The Flesh and the Fiends (1960) on Netflix
NR19601h 34mCrimeDramaThriller
Edinburgh, 1828: anatomist Dr. Robert Knox needs fresh cadavers for his anatomy lectures. He buys them from William Burke and William Hare, who murder lodgers to supply his demand.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.9/102,791 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Dr. Robert Knox lectures on the human body to crowds of medical students in Edinburgh, and sees it as his task to advance the medical profession. Because the law leaves few cadavers for teaching, his assistant Geoffrey Mitchell and a young student, Chris Jackson, buy specimens on his behalf. William Burke and William Hare, two drunken men, discover that a body fetches a good price and begin supplying the medical school. At a tavern where he pays them, Jackson meets Mary Patterson and becomes involved with her. Knox's ward and niece Martha has returned unexpectedly from a finishing school in Paris. His colleagues hold him in contempt, and he has little patience for them.
Cast
- June Powellas Maggie O'Hara
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Flesh and the Fiends (1960)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Censors forced John Gilling to rename the killers in his 1948 film The Greed of William Hart, and for The Flesh and the Fiends they still barred Burke and Hare's names from the title; chief censor John Trevelyan raised concerns over "potentially offensive sequences" but the film was passed uncut with an X rating.
- John Gilling, Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman formed Triad Productions specifically to make the film, which was the first horror movie to feature Peter Cushing that was not produced by Hammer Films.
- To limit similarities to Gilling's earlier Burke and Hare film and to Dylan Thomas's then-unproduced script on the same subject, filmed in 1985 as The Doctor and the Devils, the producers brought in Leon Griffiths to rewrite Gilling's original screenplay.
- Peter Cushing's drooping left eye as Dr Knox, played up in some posters but not the American one, matched the real Knox, whose left eye was destroyed and face disfigured by smallpox he contracted as an infant.
