Fifty-six years before her much anticipated genre reappearance in M Night Shyamalan’s Trap (2024), perennial Disney sweetheart Hayley Mills entered the world of horror and exploitation by taking on the leading role in Twisted Nerve (1968). Directed and co-written by her husband Roy Boulting, the film was definitely not up Mills’ creative alley, as recounted in her memoir Forever Young, and it ultimately faced controversy over its implied correlation between intellectual disability and psychotic behavior. 

Mills, naturally, is the sweet faced heroine. Appearing with frequent co-star Hywell Bennett, she unwittingly becomes the target of the obsessive behavior of Martin, his character. Pretending to be cognitively impaired, Martin becomes a boarder in the home run by Mills’ slattern mother Joan, played with acidic grace by the great Billie Whitelaw..

Whitelaw, who provided the original The Omen with some of it’s many highlights as Damian’s obsessed nanny, is also a force of powerful attraction here. Her performance won her the BAFTA for supporting actress and the scene in which she tries to seduce Martin by wriggling her fingers into one of the front pockets of his jeans is pure cinematic salaciousness. 

Mills supplied the same sort of fresh faced honesty to her next project with Bennett, 1972’s Endless Night. Based on an Agatha Christie novel, she is an heiress named Ellie Thomsen here, allowing her to play someone that was a far cry from the working class innocent in the duo’s previous project. The actress’ charming yet dignified lightness is a perfect match for this character and the hiring of Swedish sexpot Britt Eklund to play her best friend is a brilliant casting choice of contrasts.

Despite warnings of doom from small town eccentrics, Ellie builds her new husband Michael’s (Bennett) dream home in a countryside valley with a notorious history. At first, Michael’s caustic relationship with Eklund’s overbearing Greta, Ellie’s longtime friend and professional companion, is the only major impetus to the neophyte couple’s happiness. But as murder and death raise their heads, someone eventually meets their inglorious end. Naturally, in true Christie style, many twists and turns are delivered until the real culprits are finally revealed. 

Unexpected tragedies also surrounded Mills in her second season appearance for the British horror anthology Thriller. Only A Scream Away (1974) finds her paired with a very handsome David Warbeck. Years before his Euro fame in such Fulci projects as Black Cat and The Beyond, Warbeck’s beginnings as a male model are apparent here and the two make a truly compatible pair. That danger lurks for Mills via a character played by the arbitrarily golden Gary Collins only adds to the story’s competent yet fairly standard psycho-from-the-past feel. 

Still beautifully active as of this writing, these projects ultimately prove that while the 80 year old Mills may not always favor the genre, it certainly always favors her. 

True Survivor:

In her memoir, Mills reveals that, when she was a young teenager at Catholic boarding school, a priest named Father Mike tried to lure her into an inappropriate relationship. Using her wits, she was able to extract herself from the situation. Her sense memory of the incident surely must have played into the authentic way that she portrayed the above roles, proving that, for the luckiest, a painful past can lead to an authentic artistic release. #triumphantsurvivor #bancatholicism #burnthechurch