Horrors of the Black Museum
| Horrors of the Black Museum | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Arthur Crabtree |
| Written by | Herman Cohen Aben Kandel |
| Produced by | Herman Cohen Jack Greenwood Nat Cohen |
| Starring | Michael Gough June Cunningham Graham Curnow Shirley Anne Field |
| Cinematography | Desmond Dickinson |
| Edited by | Geoffrey Muller |
| Music by | Gerard Schurmann |
Production companies | Anglo-Amalgamated Carmel Productions |
| Distributed by | American International Pictures (US) Anglo-Amalgamated (UK) |
Release date |
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Running time | 94 minutes (with prologue) 81 minutes (without prologue) |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $164,000 (est.) or £40,000 or $1,000,000 |
| Box office | over £1 million or $3,000,000 |
Horrors of the Black Museum is a 1959 British horror film directed by Arthur Crabtree and starring Michael Gough, June Cunningham, Graham Curnow and Shirley Anne Field. It was filmed in Color and CinemaScope, and most of the financing came from the United States. The credited producer was Jack Greenwood, but Herman Cohen says this came about to ensure the film qualified for the Eady levy, and in fact, Greenwood was more of an associate producer assisting Cohen. The film was released in the US on April 22, 1959, on a double feature with The Headless Ghost (1959).
It was the first film in what film critic David Pirie dubbed Anglo-Amalgamated's "Sadian trilogy" (the other two being Circus of Horrors (1960) and Peeping Tom (1960)), with an emphasis on sadism, cruelty and violence (with sexual undertones), in contrast to the supernatural horror of the Hammer films of the same era. Cohen says when the movie was released years later on television, they had to take off the hypnotism prologue "because it does hypnotize some people."