‘Taste of Fear’ or — A Delicious Delight?
No spoilers.
It’s staggering just how influential Henri-Georges Clouzot’s ‘Les Diaboliques’ (1955) has been on cinema impacting everyone from William Castle, Mario Bava, Alfred Hitchcock and countless others. It seemed as though Clouzot had unlocked a story-telling secret — that of providing scenes of terror, impossible to guess plot twists and all without relying on the supernatural as an easy explanation. Can you imagine Gialli or the films of De Palma without Clouzot’s movie?
Hammer’s ‘Taste of Fear’ (1961) functions very much as a variation on Clouzot’s thriller, even down to the creepy swimming pool and a drowned corpse. It also has an international, modern feel opening outside a stylish continental airport before locating to a villa on the French Riviera and we quickly realise we are a million miles away from Hammer’s Gothic past. Indeed, made two years before Mario Bava’s ‘The Girl Who Knew Too Much’ (1963) I did find myself contemplating a parallel universe whilst watching ‘Taste of Fear’ where it was Britain that kicked off the Giallo boom. Imagine what that would’ve been like. But I digress.
‘Taste of Fear’ also has connections to ‘The Innocents’ (1961) and ‘The Haunting’ (1963) where we encounter a young woman of fragile mind and jangly emotions who seems to be being driven, or driving herself, out of her mind. This young woman is Penny who has returned to her father’s house after the death of her closest friend. Penny hasn’t seen her father in ten years although after being informed by her stepmother that her father is away on unspecified business Penny begins to suspect that her father might be dead, something which seems to not just be in her imagination when his dead body keeps unexpectedly popping up at most inconvenient, and spooky, times.
And that’s all I’m going to say about the plot because this is one of those movies where the pleasure is in knowing that something IS not what it seems, that there is a big twist coming but, for your life, you can’t figure out exactly what the hell it is. The initial explanations to it all are madness or the supernatural but, as I said earlier, those are easy cop-outs that we don’t deal in anymore in the modern 1960s so it can’t be that.
The other main ingredient that pushes ‘Taste of Fear’ almost into proto-Giallo territory is the sense of style with director Seth Holt letting events unfold at a perfect pace through a series of nicely composed images and camera-moves: the villa’s colonnades provide an almost De Chirico sense of Spartan desolation and Douglas Slocombe’s black and white cinematography is gorgeous. Then there’s the set-pieces, all revolving around seemingly mundane objects — a freezer, a piano, a swimming pool — but, much like how Kubrick made the Overlook hotel into a place of ‘terror of enlarged domesticity’, Holt pulls off a similar trick here where everything seems threatening. Combine all this with a serious clever and intelligent score by Clifton Parker and you’ve got some scenes of real power, dread and fear. Listen to the soundtrack during the ‘Night of The Hunter’-esque exploration of the swimming pool and the masterful job Parker does with the music.
But the real trick of ‘Taste of Fear’ is the twist and this one is a stunner. All I’m going to say is that, at some point in the movie, a death occurs and that it might be the best placed, most surprising murder I’ve seen in a film. It not only turns the entire movie on its head, and making attempting to figure out the plot even more baffling, but I’m not quite sure I’ve ever seen another movie which places such an important fatality at that specific point in proceedings. It’s just not somewhere you’d ever expect it and, in some regards, is even more radical, and is just as surprising, than what Hitchcock did to Janet Leigh in ‘Psycho’ (1960). It’s amazing.
I had a total blast with ‘Taste of Fear’. It’s a movie that’s compelling, exciting, stylish, terrifying, clever, tricksy as hell and with a literal kicker of an ending. It’s a great example of how much more there was to Hammer than its Gothic monsters as well as demonstrating just how much Clouzot kicked-off with one film.
