Tigon, Tigon, Burning Bright

In recent years, England’s FAB Press has performed an invaluable service by publishing large, handsome volumes on hitherto neglected subjects, such as Troy Howarth’s The Haunted World of Mario Bava, with which we had to make do until Tim Lucas’s definitive tome appeared. Augmenting their list of titles on Dario Argento, Abel Ferrara, and Lucio Fulci was John Hamilton’s Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser (2005), and although I am not a big fan of Tenser’s work for the most part, it was a significant story that needed to be told. It reads like a who’s who of the most ubiquitous names in horror films, e.g., Roy Ashton, Herman Cohen, Peter Cushing, Freddie Francis, Richard Gordon, Michael Gough, Louis M. Heyward, Boris Karloff, Klaus Kinski, Christopher Lee, Donald Pleasence, Dennis Price, Vincent Price, Michael Reeves, Peter Sasdy, Barbara Steele, and Harry Alan Towers.

Between 1961 and 1972, Tenser produced thirty-six films through the two British companies he co-founded and later left, Compton (1961-66) and Tigon (1967-72), with the name and symbol of the latter representing a cross between a tiger and a lion. Some were softcore “nudies” with self-explanatory titles like Naked–As Nature Intended (1961) and Love in Our Time (1969), while others such as Black Beauty, Hannie Caulder (both 1971), and August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1972) aspired to mainstream success, but the best-known were in the horror and SF genres. Shrewdly covering all the bases, Tenser was also active in exhibition and distribution, obtaining the sometimes belated U.K. rights to films ranging from Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow and Missile to the Moon to Fires on the Plain and Last Year at Marienbad, as well as works by Riccardo Freda and Antonio Margheriti (aka Anthony M. Dawson) that featured future Tigon stars Lee, Steele, and Robert Flemyng.

As Hamilton explains, Tenser’s formula was simple: by giving the public what it wanted to see (as good a definition as any of exploitation filmmaking) and keeping costs strictly contained, frequently sharing them with other companies, he ensured that almost every one of his films turned a profit, however modest. Of course, scantily clad–or less–girls didn’t hurt, and Tenser paraded the likes of Francesca Annis, sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac, Diana Dors, Hilary Dwyer, Julie Ege, Linda Hayden, Suzanna Leigh, Helen Mirren, Yutte Stensgaard, Raquel Welch, and Virginia Wetherell across the screen, often in various stages of undress. The conflict between art and commerce came to a head most notably when Roman Polanski clashed with Tenser over the escalating budgets and shooting schedules of his first two English-language films, Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-Sac (1966), shortly after which Polanski headed to hoped-for greener pastures in Hollywood and Tenser left Compton to found Tigon.

Perhaps Tenser’s biggest claim to fame was producing two of the three films made by Reeves, the controversial and short-lived director who had already worked with Steele in Italy on La Sorella di Satana (aka Revenge of the Blood Beast, The She-Beast; 1965). For Tigon, he then made The Sorcerers (1967) with Karloff and Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm; 1968) with Price, and had several additional projects in the pipeline when both Karloff and Reeves died in February 1969, dealing the company a serious blow. Like the oft-imitated Witchfinder General, Vernon Sewell’s Curse of the Crimson Altar (aka The Crimson Cult; 1968), which starred Karloff, Lee, and Steele, and Michael Armstrong’s The Haunted House of Horror (aka Horror House; 1969), which was to have featured Karloff, were contentious co-productions with American International Pictures, about which I’ll have a great deal more to say at a later date.

Tenser also joined forces with other notable producers, including Cohen on A Study in Terror (1965), the first film to pit Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper; Gordon on The Projected Man (1966); and Towers on Black Beauty. Like Hammer Films (which Tigon almost acquired in 1972) and Amicus Productions, Tenser had conspicuously less success in the SF genre with such non-starters as The Body Stealers (aka Thin Air), the interstellar sex romp Zeta One (both 1969), and Sasdy’s Doomwatch (1972), spun off from the eponymous BBC-TV series. Consciously evoking the style of his homegrown rivals, The Creeping Flesh (1972) was Tenser’s only effort teaming frequent co-stars Cushing–who called Sewell’s Tigon opus The Blood Beast Terror (aka The Vampire-Beast Craves Blood; 1967) his own worst film–and Lee, reuniting them with Hammer and Amicus veteran Francis.

There may be a better book to be written about Tenser, especially since Hamilton’s prose is rarely scintillating and marred by poor proofreading, but I doubt there’s a more complete one, given that he drew on exclusive interviews, original production files, and private correspondence to make the story of Tenser’s business dealings genuinely absorbing. In particular, Hamilton had enviable access to his candid subject, who produced one more film, Peter Walker’s Frightmare (1974), after leaving Tigon and died in 2007, two years after Beasts in the Cellar was published. Tenser’s time in the spotlight was barely a decade, due to the collapsing market for the kinds of films he made, yet his was an important chapter in genre history, and this comprehensive, lavishly illustrated account more than does him justice.