FEAR IN THE NIGHT: silliness on the big screen

Realism was never a strong point with Hammer movies.
Their stock in trade was the supernatural - ghosties, ghoulies, vampires, satanism and anything else that went bump in the night.
The films appeal to our fears and superstitions, and a willing suspension of disbelief is a prerequisite to truly enter into the world of Hammer.
That said, it's almost impossible to find anything good to say about the studio's 1972 release FEAR IN THE NIGHT.
Hammer's deep well of creativity had run dry by the time writer-director Freddy Sangster committed this monstrosity to celluloid. The only scary thing about it is just how ridiculous it is.
Starting with the title.
Other than the initial incident which, given the nocturnal habits of the lead character Peggy Heller (Judy Geeson), is - strictly speaking - more mid to late evening than nighttime, all of the fear-inducing events take place in daylight.
Peggy is the ultimate stock horror movie victim, the pretty but mentally fragile heroine who can can convince no-one of the reality of the horrible events happening to her because she's recovering from a nervous breakdown and is, therefore, subject to delusions with no-one need take seriously.
This device was beyond threadbare by 1972 having been worn down to a tiny nub by constant overuse in the preceding decades, and is just an annoying and totally implausible distraction.
And then there's the fear-inducing events, which involve Peter Cushing as an unknowingly deluded private school headmaster with an artificial arm and a seemingly bottomless fortune which allows him to indulge his delusion.
Cushing had loyally played all kinds of bizarre and ridiculous characters for Hammer over the decades but even he struggles to bring any kind of plausibility to this one. Another Hammer stalwart, Ralph Bates, similarly flounders as Peggy's husband and chief driver of the "I don't believe what you're telling me because you were mentally ill" storyline.
Had Sangster written this script eight years later FEAR IN THE NIGHT would have made for a fair to middling episode in the 'Hammer House of Horror' tv series, but as a 95 minute feature film it's a bust.