of his lust for the girl, who is meanwhile playing a dismally murmuring lament on the organ, having some sort of psychosomatic fit. This is a sequence of remarkable Franju-like beauty, Siobhan MacKenna's fragile, quivering mask evoking great sorrow and distress.

The picture of gentle innocence, it's difficult to see what danger anyone sees in Emmie, but so loaded have been both the accusations and the relentless style, that we shudder when she bends down to talk with a little, shaking girl, who has been warned off by her mother. When Emmie offers her flowers, there is an ominous FRANKENSTEINish (James Whale) frisson, but her mother, terrified, reefs her away, and brings her into a shop. A circus has set up tent nearby, and one of its members, a boxer Dan, has watched this scene, kicks the shop's door down, and asks Emmie to watch him fight tonight. She coyly agrees.

Besotted with lust, Dan turns what is supposed to be a fixed match into a farrago to impress Emmie. They later enjoy themselves throughout the fair, and we see Emmie happy for the first time. The pair venture to a quiet space just outside the fairground. Dan's intentions are clear, but when Emmie professes innocence, he turns nasty. In the next shot we see a petrified Emmie running through the fair, followed by Dan, whose eye has received a violent wound.

The priest succumbs to the public pressure, and sends Emmie to stay in England with a wealthy landowner, Mr. Tallent. She fits in well enough, but one daughter, Bess, views Emmie with an hostility even she can't explain, although intensified by the effect a much more brazen Emmie seems to have on the men folk. One day, Dan's circus comes into town, and Dan reimposes himself on Emmie. We see his injury, a loathsome scratch gashing his eye. He determines to avenge himself on Emmie, and chases her to an isolated barn. Later Emmie is found by her employer running home dazed. The next morning Dan is found dead. (The film isn't even halfway there by this stage!)

DARKNESS is considered notable as the first in-depth treatment of a female serial-killer, but it is much more than that. On an abstract level, Emmie is an embodiment of the Id, the unconscious desires that, if acted on, could result in the destruction of civilised society. This nearly happens as the women intuit, and Emmie is a remarkably subversive presence, linked to the carnivalesque, fairground atmosphere, all the more powerful in that she doesn't seem to understand her own power.

In the conservative societies she disturbs, sex is linked to fertility, reproduction, continuity and the land - Emmie offers a destructive opposite, all-consuming, disruptive and fatal. This allegory is heightened by conscience, the only bind on the Unconscious, here an almost supernatural Alsation that preys on Emmie (a pun on prey and pray pervades the film).

The resolution of this problem might seem reactionary, if it wasn't for the fact that Emmie is so sympathetically portrayed, and her malady is never explained away, its inexplicability making it all the more disturbing; while her enemies are repulsive, intolerant, in both societies becoming a lynch mob.

The film's abstract elements are matched by very real traumas - that of a parentless (she is a daughter of darkness; she calls the very disturbed priest Father, he calls her child) young girl, hounded and lonely in strange lands; class issues (the demonisation of a working class girl by her aristocratic employers), as well as being a returning of the Irish repressed on a complacent, historically amnesiac England (and a new Ireland that is beginning to repeat its repressions).

The portrayal of Emmie's disturbed mind is given a Romantic/Gothic framework (her only peace is facing the ocean on a lonely crag) that is very reminiscent of the Archers. Lance Comfort may not be a 'good' director in the conventional sense, but his seeming fausses pas contribute to the film's disorientating effect. He even pulls off the old heroine trapped by shadow of barred staircase shot with a vivid tangibility not even the great noir directors could quite manage. He follows this with that noir scene's seeming antithesis, a sun-dappled, pastoral idyll, site perhapse of Emmie's rebirth, except for one, very natural shadow, of a gate, with bars. Comfort's use of Gothic and animal imagery as well as some chilling ghost-story effects (see Emmie run away from Dan to the barn, or the whole organ playing sequence), are brilliantly successful.

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.

Daughter of Darkness is a strange noir with gothic touches starring Anne Crawford, Maxwell Reed, Siobhan McKenna, Honor Blackman, and Barry Morse.

McKenna is Emmy, a pretty young Irish girl who seems sweet and shy. Evidently she gives off a scary vibe. While men flock to her, women hate her and ask the priest for whom she works to get rid of her.

A fair comes to town and one of the performers (Reed) is attracted to Emmy. She flirts but then rejects him. One night she scars his face with her fingernails.

At this point, the priest sends her to work on a family farm. When the fair hits that location, Reed comes after her again. The next day he's found dead. More murders follow.

We don't really know if Emily has a problem where she wants affection (sex) and becomes terrified, or if she's Circe leading men to their doom. I tend to think she's the latter.

Good film and a suspenseful one, especially at the end, when you know what's going to happen.

A note here on Barry Morse, who plays Anne Crawford's husband. He is known to us boomers anyway as the feared Lt. Gerard from the tv show The Fugitive. Seeing him so young and with an accent- you wouldn't know it's the same person. Obviously quite talented.

This is a little known movie but one undeserving of the obscurity into which it has fallen ,throwing,as it does , a sharp light on the narrow mindedness and pettiness of small ,enclosed and isolated communities .The opening sequence is especially gripping and commands attention from the word go.It takes place in a church in a small ,backwater Irish community where the local women break off from their gossip to eye with undisguised loathing a younger woman ,Emily Beaudine (Siobahn Mckenna).She has the reputation of being a siren ,a temptress able to turn the heads of the men of the village .In a scene between herself and the local priest it is hinted strongly that he too feels an attraction towards Emily .To add to the miasma of gloom and oppression ,she is a talented organist but one with a fondness for the tonally darker and more plangent aspects of the instrument's tonal pallete . She is isolated within her community and young girl's warned not to associate with her .When a fair visits the village she receives the unwanted attention of Dan ,a boxer employed by the fir ,and she wounds him in self defence .She is sent away to england where she ingratiates herself with the Talent family ,until the return of Dan and the suspicion of the eldest Talent sister Beth precipitates the final tragedy

Lance Comfort directs with fine use of light and shade and good use of some neat monochrome photography .The script leaves open the issue of Emily's true nature giving a pleasing ambiguity to proceedings and the fine ,intense performance of Siobahn Mckenna makes her relatively sparse engagement with the movies a matter to be regretted

This is no masterpiece but it is a subtle ,ambiguous picture that should be better known

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.