‘We are students of Hippocrates, but some of us are hypocrites...’
Jack the Ripper is pop culture’s favourite Victorian era maniac, but Burke and Hare are not too far behind. The infamous murderers and body snatchers killed more than three times as many as the Ripper (if only including the canonical Ripper victims), over a ten month period in Edinburgh in 1828. John Gilling’s early horror film is ostensibly a B movie about the Burke and Hare murders, but the script and the performances elevate it into something more…
Dr. Robert Knox (Peter Cushing) is a respected anatomist who requires fresh cadavers in order to continue his important work. William Burke (George Rose) and William Hare (Donald Pleasence), a pair of Irish immigrants, are keen to oblige him, so keen in fact, that they stop just picking up bodies scattered around the mean streets of Edinburgh and instead start creating victims themselves.
Most people of my generation know Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin from the Star Wars franchise. Cushing was an old man by that point, famously wearing a pair of slippers throughout the shoot whenever his feet weren’t on camera. The Flesh & the Fiends offers a tantalising glimpse into Cushing’s power as a younger man. He really is a force of nature here, helped along by Leon Griffiths’ exemplary script, and it is also interesting to see a young Donald Pleasence (or Dr Loomis as he is better known by horror film fans) trying gamely to put on an Irish accent.
The Flesh & the Fiends has never had a proper remaster, so the version I watched was full of imperfections and occasional skips, but this only added to the sense of watching something forbidden and long forgotten, for those able to seek it out, The Flesh & the Fiends is a lot of fun.