A Filmmaker's Review: Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965)

I was actually watching this film when I was supposed to be working and thus, I got nothing done. The film was, at first primitive and slightly odd so I thought about turning it off, but then I saw tarot cards and then I was absolutely sold. The film is about a man who can tell the fortunes of each and every man in his carriage with the only way out for each of them being death. There is a twist that I don’t want to tell you because it gives the game away but Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are both in it, so you know it’s good.

The first thing I adored about this film was the storytelling. It kept going into the near future about each of the men in the carriage and telling some psychotic story of terror about them. The storytelling technique is brilliantly done because we are thrown into various stories in which all are completely separate and yet, each of them are subtly connected. From severed hands to werewolves, killer plants and stolen voodoo prayers, the storytelling is absolutely brilliant in the way it goes through each character with an entire backstory context and everything. It seems like it was pretty well written for a movie that is, in fact, so short at only an hour and a bit long.

Another thing that was really enjoyable was for once, seeing Christopher Lee play the man who does not believe in all these monsters and vampires even though he is the man who played the greatest Dracula ever. (Yes, even better than Bela Lugosi and Gary Oldman and I’m not sorry about that. We won’t include Max Schrek in this for copyright purposes. My fellow “Nosferatu” fans will know what I mean). Christopher Lee made a brilliant non-believer in this film because he was later proved wrong by Peter Cushing and truthfully, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are possibly one of the greatest duos in film history.

The atmosphere of this film is brilliant even seeing as it is set mainly in a train carriage apart from the flash-forward sequences. We get the weather coming in through the window, the closeness and the claustrophobia of a bunch of people trapped in a train carriage together and finally, we have this sense that this random person in the middle of them is trying to warn them about something even when some are not really buying it.

Another thing I loved about this film is that it included, in my opinion, one of the greatest actors ever - Donald Sutherland. He was the professional spy known as “X” in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” and he was also the lead in the adaptation of “Don’t Look Now”. There is absolutely no doubt anywhere that Donald Sutherland is one of the kings of creating mysterious atmospheres and in this film, he does just that. Even when it is his turn to receive a tarot reading, he is mysterious and distant, constantly avoiding the issue altogether. But in the end, he must face the facts from the teller in the carriage.

I thought this film was brilliant and really, I only watched it because I found it randomly on Amazon Prime. I read the names ‘Peter Cushing’, ‘Christopher Lee’ and ‘Donald Sutherland’ and in my opinion, you really cannot go wrong with a cast like that. For one thing, we have some excellent characters and then for the next thing, the whole thing starts off in a very “Strangers on a Train” (1952) kind of way with a bunch of…strangers…on a train… I guess.

In conclusion, I will definitely be watching more films like this as I stumble upon more and more of them in the Prime Channels suggestions of what I should watch. I won’t go out seeking them in filmographies because then I won’t really be surprised having seen many of these types of horror films already. I want to be surprised and I want to not know anything about the film apart from whether Christopher Lee is in it or not. I love old horror films and honestly, this has to be my favourite ones to date. You really have to watch this if you haven’t already.