Asylum

A young psychiatrist arrives at an asylum for a job interview. The condition is strange: he will speak to four patients and work out which of them is the former head doctor. Each patient tells their own story and the film breaks into four parts. Roy Ward Baker directed, from a screenplay by Robert Bloch, who also wrote the novel of Psycho. The cast includes Peter Cushing, Herbert Lom, Britt Ekland, Charlotte Rampling and Patrick Magee. It is an Amicus production. The company built itself on this format in the seventies: several short horror stories and a frame connecting them. The most cited of the segments has the limbs of a dismembered body, wrapped in paper, moving on their own. Bloch's writing is short and sharp; each story rests on a single idea and is not stretched. The budget is low and the effects simple; the fear is produced through sound and editing. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies British horror anthologies. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a unified film; the structure is deliberately fragmented.