The Flesh and the Fiends

John Gilling's 1960 film rests on events that actually happened in nineteenth-century Edinburgh. The surgeon Robert Knox needs a constant supply of cadavers for his anatomy classes and prefers not to ask where they come from. Two men, Burke and Hare, have found a much faster way of meeting that demand than robbing graves: killing people directly. The film concentrates less on the two murderers than on Knox, and the questions a man convinced he is serving science deliberately does not ask sit at its centre. Peter Cushing's Knox is cold and arrogant, and convincing for exactly that reason. Donald Pleasence's Hare is one of the most unsettling performances of the period. It is among the harshest British horror films drawn from real events. Who it's for: viewers who like classic British horror and historical crime. Who it's not for: anyone who does not want to watch the killings in detail, or the poor being singled out as targets.