Peter Sykes and Christopher Wicking reject the era of Victorian science and reason that most Hammer films seem to take place in and cast Demons of the Mind seemingly back into the Middle Ages. There Christopher Wicking interestingly deconstructs the Hammer Gothic by way of the early psychiatric movement of experimenters like Krafft-Ebing, Wilhelm Wundt and Lightner Witmer. The sets and photography are much more brooding and sombre than the usual florid colours of the Hammer product. Peter Sykes creates a series of striking images – Patrick Magee’s hypnotising of Robert Hardy, which comes filled with flashes of images across Hardy’s face depicting the obscenities of his acts; the scene where Gillian Hills is coldly and clinically bled; the course of a coach racing through the forest with a hand clawing out a barred window; and Robert Hardy’s end impaled on a flaming cross.

However, much of the film is regrettably too murkily plotted to emerge in plain sight – the script never clearly resolves between the well-conveyed incest and hereditary madness themes or whether the children are products of the Baron’s madness and obsession. When the initial ideas run out of steam, the film falls back on the traditional staples of the genre – the lynch mobs of villagers, the reckless romantic hero, the murky goings-on in the woods, the hulking manservant. It never quite works, nevertheless Demons of the Mind can be considered an interesting failure.