Lindsey Vickers obituary: onetime feature director behind rediscovered British horror The Appointment
The British director, who has died at 85, only got one shot at a feature film and it never had a cinema release, but The Appointment was rediscovered 40 years later and won fans in Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro and Charli XCX.
“I was something of a lost soul growing up in postwar Britain. I – like many others, I am sure – sought refuge in the magical world of cinema. I dreamt of making films, even as a boy, and, when walking around, I imagined what I saw was a tracking shot.” — Lindsey Vickers
Later, Lindsey Vickers wrote and directed just one feature film, The Appointment (1982), but he eloquently explored many of his dreams within it. It’s a superb slow-build story of malevolent psychic forces and ominous omens gathered, in which a slightly pompous middle-class businessman (The Wicker Man star Edward Woodward), despite recurrent nightmares involving savage dogs and the growing unease of his wife (Jane Merrow), unwisely decides that a business meeting is more important than his precociously-gifted adolescent daughter’s (fiery-eyed Samantha Weysom) violin recital. Nebulous tensions, possible pre-ordinations and internalised terrors mount mysteriously over the course of the film to culminate in a truly terrifying finale, which had been carefully storyboarded, image by image, comic-strip style: a stunningly kaleidoscopic coda to a unique anxiety-horror of the first order.
Unusually, finance came from the National Coal Board Pension Fund; The Appointment was the first film ever to receive its whole budget from a pension fund source. Acutely cinematic, it was expensively shot on 35mm – predominantly on location – and boasts outstanding pre-digital special effects, fine performances and a lovely score. Designed to be a prestige television movie for the international market, it would have made an equally terrific cinema release. But it was not to be. After production team relationships disintegrated, The Appointment was briefly out on home video before disappearing for 40 years. Disenchanted, Vickers soon gave up filmmaking altogether.
“I could have been a contender,” Vickers – always quoting his favourite movies – would shrug resignedly in more recent days, with a characteristically warm but wistful smile, when I visited him and his wife Jan, his staunchest supporter, for cups of tea and an endless supply of cakes, in a house filled with film books, Blu-rays, cuddly toys, pictures of dogs and a huge model rocket, painstakingly assembled in his upstairs office. An atomic-era schoolboy, Vickers was also a devotee of Dan Dare’s interstellar adventures in Eagle and otherworldly fantasies, which, alongside films, had helped him endure an austere childhood. He left school to become film-rewind boy at the Granada, Greenford, was promoted to projectionist, then moved into cinema management.
A job at BBC Television in Ealing, and a BFI training course, led Vickers into filmmaking. An unfinished short about Richmond, Surrey, caught the eye of documentarian Denis Mitchell, who hired him. Having learned on the job, Vickers diversified. He worked as second and third assistant director on Hammer horrors; then with John Frankenheimer as assistant director on Grand Prix (1966); and as assistant director on Inadmissible Evidence (1968) and The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970).
Further Hammer films, and commercials, followed, before he wrote and directed his exceptionally spooky ‘showreel’ short The Lake (1978). Elegant and atmospheric, as The Appointment would be, it similarly reflects Vickers’ preoccupation with troubled family life and is likewise imbued with undercurrents of mounting malevolence. It also features a rather fine dog (or, as proud dog-lovers Lindsey and Jan, inseparable since they got together back in the Hammer days, would have called him, “a woofer”) who would feature prominently again in The Appointment.
In the absence of any 35mm film materials – which hadn’t been seen in a dog’s age – it only became possible to reissue The Appointment following the unexpected discovery of a 1980s-era 1” video master a few years ago. Finally remastered and rereleased in the BFI Flipside Blu-ray series in July 2022, since then it’s been belatedly acclaimed by an eclectic array of cineastes, including Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro and acclaimed singer-songwriter Charli XCX, all of whom have at last had the opportunity to become engrossed by its peculiar, eerie visual poetry.
The Appointment recently played a brief but successful run in Paris cinemas. “The French know a bit about cinema,” the ever-modest Vickers reminded me, with a twinkle, when I told him. His film may even live up to the hyperbole of its original press pack, in which it was declared: “The most frightening TV movie ever”.
When I recently saw The Appointment make its London cinema premiere, at Picturehouse Greenwich, on 5 October 2025, I was most frightened at the prospect that I would suddenly realise it wasn’t as great on the big screen as I had always hoped. But I need not have worried. It was still fantastic. I just wish Lindsey could have been there, to see once more how wonderfully it worked. You might even say it worked like a dream. Just one film, Lindsey, but what a brilliant film.
Lindsey Vickers, 4 October 1940 to 2 November 2025