1964, UK
In this subtly eerie kitchen-sink horror (remade by Kiyoshi Kurosawa in 2000 as Séance), middle-aged couple Myra (Kim Stanley) and Billy (Richard Attenborough, who also produced) are grieving the loss of their son Arthur.
They live in the large Victorian house left to Myra by her family, where Myra holds séances for people trying to connect with their departed loved ones, claiming that her ‘special gift’ is assisted from beyond by Arthur’s spirit.
Despite the comfort implied by the grand appearance of the house, Billy and Myra are financially and emotionally unstable.
Billy questions Myra’s powers as a medium, but supports her endeavours because he recognizes them as a necessary funnel for her grief, and that of the people she ‘helps.
In fact, he is aware that she’s quite mad, but his love for her drives him to tolerate and enable her madness; the best he can do is to try not to contradict or upset her.
When she turns off the radio, and then accuses him of turning it off only moments later, we see the resignation in his face.
As she condescends to him, it is clear that he has been a victim of emotional abuse for some time, and he is completely shrunken and worn down as a result.
Myra: “Oh Billy, why did I ever marry you?”
Billy: “I don’t know, dear, why did you?”
Myra: “Because you’re weak. And because you need me.”
He lives only to serve her, and when she concocts a plan to kidnap a wealthy couple’s child so that she can prove her psychic abilities and gain recognition by ‘finding’ the child, he’s the one sent out to carry out the abduction (of course leaving witnesses and fingerprints all over everything).
“I’m not a master criminal”, he says to Myra, and indeed the film derives much of its tension from Billy’s capacity for error.
Like the enabling husband in Pete Walker’s Frightmare, he gets wrapped up in crimes that are not of his own imagining, while his wife sees everything as a sign that they are doing the right thing.
The script by Bryan Forbes (based on the book by mystery writer Mark McShane) gives Kim Stanley plenty to work with psycholoqically (“You know what I sometimes wish? I sometimes wish I were ordinary like you. Dead ordinary. Ordinary and dead like all the others.”), but the actress’s girlish expressions and her sad, lost eyes are where her madness is conveyed most poignantly.
In the film’s climactic séance, her vocal register shifts dramatically and she commands the scene as a woman possessed – not by the spirits of the dead, but by her own damnable soul.
After a chilling, Oscar-nominated performance like this it’s surprising that Kim Stanley didn’t go on to a more prolific film career, but in fact other than a handful of television appearances she didn’t appear on the big screen again until her role as Frances Farmer’s domineering mother in Frances (1982), which also earned her an Oscar nomination (and featured a score by John Barry, who also provided the suitably nerve-wracking score for Séance on a Wet Afternoon).
Actor/director Bryan Forbes again delved into the realm of female delusion in The Whisperers (1967) but perhaps his most recognizable genre credit is as director of The Stepford Wives (1975), which would count as a neurotic woman film if not for the science fiction elements.
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