From Beyond the Grave

The second half of tonight's lineup on TCM, after midnight, includes several horror anthology movies. One that I hadn't seen before, but was sitting on my DVR from the last time it aired, is From Beyond the Grave, which comes on overnight at 2:00 AM.

The establishing story, or what connects everything together, is an antique shop in London run by an unnamed proprietor, played by Peter Cushing. Each of the stories is started by a different person coming into the shop looking to buy an item; whether the person has a positive or negative outcome in the story depends in part upon how honest they are.

First is Edward Charlton (David Warner), who buys an old mirror for his apartment. When he has some guests over, one of them comment about the mirror looking like it could have been in an old-timey ghost story. So the group decides to host a séance, not that anybody really believes in that stuff. Of course, this time it turns out that the other side is actually real, in the sense that there's a ghost in the mirror. And it decides to possess poor Edward, telling Edward that he needs to kill people in order to satisfy the ghost with the dead people's blood. But will the ghost ever be satisfied? And won't somebody figure out that Edward is killing people?

Next up is Christopher (Ian Bannen). He hasn't got much of a life. Since getting demobbed from the military, he's wound up in a loveless marriage to Mabel (Diana Dors) with a son Stephen and a low-paying, low-status job as an office manager. One day on the way to the office, he meets Jim (Donald Pleasance), an older man who sells matches and the like. Jim is pushy enough that Christopher should see warning sirens, but instead he pilfers a military medal from the antiques shop, feeling the need to go over to Jim's apartment and visit. Meanwhile, Mabel has weird feelings that there's somebody else in the room trying to stab her or something.

Reggie (Ian Carmichael) is a businessman with a wife Susan (Nyree Dawn Porter) who cheats the proprietor out of a snuff box before heading home to Sussex. On the train to Sussex, he shares a compartment with Madame Orloff (Margaret Leighton), who claims to be a clairvoyant and claims that Reggie has some kind of being on his shoulder that's all sorts of bad juju and that's trying to escape into the real world. Once again, no reason to believe any of this crap, at least not until Susan first tells Reggie there's a sudden bad smell followed by Susan realizing someone -- or something -- is trying to kill her.

Finally, William Seaton (Ian Ogilvy) sees an antique door he likes, even if he's only going to use it to replace the door to his stationery closet. His wife Rosemary (Lesley-Anne Down) jokes about using such a door for a terribly mundane purpose, but surprise surprise, installing this door opens a portal so a world from several centuries earlier inhabited by a magician only William can see, and not every time he opens the door. At least, not until the magician decides he wants Rosemary....

From Beyond the Grave is more than competent for the genre of horror anthologies. It's not great, certainly not as good as something like Dead of Night, but it's certainly good enough to entertain. And as always with anthologies, the stories are short enough that if you don't like one, you don't have to wait all that long for the next story.