Captain Clegg (1962) represents a cross pollination of different genres that Hammer excelled in. It is at once a horror film, an adventure picture and a thriller. In the hands of veteran director Peter Graham Scott these shifting genres flow seamlessly one into the next. And at its anchor is the performance by Hammer stalwart Peter Cushing who elevates the material when it is at its weakest.
The most indelible image that Captain Clegg has to offer are the pirates on horseback in glowing skeleton costumes. This eerie apparition grabs a hold of the imagination in a way that the best of Hammer Horror often has. It’s a grim representation of post-colonial anxieties and resistance to the aristocracy. This loaded image occurs only twice in the film, but when it appears it strikes fear into the viewer.
Captain Clegg was produced as the second half of a double bill with The Phantom Of The Opera (1962). But unlike that film, Captain Clegg is far more original and daring in its aesthetic provocations. The horror elements of the film play into local folk legends that disguise a conspiracy to smuggle rum into and out of Britain. Horror, in Captain Clegg, is a kind of ruse employed by the titular captain to pull off his scheme. For the majority of the film the genre conventions employed are that of a thriller.
The weakness of the film derives from Scott’s inability to imbue the whole of the material with the same macabre atmosphere afforded the sequences of the glowing skeleton riders. A filmmaker such as Terence Fisher would have filled the film with deep reds and long shadows so that the fear and dread of the caper were more palpable. Scott handles shifts in genre mechanics well, but there isn’t that extra sensory cue to connect all of the film’s dramatic elements as a whole stylistically.
However, that single shortcoming hardly detracts from Captain Clegg. The film remains one of the unsung and under-seen entries in the Hammer filmography. The film’s playing with folklore gives it a decidedly modern and contemporaneous feeling linking it to the folk horror genre so popular today. Along with The Witches (1966), Captain Clegg is one of Hammer’s most idiosyncratic folk horror offerings.
