The Nightmare Man [TV] (1981)
Directed by Douglas Camfield

Film Review

The Nightmare Man was an unusual departure for the serials department of the BBC in the 1980s, away from the familiar world of period and contemporary drama, into the realm of adult sci-fi horror.  The corporation had had some earlier successes in the genre, most notably the Quatermass serials of the 1950s, but it rarely dabbled with the concoction of horror and science-fiction outside the cosy confines of its popular series Doctor Who.  Scripted and directed by two of the latter series' most venerated figures, Robert Holmes and Douglas Camfield, The Nightmare Man is a classic Doctor Who story in all but name, just a tiny bit more frightening and sporting just a little bit more female cleavage.

Adapted from David Wiltshire's thriller novel Child of Vodyanoi, the plot is pure 50s B-movie fare, almost identical with that of Terence Fisher's Island of Terror (1966), with a few (not very imaginative) twists.  The characters are all stock archetypes who, in the best B-movie tradition, have next to no depth and a worrying inability to speak normal human dialogue.  Performances range from the downright dull (James Warwick, Celia Imrie) to the eerily portentous (Maurice Roëves, Tom Watson), with  Jonathan Newth stealing the show as the totally creepy Colonel Howard (Newth looks as if he may have been cast on account of his scary resemblance to the actor Leslie Howard).

In common with pretty well every Doctor Who story, most of the episodes consist of people standing about vomiting copious quantities of plot exposition, with most of the action held back for the last five minutes to provide a sufficiently strong cliff-hanger to make the spectator want to tune in the following week.  Director Douglas Camfield only really comes into his own in these brief flurries of action, which he handles superbly.  For most of the production, however, Camfield's direction is as lame and uninspired as the writing, with most of the episodes consisting of static and uninteresting camera set-ups with actors propped up like dummies as they try (and fail) to make their plot-laden dialogue sound convincing.

The main technical flaw with the series is that it was recorded on videotape instead of film (presumably because film was too expense).  As a result, the series has an ugly 'washed out' look throughout.  This adds an eerie feel to the outdoor scenes filmed during the daytime (with a Cornish village making a good stand-in for a Scottish island), but for the interior and nocturnal sequences film would have been far more atmospheric and effective in sustaining the tension.  The camerawork and editing partly help to make up for this, although, like the direction, these only rise above the mundane within the closing few minutes of each episode.

Despite its obvious shortcomings, The Nightmare Man manages to make compelling viewing and genuinely does have some terrifying moments - the last few minutes of Episode Three being particularly horrific, easily on a par with what was being seen in cinemas at the time.  The use of the subjective camera to show the killer's point-of-view is also effective and adds to the general aura of menace.  Such a shame that the killer ends up being - surprise, surprise - a man in a rubber suit.   Broadcast in May 1981 as four thirty-minute long episodes, The Nightmare Man attracted a fairly respectable audience of six million but is hugely surpassed by the BBC's subsequent, far more lavish sci-fi horror serial, The Day of the Triffids (1981).

Film Synopsis

The peace of a small island in the Hebrides is disturbed by the discovery of the mangled remains of a woman's body.  At first, it looks like the work of a deranged psychopath with the strength of a gorilla but from the unusual teeth marks found on the corpse the resident dentist, Michael Gaffikin, becomes convinced that the killer was not human.  Shortly after the island's small police contingent begin their search for the killer a birdwatcher camping in a remote spot becomes the second victim.  Among the smashed human remains the island's inhabitants have the first clue to the killer's identity, and it begins to look as if Gaffikin's theory is correct...