Nothing but the Night (1973)

directed by Peter Sasdy
UK
90 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I was going to watch this anyway because of the presence(s) of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, as well as its having been directed by the same guy who did The Stone Tape, but I was planning on spending some time talking about how this wasn't a horror movie, until the film itself abruptly proved me wrong. I know this is an old movie, but do try to avoid spoilers beforehand.

So this starts out as a pretty stuffy mystery involving the mysterious deaths of some very wealthy people, and the involvement in said deaths of a little girl who appears traumatized, as well as her mother who everybody hates because of her history as a prostitute and her stint in jail. I felt like the mother was actually the weakest aspect of this, because all she really does is have an absurd hairdo and go around saying things to people with overacted vitriol. It's one of those times when I think the character could have been much improved if they'd gotten an actor who could pull off the role. This actress wasn't convincing as a willful ex-prostitute and her storyline was ultimately meaningless. Fortunately, to make up for it, the girl who plays the traumatized daughter is an excellent child actor, something I rarely come by in 70s movies.

As others have noted, Nothing But the Night is extremely drab for most of its runtime before a sudden and bizarre climax at the end, but it doesn't feel at any point like it's intentionally dallying to throw off viewers. I mean, it does dally, but that's just because that's its style. Even when they begin to introduce the possibility of psychic phenomena it felt like it was going to stick to its dreary old whodunit tone until the very end. I'm going to talk about some spoilers from here on out so please avoid this final paragraph.

Lord Summerisle gets his comeuppance. I'd seen comparisons to The Wicker Man, but I interpreted them to mean that the film was reminiscent of what Wicker Man would have been had it been chopped off at the end before the actual wicker man came in. This was wrong. It does eventually build up into all cultic hell breaking loose on a remote island as psychically mutilated children burn their parents and chant in glee. Seriously, we go from Peter Cushing diligently fiddling around with test tubes and Christopher Lee investigating goings-on with the most upsetting mustache of his career to a child catching on fire and plunging herself off a cliff while screaming "I CURSE YOUR GOD". The Stone Tape got scary, but it never gave the viewer as much whiplash as this. I even enjoyed the dull parts, probably because I was expecting them to be that way, but the way it immediately ramped up into terror was the cherry on top.