Dr Turner's Mental Home

The wilder fringes of the Bloomsbury Group are exposed in this dark amateur film starring Dora Carrington.

The wilder fringes of the Bloomsbury Group are exposed in this dark amateur film. Filmed by Bernard Penrose over a weekend at Ham Spray House, Wiltshire - nexus of the menage a trois between Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey and Ralph Partridge - the trippy plot concerns a wicked doctor who experiments on the inmates of his mental home. Will heroine Daisy escape? Probably not. The creepy dummies and masks were made by Carrington, who also stars as a disturbed inmate.

Ham Spray House was bought in 1922 by Strachey, who died of cancer there ten years later; unable to live without him, Carrington committed suicide shortly after. Writers and artists, including surviving members of the Bloomsbury Group, continued to visit until Partridge's death in 1960. This was one of three films Carrington made with Penrose and was first shown at 41 Gordon Square, home of Strachey's brother James, in August 1929.