Amicus Productions

Amicus Productions is a British film production company, based at Shepperton Studios, England. It was founded by American producer and screenwriter Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg.

Horror

Amicus is perhaps best known for Subotsky's own trademark portmanteau horror anthologies, inspired by the Ealing Studios film Dead of Night,^[1] though their first two films were musicals for the teenage market; *It's Trad, Dad! (1962) and Just for Fun (1963). However, prior to Amicus being created the two producers collaborated on the 1960 horror film The City of the Dead.

Amicus' portmanteau films included Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1964), directed by genre stalwart Freddie Francis, Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1970), Tales from the Crypt (1972),and Vault of Horror (1973). The last two were based on stories from EC horror comics from the 1950s. These films, typically feature four or sometimes five short horror stories, linked by an overarching plot featuring a narrator and those listening to his story. The casts of these films are invariably composed of name actors, each of whom play small parts in the various stories. Along with the expected genre stars, such as Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Herbert Lom, Amicus also drew its actors from the classical British stage (Patrick Magee, Margaret Leighton and even Sir Ralph Richardson), up-and-comers (Donald Sutherland, Robert Powell and Tom Baker), or former stars on the way down (Richard Greene, Robert Hutton, and Terry-Thomas). Some, such as Joan Collins, were in their mid-career doldrums when they signed on with Amicus.

Torture Garden, Asylum, and The House That Dripped Blood were written by Robert Bloch, based upon his own stories with the exception of the Waxworks segment of The House That Dripped Blood, which was scripted (uncredited) by Russ Jones, based on the Bloch story. The earlier The Skull was also based on a Bloch story (though scripted by Milton Subotsky), and Bloch was also the screenwriter of The Psychopath and the adaptation of The Deadly Bees (based upon H.F.Heard's A Taste of Honey).

Hammer Films

Amicus films are often mistaken for the output of the better-known Hammer Films, to which they are similar in visual style, and with which they share many stars, including Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Unlike the period gothic Hammer films Amicus productions were usually set in the present day (as Vincent Price's character says in The Monster Club, this means a "lower budget!"). They now enjoy a considerable cult following of their own.

Science fiction

Amicus Productions also produced small number of science fiction films, with adaptations of several of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and, in the mid-1960s, two films based on the then-relatively-new television series Doctor Who. Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 AD, the first (and still the only) big-screen adaptations of the long-running series, were filmed in Technicolor at a time when the series itself was still filmed in black-and-white, giving Dr. Who and the Daleks the additional distinction of being the first time Doctor Who had appeared in colour. In these films, Peter Cushing played Doctor Who (a human scientist, rather than an alien, with Who as his actual surname), and the backstory and continuity established for the TV series were completely ignored. Although on TV it had been established in the very first story that the Doctor was an alien, the Amicus films ignored this. The films were also made without knowledge of the BBC policy that a Dalek's lights only flashed when they were speaking, making it difficult to know which was saying what.

Other films

Amicus funded and produced Danger Route, a film version of Christopher Nicole's (writing as Andrew York) 1966 spy novel The Eliminator that was directed by Seth Holt. Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, directed by William Friedkin, who later found fame with The Exorcist, directed the film adaptation in 1968. Margaret Drabble' adaptation of her 1965 novel The Millstone (1965) was filmed as A Touch of Love (1969) and Laurence Moody's 1969 novel The Ruthless Ones was filmed as What Became of Jack and Jill?.

Today

In 2003, Anchor Bay Entertainment released a five disc DVD box-set of Amicus films in a coffin-shaped container in the U.K. In 2005, Amicus was revived to produce homages to the old titles as well as original horror fare. Their first production was Stuart Gordon's Stuck (2007).

Amicus Films

• It's Trad, Dad! (1962)
• Just for Fun (1963)
• Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1964)
• Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965)
• The Skull (1965)
• Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966)
• The Psychopath (1966)
• The Deadly Bees (1966)
• Torture Garden (1967)
• Danger Route (1967)
• They Came from Beyond Space (1967)
• The Terrornauts (1967)
• The Birthday Party (1968)
• A Touch of Love (1969)
• The Mind of Mr. Soames (1969)
• The House That Dripped Blood (1970)
• I, Monster (1971)
• What Became of Jack and Jill? (1971)
• Asylum (1972)
• Tales from the Crypt (1972)
• The Vault of Horror (1973)
• From Beyond the Grave (1973)
• And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973)
• The Beast Must Die (1974)
• Madhouse (1974)
• The Land That Time Forgot (1974)
• At the Earth's Core (1976)
• The People That Time Forgot (1977)
• The Monster Club (1980)

References

• David Pirie A New Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema London: I.B. Tauris, 2008

Notes

Further reading

• Amicus: the Studio that Dripped Blood, Allan Bryce (editor)

External links

• Amicus Productions at the Internet Movie Database
• Amicus Productions Website (Unofficial)
• Amicus Productions studio history on (re)Search my Trash
• Amicus Horror Film Synopses
• Blood and Gutsiness http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/feb/13/british-horror-film-studio-amicus

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