Trefoile (Tallulah Bankhead), the mother of her deceased fiancé whom she'd never met. Patricia Carroll (Stefanie Powers) has just arrived in London to marry her fiancé but first decides to pay a brief visit to Mrs.
So it was odd that she decided to return to the screen after an absence of almost twelve years (her last movie appearance was a cameo as herself in Main Street to Broadway in 1953) to headline Die! Die! My Darling!, a Hammer Films production distributed by Columbia.īased on the novel Nightmare by Anne Blaisdell and adapted to the screen by Richard Matheson ( The Incredible Shrinking Man, House of Usher ), Die! Die! My Darling! charts a young American woman's descent into a nightmare of captivity, psychological torment and physical abuse orchestrated by an elderly religious fanatic. And the reason she was a unique case was because she was primarily famous as a New York and London stage actress who never really attained the status of a movie star despite several promising roles including Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944). But one actress who stood out from the rest in her solo venture into the macabre was Tallulah Bankhead, the star attraction of Die! Die! My Darling! (1965), aka Fanatic. Crawford found plenty of opportunities separately in this new subgenre. Barbara Stanwyck was plagued by nightmares in William Castle's The Night Walker (1964, Universal), Deborah Kerr ran afoul of devil worshippers in Eye of the Devil (1966, MGM), Joan Fontaine became the target of a witch coven in The Devil's Own (1966, Fox), and, of course, Ms. Olivia de Havilland was coaxed into taking over Joan Crawford's villainous role after she dropped out of Hush.Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) for 20th-Century-Fox and then appeared as a victim of homicidal hoodlums in Lady in a Cage (1964) for Paramount. In the wake of Warner Bros.' What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the gothic horror surprise hit of 1962 featuring Hollywood legends Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in grotesque roles, almost every major studio followed suit, releasing Grand Guignol thrillers starring aging divas of the silver screen. Trefoile embraces her dead son's portrait and murmurs, "Stephen, they hurt me." While Alan telephones the police, Anna, having discovered her dead husband's body in the basement, stabs the old woman in the back. Trefoile tells him Patricia has already left, but he discovers the truth and breaks down the cellar door just as the crazed woman is about to perform a death ritual over the terrified Patricia. Eventually, Patricia's fiancé, Alan Glentower, becomes so worried about her absence that he drives to the village. Trefoile kills Harry in the basement of the house. All of Patricia's efforts to escape are thwarted until she tempts the lecherous Harry into releasing her, but the plan fails when the now totally deranged Mrs. Trefoile locks the young girl in the attic and prepares to "cleanse her soul" so that she will be fit to be reunited with Stephen in the hereafter. Upon learning that Patricia is soon to marry, Mrs. One day she receives a courtesy visit from her dead son's former fiancée, Patricia Carroll. Her only companions are a sullen housekeeper, Anna the woman's brutish husband, Harry and an imbecile gardener, Joseph. Trefoile, an aging religious fanatic who lives in a desolate country home in an English village, devotes her days to reading the Bible and mourning her son, Stephen, who died a few years earlier in a car crash.
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