The Flesh and the Fiends

Plot

In 1828 Edinburgh, Dr. Robert Knox, a talented anatomist, packs his lecture hall with medical students who admire him greatly. He clashes with his more traditional colleagues, seeing his mission as advancing medicine. Because the law of the time provides very few bodies for dissection, Knox must rely on grave robbers, known as Resurrection men, to get more specimens.

His assistant, Geoffrey Mitchell, and a student, Chris Jackson, handle the purchases, paying high sums for fresh corpses. Meanwhile, two drunkards, William Burke and William Hare, find that a lodger who died in Burke’s boarding house still owed four pounds in rent. Realizing a dead body can earn them money, they start murdering locals and selling the bodies to the medical school. When Jackson visits a tavern to pay the pair, he gets involved with a fiery prostitute named Mary Patterson, whom the killers also know.

As time passes, Jackson and Mitchell grow suspicious that the bodies are murder victims. Despite their worries, Knox refuses to involve the police. After Burke and Hare kill Mary, Jackson finds her body in the lecture room and is himself killed when he confronts them.

The murderers then kill a well-known mentally ill youth, which draws an angry mob that captures them. Hare escapes punishment by testifying against Burke, but vengeful locals catch him and burn out his eyes. Burke is hanged, complaining that Knox never paid him for the final body. Knox faces public fury but is neither punished nor censured by his peers, thanks to Mitchell’s eloquent defense.

Feeling guilt, he admits to his niece Martha that the victims seemed small in his plans, but he knew how they died. The film closes with Knox expecting an empty hall, yet finding it packed with applauding students. Changed, he starts his lecture with the Hippocratic Oath, promising to never harm anyone.

Production

Triad Productions was created by John Gilling, Robert S. Baker, and Monty Berman specifically to produce this film. It marked Peter Cushing’s first horror role outside of a Hammer Films production. Gilling had already written a 1948 film about Burke and Hare, but the British Board of Film Censors forced him to change the killers’ names and other details.

For The Flesh and the Fiends, the historical names were restored, and the film opens with a declaration that it makes no apologies to the dead and is entirely true. Still, the censors would not allow “Burke and Hare” in the title, and chief censor John Trevelyan met with Baker to raise concerns about certain scenes, though the film was ultimately approved uncut with an X rating. To avoid comparisons with Gilling’s earlier work and an unproduced Dylan Thomas script (later made as The Doctor and the Devils in 1985), Leon Griffiths was brought in to revise Gilling’s screenplay.

In his autobiography, Cushing likened Dr. Knox to his famous character Victor Frankenstein, noting that both were exceptional men driven by a single desire to explore the unknown, and were misunderstood because they were ahead of their time. The drooping left eye Cushing adopted for the role was historically accurate: the real Dr. Knox lost that eye and suffered facial disfigurement from smallpox he caught as a baby. This feature was highlighted in some film posters, though not the American one.

Reception

The film has been described as a "box office disappointment" or doing "average business," though Kinematograph Weekly reported it made "a big impression" at the box office. In February 1960, Kinematograph Weekly wrote that the full-blooded melodrama was scoring fluently at the Rialto, Coventry Street, noting that horror films do not play to captive audiences. The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that the attempt to do justice to medical ethics and the Burke and Hare horrors, with a sub-plot about a prostitute, leads to continual changes of mood and interest that weaken the film's total effect, though Peter Cushing offers his usual polished performance.

Variety praised Cushing's performance as a "most effective study in single-minded integrity which knits the film together admirably." The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 3/5 stars, calling it an explicitly scary and darkly atmospheric retelling with Cushing exceptional as the coldly ambitious Dr Knox. In British Sound Films: The Studio Years 1928–1959, David Quinlan rated the film as "average," writing its best asset is its period feel. Film and Filming's Ian Moss criticized the film, saying he could not understand anyone wishing to see it voluntarily and arguing the script afforded the characters no depth.

Versions

The film exists in multiple versions. The Image Entertainment DVD presents the 94-minute original theatrical cut as "uncut," alongside a 95-minute "Continental" version made for European markets, which includes extra nudity through short sequences or alternate takes. In the United States, Valiant released the British theatrical cut under the titles Mania and Psycho Killers.

A later 1965 re-release by Pacemaker Pictures, titled The Fiendish Ghouls, removed 23 minutes from the runtime. The Image DVD includes both the UK and Continental cuts. On July 7, 2020, Kino Lorber issued a Blu-ray featuring the Continental version and the alternate cut labeled The Fiendish Ghouls aka Mania.