There's more than a whiff of Beauty and the Beast to the fantasy folklore element that edges its way into the film and that may be real or the product of the troubled Helen's imagination, and it's she that provides the film with its emotional core.

The only surviving seven minutes of an ambitious-looking apocalyptic drama, in which a couple whose friend dies of a mysterious disease (at least that's what I'm guessing from what remains), so they bury the body and flee into town, where they discover that he was not the only one affected. It's likely for these reasons that there are a few glum looking exteriors in the UK-set 16mm films, but when the light is right, the film format really shines. In some cases, all of the film elements have been lost and we have only a standard definition video recording of a production that was shot on 16mm. Unsurprisngly, films that were shot on 16mm look a lot nicer when the restorations are sourced from the original film material, but even the rougher tape copies are perfectly watchable.The performances here are a little stronger than those in the preceding films, with three of Murphy's regular actors starting to polish their skills, and while I may have winced every time Hall says the word "Yes" (the one word that feels like it's being read off a cue card every time), when he silently stares at Shirley, he exudes an air of brooding menace that really works for his character. A small crew I was part of once shot for a whole day on the very same clockwork Bolex that Murphy favoured. Boasting all-new 2K restorations from archival 16mm and 8mm elements, as well as a number of new digital captures from Murphy’s personal tape masters, this extensive retrospective of the obsessive auteur’s work is bolstered by a wealth of bonus features, including surviving fragments from lost works, and a 120-page book, all of which provides the definitive account of the weird and wonderful worlds of Britain’s great unheralded DIY filmmaker. In the wonderfully titled essay Balsawood Babylon, he considerably expands on what has been discussed elsewhere in this set and provides a detailed breakdown of Murphy's life and career.

The photography lacks the sparkle of Secrets, but there's a great, De Palma-esque shot that frames the eye of one character against the background actions of another.I would think there's an unwritten rule somewhere that if you're making films on microscopic budgets, then you don't even attempt a feature-length drama based on an ancient legend, but either no-one told this to Murphy or he just didn't give a hoot – this was the movie he wanted to make, so he went and did it anyway. To start tinkering with the image to give it a more film-like grading at this stage would, I think, be inappropriate, and the drama itself is often so absorbing that it quickly ceased to be an issue for me. A psychodrama that oddly feels simultaneously plausible and a bit of a stretch, one whose situation I became more invested in than the characters, particularly the ominous clues that are dropped in the early scenes. With no-one on the island willing to come near a house that they believe is haunted, the couple advertise in England and secure the services of young Liz (Carol Aston). The first segment of a three-part retrospective look back at Murphy's career reveals how Atlantis made him popular with his fellow pupils (yes, he made it when he was still at school) because it featured several scantily clad women, and how this led to him landing a trainee film director job at Elstree Studios.