The year is 1956, and a young man originally trained as a monk but who chose acting instead now runs the 55th Street Playhouse Theater in New York, a shrine to the art house film. No, he doesn't just run art house films - he created the art house circuit himself. As the founder of Janus Films, this young man (his name is Bryant Haliday) was the one who brought Fellini and Bergman and Kurosawa to moviegoers in the United States, who nurtured their audiences and fan bases and thereby created the marketplace for such artists to do their work in the first place. But there is something strangely telling about the name Haliday chose for his enterprise. Like Janus, the two-faced Roman god, Haliday was himself an oddly bifurcated man. On the one side he was the avatar of the art house, a classically trained thespian championing the most pointy-headed aspects of cinema. And the other, he was a B-movie star making low-budget horror movies for producer Richard Gordon.

Their partnership began in 1963 when exploitation producer Gordon cast Haliday as a maniacal ventriloquist in Devil Doll, inaugurating a long-running collaboration on par with Alfred Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Koji Yakusho, Jack Hill and Pam Grier.

Gordon's Grenadier Films struck a deal with drive-in maven Joe Solomon's Fanfare Corporation to make a flick full of gore and bare breasts tailor-made for the 70s exploitation market. Shot at Shepperton Studios at the same time that Amicus was mounting their anthology triptych Tales from the Crypt, Horror on Snape Island (as it was originally known) did not originally have a part for Haliday. The already convoluted plot was adapted to make room for Haliday as a private detective who joins up with an archeological expedition exploring an abandoned lighthouse where a group of teenagers were hacked to bits...well, it sort of makes sense when you see it.

Joining Haliday in the cast was a motley collection of young newbies and experienced hands, few of whom had any real connection to the horror genre. Character actors like George Coulouris, Anthony Valentine, Dennis Price, and Jack Watson certainly had horror credits on their busy resumes, but were hardly the usual faces for such outings. Candace Glendenning, the topless lunatic driven to a killing frenzy by her experiences, was fresh from her role in Franklin Schaffner's Nicholas and Alexandra (1971). Robin Askwith was best known for appearing in sex comedies, and Jill Haworth grumbled, "I never wanted to do horror movies, but when acting is your livelihood, you sometimes have to accept unwanted roles just to survive. I remember in Horror of Snape Island my character stumbles upon five dead bodies and I had to say with a straight face, 'Ooh, the police aren't going to like this.' The crew just kept laughing every time I said it."

Director Jim O'Connolly had previously supervised the Ray Harryhausen monster-vs.-cowboys The Valley of Gwangi (1969) and Joan Crawford's horror opus Berserk! (1967, A.K.A. Circus of Blood), neither of which match the creepy atmospherics of his work here. This is largely due to the considerable skill of cinematographer Desmond Dickinson, the distinguished D.P. responsible for Laurence Olivier's 1948 Hamlet, The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), and The Browning Version (1951), whose career had veered into horror as the years went on and English cinema found that Gothic shockers were the only movies they could reliably export. O'Connolly directed but one more film, Mistress Pamela (1974), an example of the British sexploitation films that would give cable outlets like Cinemax something to fill its airtime with.

by David Kalat

Sources:

Robin Askwith, www.freewebs.com/robinaskwith

Tom Lisanti, Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema

Hank Reardon, Tower of Slash, Horror-wood.com

George Reis, An Interview with Richard Gordon, DVD Drive-In

Jonathan Rigby, English Gothic