In 1957 Dorothy (Sheila Keith) and Edmund Yates (Rupert Davies) are put to trial for a series of murders with cannibalistic characteristics. They are sentenced to confinement in an asylum for the criminaly insane until such time as they are deemed “fit to take their place in society”.
15 years later doctors believe them to be “cured”. Thus they are released and retire to a creepy old farmhouse in the country. While Edmund is working as a chauffeur for a local aristocrat, Mrs.Yates is getting bored and takes out an ad in a London magazine offering her services as a tarot reader. Soon she is visited regularly by all kinds of people looking for guidance. The majority of her visitors are lonely and desperate individuals with no friends or family to speak of. It´s hardly surprising that Dorothy draws the DEATH card quite often, with foreseeable consequences. She is back to her old cannibalistic habits, killing unsuspecting folk and eating their crania.
Now things start to get more complex because Edward has a daughter – Jackie - from a previous marriage who was old enough at the time her father was being committed to understand what he and his second wife had been doing. She now lives in London and is – surprise, surprise! – the legal guardian of her younger half-sister Debbie, Edmund´s and Dorothy´s only child together, who was born shortly before her parents were locked away and assumes them to be dead.
Unfortunately, Jackie´s boyfriend, a budding psychiatrist, starts digging up matters from her past while Debbie runs of and falls in with a crowd of hard drinking and hard partying youths. After a brawl in a pub which leaves a bartender dead she has her first taste of blood. She seems to have inherited her mother´s sense of cruelty and unquenchable hunger for human flesh…
A classic of British horror. Watch it and you may never be able to look at a power drill without cold shivers running down your spine.