The 10 Greatest Horror and Sci-Fi Roles of Michael Gough

5. The Celestial Toymaker

Michael Gough did time in a couple of Doctor Who adventures, probably most notably in 1966 as The Celestial Toymaker, opposite original Doctor William Hartnell. The Toymaker is a super-powerful, seemingly immortal alien, dressed in vaguely Fu Manchu drag, who uses sentient beings as toys. Most of the four part series is not extant, but the one known surviving episode may be found on the Lost in Time Collection of Rare Episodes: The William Hartnell Years and the Patrick Troughton Years.

Come to think of it, might not Gough, like his Richard III castmate Troughton, have made an interesting Doctor himself?

4. The Corpse (or is he?)

Known as Crucible of Horror in the U.S., The Corpse, an uneasy mix of terror and Strindbergian domestic tragedy (heavy on the uneasy), allows Gough a slightly more subtle take on his standard rotten creep. Very slightly more subtle. Here’s he’s a father maintaining tyrannical control over his upper-middle-class family through psychological bullying of a really queasy sort.

We see his wife and daughter revolt, or maybe we just see the fantasy of their revolt; it’s up for interpretation. What we definitely see is a classic turn by Gough, padding around the house with an obsessive wary watchfulness in his eyes or speaking with such vile condescension that it seems to deprive us, along with the characters, of oxygen.

Michael Gough’s real-life son and daughter-in-law, Simon Gough and Sharon Gurney, played his son and daughter in this movie, which somehow gives it an extra level of queasiness.

3. Satan’s Slavemaster

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPEHfhJuDY0

As dastardly as Gough could be, it’s only natural that now and then he was directly in league with The Devil himself. Along with Christopher Lee and Barbara Steele, he was tangled up with an evil cult as an ominous butler in one of Boris Karloff’s last films, Curse of the Crimson Altar (called The Crimson Cult in the U.S.). But Gough was large and in charge in 1974’s tawdry Satan’s Slave, also known as Evil Heritage.

He’s a satanic priest who plans to sacrifice his niece (Candace Glendenning) to the powers of darkness. He also wears a ‘70s-style mustache in this one, making him seem extra-special-evil.

2. Dr. Storm

It’s possible that my particular partiality for the low-budget nightmare Horror Hospital came from the circumstances under which I saw it, back in the ‘70s. It was the second bill at a drive-in in rural Pennsylvania, and my friends and I had just sat through the dreary first feature, some tedious and unpleasant American “roughie” that had been marketed as a horror picture. We were in a crappy mood when Horror Hospital started, but as soon as we saw a blade extend from the side of a Rolls Royce and decapitate a fleeing couple, neatly flipping their severed heads into a sack, we honked the horn with joy.

The film which ensued did not disappoint us. At its heart is Gough, sardonic and power-mad as ever, as Dr. Storm, who from his wheelchair runs a health farm at which the patients are lobotomized. The very mod hero (Robin Askwith) and heroine (Vanessa Shaw), would just as soon split, if it’s all the same to Dr. Storm, but this proves difficult, since in addition to the lethal Rolls, the area around the hospital is patrolled by killers on motorcycles. Storm also has a secret, but I won’t give it away in case you want to see this under-appreciated, tongue-in-cheek bit of weirdness.

1. Emeric Belasco

At the end [spoiler alert!]of the 1973 haunted-house chiller The Legend of Hell House, scripted by Richard Matheson, ghostbuster Roddy McDowall finds the desiccated corpse of Emeric Belasco, the unquiet spirit that haunts the title pile of bricks. Said corpse, seated upright in a chair, is played by an uncredited Michael Gough.

It’s not much of a role, but a fitting place to end this list, because it shows how much malevolence Gough could project just sitting there.

Previously by M.V. Moorhead

The Top Ten Triumphs of Tracey Walter

10 Bizarrely Great Manifestations of Brother Theodore