So much promise! And FIVE years before The Shining

This is a movie I vaguely remembered from my childhood, spent over ten years trying to figure out what it was (I only remembered the man hanging from the tree in the opening/closing shots, and a walking chase through the empty school with stuff covered in sheets).

Watching it now immediately reminded me of The Shining - which was published five years later. The daylight shots of the school feel like the Overlook Hotel in terms of space and spookiness. The scene where the Headmaster breaks through the wooden door panels to open the door from the other side, while a woman is in the room screaming for her life - is SO similar to Kubrick's adaptation.

What a waste of a story though! The briefly mentioned part about the children burning to death and the headmaster losing his arm in the fire is pretty horrific - but nothing is really made of this! A Shining-like ghost story would have really added another level to the context. The spookiness of the empty school isn't really used - only in two notable scenes.

Peter Cushing was clearly only available for a day or two, shooting his scenes only with Judy but not with the other actors (even his on-screen wife). Using just his voice and then his arm to pull a rope in the final scenes is such a lame substitute, they should have managed the production a bit better.

Overall it feels like a really promising idea, that with script development could have become a chilling classic. Its like the production team didn't quite believe in themselves enough to do it justice, and knocked out a kind of short-hand shoddy version of the script instead.