Over the last month we’ve been watching lots of horror films from the 1960s and 70s, a period in which psychologised themes took centre stage in British genre cinema. One particularly offbeat example is Alan Birkinshaw’s Killer’s Moon (1978) which depicts the escape and murderous rampage of four inmates of a ‘cottage’ psychiatric hospital in the Lake District. Dressed in their patient whites, the escapees bear a striking resemblance to the droogs in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and they are equally as violent; we see them tormenting a coachload of choirgirls, raping, dismembering and murdering indiscriminately. With uncredited input on the script from the writer Fay Weldon (who is also Birkinshaw’s sister), the film’s gender politics are hard to read, and it simultaneously relishes in and pokes fun at the sleaziness of the sexploitation films that were popular earlier in the decade.

As the horror unfolds, we are shown scenes of suited men, doctors and ministers, sat around a table debating how such a thing could have happened. The doctors inform the minister that the patients were undergoing experimental dream and LSD therapy. One psychiatrist hypothesises that the escaped men are undergoing a collective hallucination and believe they are experiencing a shared dream, thus emboldening them to act without concern for the harm they may inflict on others.

This shared hallucination works as a metacommentary on the violent nature of media, suggesting that real harm can come of participating in imaginary crimes.  At the same time, the use of LSD therapy seems to express an anxiety about the effect of the counterculture on wider society and the subsequent shift to more permissive, liberal values. The sharp shifts between shots of the doctors and ministers discussing the escape in London and those depicting the havoc being wreaked in the Lake District highlights the professionals’ removal from the situation and mocks their ability to curb such violence. A quirky and ambiguous artefact, the film is quintessentially British with an almost carry-on approach to sex and violence. At the same time, with its cynical take on psychiatry, it demonstrates the influence of a peculiarly British wave of 70s horror, including films by Freddie Francis and Pete Walker, that display a mistrust both of liberal values and social bodies.