Life & Mortality Quote by Terence Fisher

Fisher answers like a man who’s spent a career making the dead refuse to stay politely dead. The little performance in his phrasing matters: the question arrives as a skeptical prompt, and he counters with a brisk, almost cheerful insistence ("Oh yes, certainly") that reads less like doctrine than defiance. He concedes the materialist point just enough to seem reasonable ("Physically maybe it is a fact"), then pivots to the real claim: mind as surplus, consciousness as the thing that won’t fit neatly in the coffin. That rhetorical move mirrors the best horror he helped define: grant the audience the daylight logic, then show them the shadow it can’t explain.

As director of Hammer’s gothic cycle, Fisher wasn’t just selling spooks. He was staging a cultural argument in postwar Britain, when scientific confidence, secular routine, and the aftertaste of mass death made the idea of an ending feel both plausible and intolerable. His supernatural isn’t necessarily churchy; it’s existential and cinematic. The line suggests that the "supernatural" functions as a moral technology: a way to keep meaning from collapsing into biology.

Subtextually, he’s defending horror as more than cheap thrills. If the mind exceeds the body, then the genre’s obsessions - resurrection, possession, uncanny returns - become metaphors with teeth. Fisher’s calm certainty is the opposite of hysteria; that’s the point. He makes belief sound like composure, as if refusing oblivion is simply good sense.