The framing device is one of the studio’s best. After the uneven and poorly received The Vault of Horror, From Beyond the Grave closed out Amicus’s eight-year cycle of portmanteau fright films on a high note. Amicus Productions creative boss Milton Subotsky just happened to pick up Chetwynd-Hayes’s short-story collection, The Unbidden, and decided that it would be the perfect starting point for the company’s next film. What’s weird, though, is that in 1973, when From Beyond the Grave was made, his success still lay mostly in the future, and he was almost as obscure at home as he remains in the US today. It turns out that Chetwynd-Hayes is a little like Dennis Wheatley- an enormously prolific writer and anthologist who was widely read and even somewhat respected in Britain, but relatively unknown on this side of the Atlantic. Chetwynd-Hayes was identified as the writer of all the source tales I’d never heard of the guy. I was therefore taken somewhat aback when I reached the point in From Beyond the Grave’s opening credits where R. Usually, the author in question will be fairly well known: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, and so on. From Beyond the Grave / Tales from Beyond the Grave / Creatures from Beyond the Grave / The Creatures / The Undead / Tales from Beyond (1973/1975) ***Ī lot of anthology horror movies derive some measure of unity from basing all of their stories on works by a single author.
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