One of the hardest beings from Classical Mythology (well, three beings, actually) to properly depict is (are?) the Gorgons. Three sisters, who were cursed with having living snakes for hair and being generally so ugly that to see them in full view would literally petrify you with fear. For obvious reasons, it’s going to be darned difficult to make any image of them that’s even close to the Real Thing.

Most artists have gone with making the woman “plain”, and using basic snake forms about six inches long to frame her face. Easier to do in animation than in live action.

Hammer Films, in this interpretation of the legend, decided to go with a headdress of balloon-like snakes that could be made to move through the use of air hoses. It barely worked. They did, however, make up for it – mostly – by limiting the Gorgon’s on-screen appearance.

Anyway, the movie opens with text setting up the story over a matte background painting of an old mostly-ruined castle in a forest at night.

Our first real scene has an artist working on a portrait of his girlfriend (don’t worry about their names). She’s bugging him about getting married; he doesn’t seem that interested. Then she lets him know that she’s pregnant. That changes things – he decides to go off into the night to talk to her father about something. She panics for some reason, and runs off after him into the forest. She runs into trouble – she screams, collapses, and presumably dies. The next day, after her body is recovered, the police are checking the forest for clues, and they come across the artist’s body hanging from a tree – obviously a suicide.

We’re clearly in standard Hammer Gothic Horror here. Especially with Peter Cushing as the town’s “medical examiner” (he seems to be the only doctor around). Christopher Lee shows up later. After the artist’s father comes to town to investigate his son’s mysterious death and then dies himself (but not before writing a letter to his other son, Paul, asking him to basically avenge him). Paul soon shows up in town, accompanied by his mentor, Christopher Lee, a Distinguished Professor of Arcane Knowledge. They both want to find out what killed Paul’s family members, and get to the bottom of whatever has been killing people in the area over the past few years. Which, one might add, has been covered up by Cushing and the local Police Chief Patrick Troughton….

If you can avoid paying too much attention to the mythological oddness and other questionable things (don’t they have to break the body statues in order to fit them into standard coffins?), you’ll get a well made atmospheric Gothic horror movie – that meets the usual Hammer standards. Cushing and Lee are incapable of giving a bad performance, and the rest of the cast is competent at the least. Everything works well enough, even if the final reveal of the gorgon is something of a letdown.

If I were doing a similar movie today, I’d take advantage of computer graphics to make the snakes on the gorgon. Shouldn’t be too hard. And I’d only film her in dim light, via quick glimpses, through mist at a distance, from behind, or otherwise obscured. Leave things to the imagination. As to defeating her? I suppose infrared goggles or even mirrored sunglasses would help. Just never show her clearly until after she’s dead, and you can say that whatever gives her the power to petrify has drained away.