Pine Trees and Vices

John Bayley

• The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales edited by Chris Baldick
  Oxford, 533 pp, £16.95, March 1992, ISBN 0 19 214194 5

What an agreeable moment it used to be in horror films when the heroine arose from her bed in the old castle where she was staying the weekend and throwing a negligée over her nightdress began to wander with hypnotised stealth along the dark corridor. The camera and soundtrack dwelt for some minutes on the manifestations attending this rash pilgrimage – now a motionless suit of armour revealed by the moonlight, now the cry of an owl outside the casement – but nothing more spectral occured until ... Invariably and with tremulous curiosity she opened the fatal door with a sepulchral creak; her hand flies to her lips and her eyes widen into blue saucers. A piercingly satisfying scream sometimes followed, sometimes not: and usually, in adroit anti-climax, the camera tracked to the smiling features of Vincent Price or Boris Karloff, dapper in antique costume or Victorian evening wear, surveying her discomfiture with sinister benevolence.