I recently finished Peter Hutchings' book on Terence Fisher, where the author studies the work of the British filmmaker, and avoids forcing him into the boundaries of the auteur theory, concentrating on his skills for delivering effective motion pictures. Unfortunately he did not pay too much attention to this funny title in Fisher's filmography, which has suffered from quick, unfair evaluation probably based on the presence of singer Pat Boone as the American leading man who is trapped in the big, dark, old house of his British girlfriend's family. Surprisingly this is a far better movie than what I had read about, if admittedly of the "silly" almost infantile kind of comedy, and Boone proves to be a more than adequate comic actor. I even had a big (silly) laugh when Boone so unexpectedly started to sing the title song, which is more a cultural joke than the obligatory Boone song in all his movies. Conceived as part of a double bill with Don Sharp's horror drama "Witchcraft", there is nothing original about the plot of "The Horror of It All". At first it resembles Richard Matheson's adaptation of "The Fall of the House of Usher", but it is just the beginning: the screenplay by Ray Russell also takes elements from other horror films and comedies, from "Frankenstein" and "The Old Dark House", to Oscar Wilde's "The Canterville Ghost", frequently making little jokes about Boone's nationality. All the members of the cast seem to enjoy what they are doing, especially Andrée Melly as the resident vamp lady and Jack Bligh as Uncle Percy, an inventor completely out of his time... in reverse. Fisher was an efficient director and here he proves it once again, handling everything in an adequate manner and never pretending he was making anything grand. If as Terence Fisher you take it for what it is, "The Horror of It All" works just fine.
