Sueur froide dans la nuit

While recovering from a nervous breakdown, Peggy Heller (Judy Geeson) is stalked and attacked by a one-armed man. Not surprisingly, due to Peggy's mental state, no one believes her.

After moving back in with her husband at a boy's school, Peggy meets the headmaster (Peter Cushing), who happens to have a very familiar disability! It's not long before Peggy is attacked again.

FEAR IN THE NIGHT is a wicked little mystery-thriller from Hammer Studios that keeps the viewer guessing. Ms. Geeson is believable in her tormented role. Cushing is brilliant as usual. Joan Collins co-stars in one of the best roles she's ever played!...

A great story and cast! A suspenseful horror-thriller! Worth watching if you like the classics! The casting in this movie is wonderful - everyone was great in this movie. Judy Geeson plays Peggy Heller so wonderfully... I felt so sorry for her. Ralph Bates plays Robert Heller a man who seemly is in-love with his young wife Peggy. Joan Collins plays Molly Carmichael - snooty rich woman. Peter Cushing is The Headmaster Michael Carmichael - a strange gentleman.

The movie does build an amount of suspense and it does have it's thrilling moments. It makes a wonderful late-at-night film. Not overly scary but definitely suspenseful and thrilling!

8.5/10

"Fear in the Night" is a somewhat contrived and lesser Hammer picture from 1972 that somehow still manages to work up a fair amount of suspense and one or two chilling moments. The film concerns young Peggy Heller (excellently portrayed by Judy Geeson), who, after suffering a nervous breakdown, moves with her new teacher husband to a large, private boys' school on 1,200 acres of English countryside. Poor Peggy is soon made the victim of a string of attacks by a stalker with a prosthetic hand, and her lot is hardly made more comfortable by the presence of the very strange headmaster (Peter Cushing) or his haughty young wife (Joan Collins). The film builds to a surprise ending of sorts that probably won't surprise many, especially those viewers who have already seen a certain classic Vincent Price horror movie from 1958. Still, the film does offer some compensations, including very fine performances by the actors just mentioned, as well as by Ralph Bates, playing Peggy's husband. Viewers will appreciate just how fine the acting is, perhaps, after a second viewing, with a greater knowledge of all the characters' secret motivations. The film also offers some beautiful scenery, both in terms of the autumnal Hertfordshire countryside AND Ms. Collins herself. Thirty-nine years old here, and nine years prior to incarnating TV's ultimate bitch on wheels, Alexis Carrington Colby Dexter, etc. on "Dynasty," she really is quite gorgeous to look at. (Sadly, she and Cushing, though playing man and wife, share no screen time whatsoever in this picture.) But the film belongs to Geeson, who appears in every single scene (with one major exception). Just five years after her "To Sir, With Love" debut, she turns in a very credible and ingratiating performance. Indeed, it is the sterling acting by all four principals that elevates this rather pedestrian thriller into something quite admirable indeed.

Sangster's third and final film as director forsakes the Gothic trappings of the first two for the psycho-thrillers which Hammer occasionally dabbled in (inspired by LES DIABOLIQUES [1954] and kick-started by the Sangster-penned TASTE OF FEAR [1961]).

As such, it's a pretty solid entry in the genre: well-made (the last half-hour being especially tense), stylish (making subtle use of elliptical editing, careful not to go overboard as was the case with STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING [1972]) and sporting a compact but most able cast - Judy Geeson (her inherent vulnerability is suited to this type of frightened lady role), Joan Collins (going through a horror/thriller phase at the time and who's, of course, alluringly bitchy), Ralph Bates (it took me some time to accept him in a modern setting since he's so comfortably placed in the Gothic world of his other stuff for Hammer, but there's no denying that he does quite well by his role here!) and Peter Cushing (superlative as always, he has a field day with an ambiguous characterization); incidentally, Cushing and Collins must be one of the most incongruous husband-and-wife pairings in film history!

As one can gather from the above, I liked the film quite a bit and, in fact, pondered for a while the notion of awarding it a *** rating but was, ultimately, deterred from doing so by a couple of flaws: the 'ingenious' plot is, actually, fairly predictable (but, if anything, it's even more fun to be able to anticipate the many twists involved!); however, this also means that one has to labor through a first half that is both slow and repetitive!! I do feel that it's underrated in the Hammer canon: Leonard Maltin dismisses it, for instance, but Leslie Halliwell - not usually one to bother much with the company's latter-day output - is surprisingly complimentary in his review.

While FEAR IN THE NIGHT more or less adheres to Hammer's formula for this type of film - an innocent girl having a brush with murder and madness in remote surroundings - it also draws parallels to the contemporary giallos, especially with its device of a black-gloved stalker. Incidentally, of Hammer's 10 modern suspensers, I've only got two more to catch up with - MANIAC (1963) and CRESCENDO (1970).

The Audio Commentary here proves disappointing - not because it isn't informative but, rather, due to the fact that we get an awful lot of repetition of Sangster's anecdotes from his tracks for THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN (1970) and LUST FOR A VAMPIRE (1971); to be fair to him, the fault lies more with moderator Marcus Hearn - who should have come up with a fresher set of questions, as it were. Then again, I'd have expected more insight into the actual construction of the script (a psycho thriller being, fundamentally, more intricate than a Gothic horror) - but it's safe to assume that, after all these years, Sangster recalls precious little about this aspect...although he does mention that he had pitched the script to the company as early as 1963, and that it was originally intended to be set on a boat! The discussion also touches upon Hammer's other suspensers: apart from citing TASTE OF FEAR and THE NANNY (1965) as his favorite films, Sangster mentions that Orson Welles turned up unannounced one day on the set of MANIAC; in connection with the film under review - which, incidentally, brought Sangster's fortuitous association with Hammer to a close - he acknowledges the fact that Peter Cushing was basically serving the same function (i.e. a red herring) that Christopher Lee did in TASTE OF FEAR.

Pretty, neurotic newlywed Peggy (Judy Geeson) survives an attack by a leather-gloved, one-armed assailant the day before she is due to leave London to live with her husband Robert (Ralph Bates) who teaches at a posh boys school in the country owned by sinister headmaster Michael Carmichael (Peter Cushing) and his bitchy young wife (the lovely Joan Collins).

Once there, though, poor Peggy soon realises that, even though she is now miles from the city, she still isn't safe: the one-armed maniac appears to have followed her to her new home...

It shouldn't take seasoned fans of psychological thrillers very long to suss that the mysterious goings on in Hammer's Fear In the Night are intended to turn the protagonist completely insane, drive her to murder, or both. But although the film's plot doesn't earn many points for originality, being heavily reminiscent of the French thriller Les Diaboliques, director Jimmy Sangster delivers enough startling imagery (Cushing's shattered glasses; a gloved prosthetic arm) and well-handled scenes of suspense to ensure that the film is certainly never dull: from its wonderful opening credits sequence, in which the camera pans across the school to eventually reveal the legs of a man hanging from a tree, to its tense denouement, Fear in the Night is a solid slice of macabre entertainment.