Julia (Mia Farrow) stands jolting and shuddering, a butterfly pattern of blood on her blouse, shocking the ambulancemen on her doorstep. Her nine-year-old daughter Kate, who choked on an apple like Snow White before Julia cut her throat in a desperate tracheotomy, lies dead and unseen in the kitchen.
This traumatic eruption into a quiet Kensington morning sends lingering tremors through this atmospheric, understated London ghost story. Based on the first horror novel by Peter Straub, an American genre master best-known for Ghost Story (1979), director Richard Loncraine shares Straub’s fine-grained understanding of upper-middle class London and cool sense of dread. Barely getting a 1977 UK cinema release and last available on VHS, this painstaking restoration rewards a six-year campaign by Full Circle fanatic Simon Fitzjohn.
Following Kate’s death, Julia leaves chilly husband Magnus (Keir Dullea), impulsively buys a large Kensington house and sees her antique dealer friend (and in a cut scene, lover) Mark (reassuring Tom Conti). Thinking she glimpses Kate in Holland Park, she finds a bloody penknife and stabbed turtle in her place. A disastrous séance led by cockney medium Mrs Flood (future EastEnders matriarch Anna Wing) indicates psychic danger in her home, where she discovers another, murderous girl, Olivia, died at the hands of her mum.
Farrow was reluctant to revisit Rosemary’s Baby territory, and starring in a West End play at night. But her fragile, pale presence, belying her beauty, embodies the film’s haunted quality. The camera hovers on lush, shadowy compositions as she lies in bed, close to unseen darkness. Friendly company only fleetingly warms her. Like Anthony Perkins, her discomfort was made for horror.
Dullea, pictured below, the equally odd, somewhat blank Canadian star of 2001: A Space Odyssey, makes a monotonously baleful husband, balanced by Conti’s charm. The supporting cast are stalwarts – Jill Bennett, Peter Sallis and boyish Nigel Havers as a chummily racist estate agent. Cathleen Nesbitt is the demon child’s mother, wrenched from smiling senility into a fearsome rictus at her mention. Canadian Robin Gammell is an alcoholic, ageing public schoolboy broken by former deeds. The tube chattering past his dingy window shows his social descent in a precisely located film, real to anyone who’s walked Kensington’s moneyed streets. Colin Towns’ mournful score, combining synths and Satie-like phrases, magnifies and maybe creates the mood.
The commentary sees Loncraine amusingly put his own “almost good” film down. The rigours of a shoot where he would wake up crying are summed up when, in the already unnerving choking scene, the Canadian producer suddenly soaked Farrow in fake blood. She screamed and vanished for two days, and the film stayed soberly averse to grand guignol. Loncraine is also interviewed about a rackety and successful early life, born into “show people going back to the 17th century”, inventing executive toys, assisting John Schlesinger and Alan Whicker, directing documentaries then another cult film, Slade In Flame (1975), and following Full Circle with Michael Palin in The Missionary (1982), Ian McKellen in Richard III (1995) and Kirsten Dunst in Wimbledon (2004). Interviews with Colin Towns, associate producer and Hammer veteran Hugh Harlow, Samantha Gates (who played Olivia), Kim Newman’s reliably contextual critique and Fitzjohn’s tour of Full Circle’s London complete a significant reissue.
