User Reviews

A three hundred year old curse is revived in this tale set in 1880's England. Lady Beatrice Mervyn (Patricia Manning) murdered her abusive husband in the year 1580, and the man's mother vowed that someone would die every generation until someone discovers the way to open a secret compartment in a cabinet that hides the murder weapon.

The story is strong on atmospherics and a sense of foreboding as the present day Mervyn's live in denial of the ancient curse. In actuality, George Mervyn (Peter Forster) is a fatalist regarding the legend, fearing that his wife Lucy (Jennifer Raine) may be the next victim of the Lady Beatrice apparition. No one believes visiting cousin Eve Bishop (Olive Sturgess) when she relates her encounters with Lady Beatrice, but they relent in allowing her to stay in the room where Hugh Mervyn was murdered three hundred years earlier.

Ultimately, stories like this rely on rational people doing the completely irrational. It's bad enough that one would agree to sleep in a haunted room to make a point, and even more senseless to tempt fate by doing it alone. I'm sure old Alan (David Frankham) would have been more than willing to spend the night with the woman he wound up proposing to. For all of it's build-up, the story eventually just winds down rather serenely instead of reaching a grand climax. The main question I had in all of this was why didn't anyone ever just latch those darn windows shut.

"The Closed Cabinet" has been knocked for a lack of suspense, and for the "All will be made right in the end" nature of the story, but the fun is in the solving of the puzzle of a curse whose precise meaning only becomes clear at the end. It doesn't matter that we know a happy ending is coming--The suspense lies in the events leading to the denouement (including storms which occur only outside the haunted room--ghost storms?), with the final appearance of the mournful Lady Beatrice, during which the plucky Evie finds herself (almost) reenacting the stabbing of the sleeping, no-good husband. But (presumably through an epic act of will) she instead cuts herself with the dagger, thus breaking the curse (while making sense of its odd wording). The lighting effect used for Lady Beatrice's ghost is superb: She is not transparent, but neither does she seem fully present. A semi-apparition? Again, nice to have a leading lady not given to hysteria in the face of the supernatural, and for once, we have a family hex which is unearned--it's vengeance for a wholly justified homicide. The story's Victorian source is pretty much given away by the detail of Lady B. Taking her own life after killing her jerk husband. She should have thrown a party and told the evil mother where to stick her curse.