The vanishing British horror: unearthing The Appointment

The VHS edition may have been provocatively packaged in a striking box, adorned with sinister black dogs baying beneath a blood-red sky (just as the ‘video nasty’ furore was beginning), but The Appointment was not a sleazy shocker. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I first sneaked a look at it as an impressionable kid, and it wasn’t bloody, violent or salacious. Barely any yucky stuff. Yet it was a horror still: for unsettling ideas lurked within it. As a carefully composed study in dreamlike occult terror, there was no gore of the slasher variety, or of the Hammer horror kind either. Contemporary, not gothic, it was something strange and unique. 

No spoilers here, but it’s a slow-build story of malevolent psychic forces and ominous omens, in which a slightly pompous middle-class businessman (perfectly played by The Wicker Man star Edward Woodward) unwisely decides that a business meeting is more important than his precociously gifted adolescent daughter’s (fiery-eyed Samantha Weysom) violin recital. This, despite recurrent nightmares and the growing unease of his wife (conveyed with piquant sensitivity by Jane Merrow). Nebulous tensions and internalised terrors mount mysteriously over the course of the film to culminate in a truly unusual and overtly cinematic anxiety-horror. 

Yet it was never seen at the cinema. Nor was it meant to be. The Appointment was supposed to be the first in a series of prestige British television films, to be sold around the world, under the umbrella title A Step in the Wrong Direction. Finance came from the National Coal Board Pension Fund, making The Appointment the first film ever to be wholly budgeted from a pension fund. And it would be expensively shot on 35mm (predominantly on location) and boast a great script, outstanding pre-digital special effects, fine performances and a lovely, lush score. 

American television networks initially expressed keen interest. There was talk of 13 films in the series. The film’s writer-director, Lindsey Vickers – a BFI-trained cineaste, who’d made the spooky 1978 short The Lake – was to pen three and direct five. But it was not to be. After production team relationships disintegrated, the projected series collapsed. Disenchanted, Vickers stepped away from the debut feature on which he’d lavished such love, care and attention. Soon after, he gave up filmmaking altogether. 

Thankfully the film was already finished. But, despite delighting festival audiences overseas, The Appointment was never the success it deserved to be. It briefly crept out on home video, and was glimpsed, regionally, on UK television in the early 1990s. Vickers missed his own chance to revisit it though, as – ominously – there was a power cut in his region. 

Then, wraithlike, it disappeared. The British transmission tape vanished. One or two 35mm prints had been struck – one of which definitely screened at BAFTA – but they too, like the original negative they’d been made from, seemed, somehow, to have been spirited away.  

Much has been written over the decades of the epic and ultimately semi-successful search for the longer, director-approved cut of The Wicker Man. But it might be argued that’s been a walk in the park compared to tracking down The Appointment. Sadly, not a frame of Vickers’ film is currently known to exist on safety stock. Indeed, for years, all that’s been available have been ancient VHS and Betamax copies, flickery veterans of umpteen three-night rentals from long-defunct early-1980s video shops.

Latterly these have been digitised and uploaded to YouTube, with the migraine-inducing addition of rollicking tape roll. Meanwhile, a small army of devotees have been searching for better master material; and after a multitude of disappointments – as I was poring over the director’s old desk diaries for clues – an American one-inch tape master was at last turned up, by my BFI colleague, Douglas Weir.  

“After several years of research and hunting through film archives, storage facilities and collections, we found a one-inch broadcast tape, held in the Sony Pictures archive, left over from a long-forgotten television broadcast,” says Weir. “Stories like these highlight the importance of film archives and film preservation.”

Now released as the 44th Blu-ray on the BFI’s Flipside imprint, which celebrates unusual British films that may have slipped off the critical radar, The Appointment has been lovingly remastered from this sole-existing source, with the director’s approval, so it can be enjoyed at home once again.

After so long, and so many fruitless attempts to find a print, a multitude of frustrating dead-ends, umpteen infuriating near misses, the occasional stack of mislabelled cans, and vault investigations that yielded other films called The Appointment but never our The Appointment, it’s no wonder that Lindsey Vickers and his wife Jan – who have both given their time, energy and passionate support so generously to this release – came to think of this as their ‘haunted film’. 

There’s certainly something slightly spooky about the fact that it’s taken 40 years to reach a point where it can be released on a disc. Now, at last, this unique chiller can be more properly resummoned, to haunt the rest of us too. Accompanied on Blu-ray by an extensive array of interviews, commentaries, galleries and extras, it will surely begin to work its peculiar, mischievously malevolent magic on film lovers once more. 

The Appointment is out now on BFI Blu-ray.