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Demons of the mind

This is the last part of a brief exploration of three films starring Paul Jones, ex-vocalist of the pop group Manfred Mann.

The film is a period set horror exploring the minds and lives of the troubled Zorn family ruled tyrannically by Robert Hardy whose terror of a supposed inherited madness leads him to imprison and mistreat the children he believes may be in its thrall. 

The World that Jones Made: 

Part one:

In the early 1960s Paul Jones was the singer with Manfred Mann singing on hits such as – 54321, Pretty Flamingo etc. Quitting the band in 1966 Jones conducted a brief foray into films before settling into a comfortable seeming groove with his own Blues Band, radio spots and reborn Christianity (of which more later).

As an actor he comes across as a little pallid and unassuming – but believable enough in the roles he took, roles that conversely were in at least three very difficult ‘outside’ productions. Obscure for many years, these films are finally available on official DVD releases. Films such as The Committee, with its Pink Floyd soundtrack and maverick cameo by Arthur Brown and a script by a professor from the London School of Economics  (then a ‘revolutionary’ hotbed and the very antithesis of what it is today).

The director of that film was a young buck called Peter Sykes and he cast Jones again in his film Demons of the Mind, a late Hammer horror film of unusual thematic complexity (written by the late Christopher Wicking) and visual assurance.

Jones made his debut in 1967 with Privilege ostensibly a typical rise and fall of the pop star saga but actually a strange, controversial and prophetic narrative from Peter Watkins whose previous film The War Game, (now critically feted of course) had been banned by the perennially gutless BBC.  In fact the film that Privilege most closely resembles is one upon which it was clearly a major influence, Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd movie The Wall.
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