The Shuttered Room – 1967 | 90 mins | Horror | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Eerie suspense thriller about a young woman who discovers a terrifying secret in a locked room after returning to her childhood home. The screenplay is loosely-based on a supernatural short story by master of the macabre H P Lovecraft that is alleged to be more the work of”posthumous collaborator” August Derleth. Directing his first feature film, David Greene had become a prolific television director since crossing the Atlantic and frequently turned his nose up at film scripts, but at his wife’s insistence accepted Seven Arts’ offer of The Shuttered Room. The film had been already been deserted by Ken Russell, so Greene did all he could to salvage a project by rewriting the screenplay and stylistically managing to convey a genuine sense of evil into a sound horror formula. Oliver Reed is splendidly menacing in a glowering key role, remarkably similar to the one he played in The Damned.Set in New England, the film was actually shot in Norfolk and completed at Twickenham.

Twenty years after she was driven away from her bleak ancestral island home, Susannah Kelton (Carol Lynley) anxiously returns with her new husband,Mike (Gig Young), to the village of the unhappy childhood and the old mill she remembers. However, the locals are far from welcoming and respond with words of warning when she talks of returning to the old mill and making it a vacation retreat. Susannah also meets her deliriously malevolent cousin Ethan (Oliver Reed) and his gang of New England delinquents who resent the well-heeled New York couple.

Susannah also encounters her eccentric Aunt Agatha (Flora Robson) who also learns warns of the ‘Whateley curse’ and how evil dwells in the old mill. They disregard all words of caution and make plans to spend their first night in Susannah’s former home. The evening passes relatively quietly, but the following day Mike is beaten up by the fen gang whilst Ethan is back at the mill and considering forcing himself on his niece.