During the early hours of Boxing Day (26 December) 2020, I watched a truly strange and decidedly creepy British horror movie entitled The Hand of Night (aka Beast of Morocco) on the TV channel Talking Pictures, which specializes in screening nowadays-obscure, rarely-seen British movies.
Directed by Frederic Goode, released in 1968, and set in the present day, if you can imagine a mash-up of H. Rider Haggard's novel She, the vampire movie genre, and a dash of Curse of the Mummy thrown in, it may give you some idea of what to expect from The Hand of Night.
Haunted by macabre dreams and riven with guilt after he is the only survivor of a fatal car crash that killed his wife and their children while he was driving, architect Paul Carver (played by William Sylvester) decides to end it all, and concocts an end plan whereby a doctor will euthanize him when they meet in Morocco – only for him to discover upon arriving there that the doctor has suffered a heart attack and died. During the plane journey, however, Carver had become acquainted with archaeologist Otto Gunther (Edward Underdown) and received an invitation to visit him at his palatial Moroccan home.
With his own plan now in disarray, Carver takes up Gunther's offer and sets out to walk there from his hotel close by, but en route to Gunther's home he meets a mysterious and exceedingly ancient-looking Arab named Omar (Terence De Marney), who speaks to him in riddles about the choice between light and darkness, before disappearing into the night. And when Carver reaches Gunther's, he finds himself in the midst of a lively party, full of people who are entirely unknown to him. Somewhat out of his depth, he looks up to see a beautiful, mysterious young woman walking down a staircase, but before he can approach her she is lost in the crowd. Instead, he strikes up an acquaintance with Gunther's assistant, a pretty but totally non-mysterious young woman named Chantal (Diane Clare).
To cut a very convoluted story short, one evening Carver finds himself drawn to some long-abandoned ruins in the nearby desert where Gunther and Chantal have been conducting excavations (including the unearthing of a long-buried, centuries-old sarcophagus), but to his amazement he finds that the ruins are ruined no longer. Instead, they are sumptuously decorated, populated by dancing slave girls, and standing aloof is the mysterious young woman, who tells Carver that her name is Marissa (Alizia Gur, a former Miss Israel turned actress). Omar is also in attendance, and more is spoken of choosing between light and darkness. Carver is besotted by Marissa, but she recoils in terror when she sees a bejeweled, light-reflecting ring that he is wearing, one that he had found earlier at Gunther's house and had almost unconsciously placed upon his finger. Without realizing, Carver subsequently falls asleep, but when he awakes it is morning, the overhead sun is bright, and all of the decorations, girls, Marissa, and Omar are gone – the ruins are as they had originally been, empty and desolate. Had it been real, or only a dream?
Carver later spots Marissa at Gunther's home again, but no-one else can apparently see her or even recognize her from his verbal description; nor is she reflected in mirrors. Consequently, she is dismissed by everyone else as a figment of Carver's imagination, the unreal product of lingering stress engendered by his family's death. Yet as time goes on, Carver loses all interest in everything other than Marissa, even returning at night when he can to be with her in the magically if only temporarily restored desert ruins, which he now believes to be real, albeit inexplicably so.
Gunther and Chantel, meanwhile, are becoming increasingly worried about him, and eventually Gunther suspects that the elusive Marissa may not only be real after all but in fact be a vampire, who is draining Carver not of blood but of his actual life force. After finding her likeness depicted upon an Arabian carpet, its pattern portraying a 14th-Century princess who was buried alive as a punishment for her unfaithfulness but who issued a curse upon all men before her entombment, Carver suspects this too, and that the recently-unearthed sarcophagus is hers. Consequently, he resolves to break free of Marissa's evil hold over him once and for all, but she has centuries of practice in such matters, so she isn't going to let go that easily – as Carver, Gunther, and especially Chantal discover to their peril…
I'll say no more, other than to note that Marissa's sinister sidekick, the inimical and thoroughly obnoxious Omar, ultimately performs a very literal rendition of the phrase "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust"…
All in all, The Hand of Night is a decided curiosity of a horror movie – a nothing if not novel twist upon the traditional vampire theme, with not a single pair of hypertrophic canines or any sign of gushing blood to be seen anywhere, and set not in some dark, cobweb-bedecked Central European castle but transferred instead to an exotic sand-strewn desert setting more in keeping with an Arabian Nights adventure.
Finally: I can laugh now, but just at the creepiest point of the movie, at around 3 am in the absolute stillness of the morning, some weirdo nearby suddenly decided to set off a succession of exceedingly loud banger fireworks, and yes, I definitely jumped! Who sets off fireworks at 3 am in the morning, and in the rain?? Bizarre – just like this movie, in fact!
But if you want to see for yourself, click here to view on YouTube the seriously spooky dream (or should that be nightmare?) scene that accompanies the opening titles of The Hand of Night.
And to view a complete listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!
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