THE APPOINTMENT: A horror that grips you and never lets go

For forty years, The Appointment was regarded among cinephiles as a lost, almost legendary film—until someone discovered it in a dusty basement. But did the legend withstand confrontation with reality?

After school, teenage violin prodigy Sandy Freemont decides to take a shortcut home through a small wooded area known as Cromley Wood. While walking through the forest, she hears a voice calling her name and the sound of children laughing from the thickets. Moments later, Sandy is pulled into the underbrush, and she vanishes without a trace. Local rumors swirl about a serial killer, witchcraft, and other supernatural forces, leading authorities to fence off the woods with iron barriers. Three years later, Joanne, one of Sandy’s classmates from music school, is preparing for her stage debut. She most wants her father Ian, a busy engineer, to attend, but on the day of the concert, Ian has to leave for a work trip. The night before his departure, Ian and his wife Dianna are plagued by nightmares in which he is involved in a car accident, while other family members are haunted by the appearance of three black dogs. Something strange begins happening in the waking world, too.

Lindsey C. Vickers began his career in the film industry as an assistant director, working on projects such as John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966), Anthony Page’s Innocent Bystanders (1968), and Christopher Miles’s The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970). In the early 1970s, he joined Hammer Film Productions, honing his craft on the sets of films like Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) by Peter Sasdy, The Vampire Lovers (1970) by Roy Ward Baker, The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) by Jimmy Sangster, and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971) by Michael Carreras and Seth Holt. In 1978, Vickers made his directorial debut with the short film The Lake, a horror story about a couple vacationing near a house where a brutal murder took place. The film was shown in theaters before Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981) and caught the attention of British TV producers, who hired Vickers for an ambitious project.

The project was a series of telefilms titled A Step in the Wrong Direction, funded by the National Coal Board’s pension fund and intended for international markets. Vickers was slated to direct five episodes and write scripts for three. However, the plan collapsed after the completion of the first segment, titled The Appointment. Worse still, the creators spent nearly two years searching for a theatrical distributor, but no one was interested in a television production. In the end, the film was released on VHS in 1982 and occasionally aired on British TV. The Appointment fell into obscurity (as did Vickers, who was so disheartened that he abandoned directing entirely). To make matters worse, the master tape and most copies were lost. Only in 2021 was a broadcast tape of the film discovered in the archives of Sony Pictures, allowing the British Film Institute to re-release it on Blu-ray.

This film is unquestionably worth attention and impressively crafted: shot largely on location on 35mm film, with practical effects and sound design that remain striking even today (the car accident sequence is a true masterpiece). The Appointment is especially notable for its evocative, ominous atmosphere—it begins with a figurative earthquake, and the tension slowly escalates. From the outset, the film grabs the viewer by the throat and doesn’t let go until the final minute. The horror stems primarily from what is unseen, hinted at rather than shown; there’s no gore or explicit violence, but plenty of unease and ambiguity. Vickers constructed this grim tale of malevolent forces lurking within an ordinary family with remarkable skill—and one can only lament that he withdrew from the industry afterward. Who knows what else he might have created, had it not been for the unfortunate and undeserved failure of The Appointment?