The Scare Salon

Time once again to dive back into Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff, and this time around, we’re discussing season 2, episode 10, “The Closed Cabinet.”

Based on an anonymous short story that was published in Weird Tales in May 1923 (and may have been floating around for a while before that), the episode was adapted for the screen by Kay Lenard and Jess Carneol, and directed by Ida Lupino. Although it’s a pretty stereotypical gothic ghost story, complete with a spooky old mansion, a white-clad female specter, dark and stormy nights, and a family curse, I found myself enjoying this one quite a bit; it had that eerie, old-school atmosphere that I love, beautiful art direction and cinematography, and an excellent score (by Jerry Goldsmith!) that really enhanced the vibe.

In the cold open, it’s the year 1580, and a woman whose name we later learn is Lady Beatrice Mervyn (Patricia Manning) is clearly planning something nefarious. During a raging storm, her drunk-ass husband is asleep on the canopy bed, and Beatrice’s voice-over informs us that essentially she’s sick of his abusive shit and isn’t going to allow him to live through the night. Hell yeah, sis. Using a secret mechanism on the titular closed cabinet, she retrieves a dagger from a hidden drawer and stabs the hell out of the soused motherfucker, whose name is Hugh. She then stabs herself in the abdomen and falls dead to the floor.

A maid (Myra Carter) discovers their bodies and yells her head off, drawing the attention of Hugh’s mother, Dame Alice (Doris Lloyd). Upon seeing the still-bleeding corpse of her son, she (for whatever reason) utters a rather long-winded curse on the Mervyn family, which goes, “Out of evil comes death! In each generation there shall be a Mervyn who will bring shame and death to the family, for eternity. An end there shall be, but it is beyond the wisdom of man to fix it, or the wit of man to discover it. Who fathoms the riddle, lifts the curse. Pure blood, stained by the blood stained knife, heals the Mervyn shame, ends the Mervyn’s strife!” Brevity is not her strong suit, it would seem. The maid asks her what in the Samuel Langhorne hell all that means, but Dame Alice just stashes the bloody dagger back in the secret drawer and goes about her day.

After Boris Karloff’s introduction, we then jump ahead three centuries, to 1880, now following later descendents of the Mervyn clan. George and Lucy Mervyn (Peter Forster and Jennifer Raine, respectively) have been married three years and live in the ancestral castle where the murder in the opening scene took place.

A cousin named Evie Bishop (Olive Sturgess) arrives by coach to visit them, excited to see the place, especially after all the spooky stories she heard about it from a woman on the train on the journey up there. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, she says, but she heard there’s a haunted room, and she’d very much like to stay in it, if that’s all right with her hosts (a woman after my own heart). Neither George nor Lucy believe in the supernatural either, and have no problem at all with Evie staying there.

One person who seems to have a small problem with it, though, is Alan Mervyn (David Frankham), who is George’s younger brother and clearly has a thing for Evie (and she for him). Alan is a city guy and never visits the castle, mainly because he does absolutely believe in ghosts and in the family curse. But when he heard that Evie was coming to stay, he decided to put his fears aside and travel to the castle as well, so he could keep an eye on her and perhaps protect her if any paranormal shenanigans began to occur. A good egg, that Alan.

When Lucy shows Evie the haunted room, Evie is enchanted at how lovely it is, and particularly notices the gorgeous cabinet. Lucy tells her that no one’s ever figured out how to open it, and then says in a somewhat amused tone that although it’s true a lot of people died violently in this very room, she thinks it’s less a function of some magical curse and more that the men in the Mervyn family are hotheaded, homicidal assholes.

Later that evening, Evie emerges from her room to head downstairs to dinner when she sees the figure of a dark-haired woman down at the end of the hall. She calls out, but the woman doesn’t answer, and then seems to disappear around a corner. Evie follows, but can’t find the woman anywhere. She doesn’t seem to think this is a ghost at first, but of course the audience knows it is, because we’ve already seen Lady Beatrice at the beginning of the episode.

As Evie goes down the stairs, she overhears a tense argument between Alan and George. Alan is of the opinion that George is putting Lucy’s life in danger by living in the castle, and begs him to move somewhere else. George harshly chides Alan for his superstition. They clam up when Evie comes into the room, but Alan twigs onto the fact that she heard them and tries to allay her fears.

When Lucy arrives, Evie asks if their other houseguest is going to be joining them, and George and Lucy look at her like she has three heads, telling her no one else is staying in the castle. Evie insists she saw a woman upstairs, but George blows her off, telling her she must have been dreaming. Good old Alan appears to believe her, though, and after dinner even shows her a portrait of Lady Beatrice, asking if that was who she saw. Evie states that it was, and even though she’s just received confirmation that she saw a ghost, she doesn’t seem particularly frightened; she’s actually pretty fascinated by the whole thing. That was actually one of the things I liked about her character; she wasn’t a stereotypical damsel in distress who would shriek and faint at the sight of a spirit, but instead was curious and brave, striving to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Anyway, later that night, after the household has retired to bed, Evie is awakened in her room by a howling storm outside. She sees Beatrice again, and although the ghost doesn’t talk, Evie gets the sense that the woman is trying to tell her something.

The following morning, Evie has overslept, and the maid brings her some tea on a tray. Evie says that the storm kept her up most of the night, but the maid looks at her strangely, and says there was no storm. When she asks George, Lucy, and Alan about it, they all say the same thing; the night had been clear and unusually warm, though Lucy concedes that there may have been a storm and she just slept through it.

George is a mite cranky and says he has some business to attend to, but Alan says he’ll take Evie on a tour of the grounds so they can spend some time together. At one point, Evie enthusiastically asks if the castle has a dungeon, and Alan reluctantly says yes, because what’s a castle without a decent dungeon? Alan points out the door to it, and Evie is pumped, really eager to get in there (again, a woman after my own heart). Alan asks if she really wouldn’t rather see the birch arbor instead, but come on, man, you know the ladies love the morbid shit. He tells her he doesn’t know where the key is, but Evie convinces him to go ask Lucy for it, and off he toddles.

Before he can return, though, the key becomes entirely moot, because the dungeon door creaks open all by itself, and the intrepid Evie steps inside. The place is cavernous and lousy with thick cobwebs, through which we can make out the hulking shapes of various torture devices. Evie is seemingly in some kind of low-key trance, and doors keep opening ahead of her of their own accord, so she obligingly goes through them.

Eventually, she arrives in a secret room containing a bust of the murdered Hugh and a dusty cat o’nine tails. Beatrice appears to her again and points over to the other side of the chamber.

Meanwhile, Alan has returned and is frantically searching for Evie in the dungeon. Beatrice has disappeared by the time he finds her, but when Evie tells him that she saw the ghost, he doesn’t doubt her, which I thought was refreshing.

They go over to where Beatrice was pointing and find a coffin with Beatrice’s name and birth and death dates on it, as well as a mounted plaque that reads, “Where woman sinned, the maid shall win. But God help the maid who sleeps herein.” Alan exclaims that Evie has found Beatrice’s final resting place, which no one had been able to locate for three hundred years.

The pair go into the house to tell George about their discovery, but he’s a real dick about it for some reason, smacking a riding crop against his leg angrily and insisting that there’s no way Evie could have found Beatrice’s tomb after Mervyn men have been looking for it for centuries. I think he’s just mad that a girl did something his ever-so-manly ancestors failed to do, and he’s lashing out. Indeed, he gets so emotional that he almost smashes Alan’s face with the riding crop before Evie cries out and George realizes what a spectacular douche he’s being. This must be that Mervyn temper that Lucy was laughingly referring to earlier. Yikes. A cowed George throws the riding crop down in disgust and saunters off to think about what he’s done, but not before he expresses the opinion that the closed cabinet will only open after every last Mervyn (in this case, George and Alan, who are the last of the line) are dead.

Alan then explains to Evie the story behind Beatrice, including the fact that she killed her violent, abusive husband, and subsequently had said husband’s mom curse the Mervyn family in perpetuity. Evie is of the opinion that the curse can be broken, hence why she’s trying to figure out what’s going on; she wants to be able to marry Alan and have him be happy, without them constantly having to wonder if he’s going to die violently or do something violent to her. Alan is clearly touched by her optimism and determination, but isn’t quite sure how the whole thing is going to play out.

Later that night, after Alan tells Evie that he loves her and would marry her in a heartbeat if not for this pesky curse business, Evie goes to her room and tries to sleep. Right on cue, though, the phantom storm begins to rage outside, and Beatrice appears in the corner, looking stricken and insistent. Evie notices that Hugh is now lying in the bed drunk, just as he was on the night Beatrice killed him. Apparently possessed by Beatrice, Evie approaches the closed cabinet and turns the mechanism that opens the drawer. The dagger is still there, and Evie pulls it out, stalking over to the bed with Beatrice’s voice-over echoing in her head, saying how she’s going to kill Hugh for what he’s done to her. Evie raises the knife, looking as though she’s going to repeat the past, but then her own voice breaks through and she stops herself from stabbing him, grabbing the blade instead and slicing her own hand.

At this point, Beatrice looks as though she’s at peace, and says in Evie’s head, “The maid has won,” before fading away. Evie rushes out into the hall, calling for Alan, and when he arrives, she tells him what just happened, though when she shows him her hand, it doesn’t appear as though there’s a cut there. He says, “Poor Evie,” though, so maybe I just couldn’t see it?

Anyway, he follows her into the room and she tells him about Beatrice and Hugh and the whole “reliving the murder” situation, proving it to him by telling him the mechanism to open the drawer on the cabinet, which there’s really no way she could have known. The drawer opens and he sees the dagger, realizing that the curse might be lifted. This is confirmed when the whole cabinet door opens by itself, and they find a scroll inside that contains the last part of Dame Alice’s curse: “Pure blood, stained by the blood stained knife, heals the Mervyn shame, ends the Mervyn’s strife.” The couple embrace, with the implication that it’s now safe for them to marry, and that George and Lucy are in the clear too.

I actually really liked this episode; it’s not a super original plot, but it was eerie and comforting in the way good gothic ghost stories are. The acting was a tad stagy and the specifics of the curse weren’t all that clearly laid out (I mean, I guess there would be one Mervyn in every generation who would either come to a violent end or “shame” the family by killing someone else), but it was enough to get the gist. While I enjoy the crime-based episodes of Thriller as well, I hold a special place in my heart for the more supernatural, horror-based ones, so anytime one of the episodes goes in that direction, I’m totally down.

Anyway, that will do it for this installment; we’ve still got a long way to go, but slow and steady wins the race, I reckon. Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.