Love & Passion Quote by Terence Fisher

For a mid-century horror director, this is practically a mission statement: the scariest thing isn’t the monster, it’s the crowd’s self-image cracking under pressure. Fisher needles the comforting story modern people tell about themselves - that we’re rational, secular, motivated by money and policy, basically too “grown up” for superstition. His punchline is that superstition doesn’t disappear; it gets repressed, then rerouted into “strange ways” that look less like village folklore and more like tabloid pathology.

The phrasing matters. “Income-tax conscious” is a slyly bureaucratic marker of postwar respectability: the citizen reduced to paperwork, budgeting, and propriety. Fisher sets that up to knock it down. Superstitions are “tucked away,” like embarrassing underwear, not abolished. That domestic image suggests shame and denial rather than enlightenment. When they “come out,” he doesn’t point to harmless rituals; he jumps to “sex crimes, black masses” - sensational, yes, but strategically so. Those are moral panics with theatrical staging, the kinds of transgressions society can gawk at while pretending it’s diagnosing an aberration instead of recognizing a symptom.

Contextually, Fisher is speaking from a Britain where modernization, secularization, and consumer normalcy were supposed to be the antidote to older anxieties. His films (and Hammer horror more broadly) thrived on the return of the repressed: desire, ritual, contagion, corrupted authority. The subtext is less “people are secretly occult” than “a culture that prides itself on being cured is primed to relapse in grotesque, public forms.”