Taste of Fear

Taste of Fear (US title: Scream of Fear) is a 1961 British horror thriller film directed by Seth Holt (Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb), shot in black-and-white by Douglas Slocombe, for Hammer Films. The film stars Susan Strasberg (The Manitou), Ronald Lewis, Ann Todd, and Christopher Lee, the latter, one of Hammer’s most bankable stars, in a supporting role.

Christopher Lee has been quoted as saying: “Taste of Fear was the best film that I was in that Hammer ever made… It had the best director, the best cast and the best story.” To “drag it back to reality” (his words in the film), Lee’s French accent doesn’t work.

Plot teaser:

A young paralysed woman (Susan Strasberg) returns to her family home after the mysterious disappearance of her father. She has a cool relationship with her stepmother, while the chauffeur helps her to investigate the father’s disappearance.

During the investigations, she finds the father’s corpse in various locations around the house, but it always quickly vanishes again before anyone else sees it.

Reviews:

” … plainly inspired by Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) but offering several neat twists and turns of its own. A superior Hammer movie – from its well-crafted script to its inventive direction and fabulous monochrome cinematography from the great Douglas Slocombe, it features a stand out performance from young star Susan Strasberg as well as great support from Ann Todd and Hammer Studios stalwart Christopher Lee.” Tipping My Fedora

“Scream of Fear doesn’t demonstrate quite the same mastery of its subgenre as earlier Hammer productions demonstrated of gothic or sci-fi-inflected horror in the 1950’s, but it is competitive, on the whole, with any but the best of the similar movies that William Castle would make during the post-Psycho era. Susan Strasberg is one of 60’s psycho-horror’s better damsels in distress, Christopher Lee is wonderfully smarmy (who the hell knew that Lee could do smarm?) as the vaguely but palpably suspect doctor, and Ronald Lewis damn near walks off with the whole movie as a character who repeatedly shows us that we don’t know him nearly as well as we think we do.” 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting

“I usually don’t care for this type of plotting (it requires way too much planning on the part of our heroes, not to mention that any slight deviation on the part of the villains would cause their entire plan to unravel. These people must be chess masters), but at least I was somewhat surprised by the final five minutes. It was still fairly dull, but it’s something.” Horror Movie a Day

“What I find so exceptional about S.O.F. is the fact that even though it is a grounded in reality thriller, it huffs and puffs like a supernatural yarn and is just altogether haunting. The incredible black and white photography is partially to blame but the story itself leaves giant spaces for you to come to your own conclusions at times and you won’t be blamed for suspecting something otherworldly is going down. One scene in particular that involves Dad’s corpse being spied in a swimming pool is just a blaring punch of full-on horror.” Kindertrauma