Taste of Fear

• Hammer built the film at Elstree Studios instead of its usual home base, Bray Studios, because the plot's key scene — a corpse hidden in a swimming pool — needed a water tank Bray couldn't accommodate; the crew also shot Riviera location exteriors to match the story's French setting.
• Columbia Pictures picked up U.S. distribution and retitled it Scream of Fear, releasing it about four months after the UK debut with roughly ten minutes trimmed from the run time.
• Director Seth Holt and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, both coming out of the recently shuttered Ealing Studios, gave the film a stark black-and-white look that stood apart from Hammer's usual lush Gothic color pictures.
• Christopher Lee, who plays the French doctor Gerrard, later called it 'the best film that I was in that Hammer ever made,' praising Seth Holt's direction, the cast and the story — a comment about the film overall, not specifically his own performance.
• The film became one of Hammer's most profitable productions, grossing around $800,000 in Europe alone and proving the studio could land a hit outside its usual period Gothic horror lane.
• Writer Jimmy Sangster has said his real inspiration wasn't Hitchcock's Psycho but Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1955), which he caught the same week — the swimming-pool corpse and the scheme to drive an heiress mad are lifted almost directly from Clouzot's playbook.

The film's true ancestor isn't Psycho but Clouzot's Les Diaboliques — right down to the corpse stashed in the pool. And Sangster's version gets colder than its model: the twist reveals the 'Penny' we've been watching isn't even alive by the time the story starts. The real Penny is already dead; the woman on screen is running her own revenge play. The gaslighting isn't just cruelty for its own sake — it's evidence-gathering aimed at the people who killed her.

The Riviera setting is no accident: the blinding sunshine and holiday atmosphere become weapons of psychological disorientation. Penny's deterioration feels worse because nothing around her looks like it should harbor a threat.

Jane's performance of the concerned, fragile stepmother reads as a commentary on the performance of feminine innocence — she and her co-conspirator weaponize the very helplessness and vulnerability the genre typically assigns to women, turning that expected sympathy into cover for a murder plot.

Penny Appleby rolls into her stepmother's French Riviera estate in a wheelchair, already primed for trouble. Then she sees her father's corpse lounging in a chair — and the body vanishes before anyone else can confirm it. What follows is a precision-engineered gaslight job: everyone around Penny insists she's losing her grip, and the film lets you doubt her right alongside them. But somebody wants her broken, and the Mediterranean sunshine can't bleach out the rot underneath.