“What are we to make of such an apocryphal story?”

Brain surgery is probably stressful enough without the patient waking up mid-cerebral fiddle to scream “Leave my soul alone!”, but so begins the final ‘Hammer House of Horror’ episode: ‘The Mark of Satan’.

Edwin is a new mortuary assistant who, after attending the post-mortem of the above gentleman, begins to notice some strange goings-on at the hospital and at the home he shares with his bitter mother and a young woman with a newborn baby. Always feeling like he is being watched and starting to see the number 9 everywhere, is Edwin suffering from paranoid delusions or are ‘they’ really out to get him?

A psychological thriller that plays like a cross between a gender-bent ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘The Number 23’, ‘The Mark of Satan’ is a dark and bleak instalment of ‘Hammer House of Horror’, much like 'The Silent Scream', but it still manages to find the time to insert some splashes of fun, like a splendid satanic hair-do, in among Edwin’s march toward his inevitable fate.