I suppose respect for the dead would be expecting a little too much from you.
With 1963's Paranoiac, director Freddie Francis not only made his first film for Hammer, but he also entered the post-Psycho thriller sweepstakes -- and for the most part came up a winner. (At the very least, it's not easy predict where the film's going for most of the running time.) Boasting a screenplay by Jimmy Sangster, who sure loved to tie his plots up in knots, the film stars Janette Scott and Oliver Reed as siblings who are due to come into half a million pounds eleven years after the deaths of their parents and eight years after their older brother's apparent suicide. Neither is particularly well-adjusted, though, since Scott is slowly going mad (she even has a full-time nurse, played by Liliane Brousse, to look after her) and Reed is a heavy drinker who can't wait to claim his inheritance so he can spend it wantonly. And watching over them both is their disapproving aunt (Sheila Burrell), whose main interest is protecting the family name.
The plot is set in motion when Scott starts seeing someone who looks like her dead brother (Alexander Davion) and becomes convinced that he's come to fetch her (at one point she says she has "faith in the dead"). That belief is quickly dispelled when Davion (who's more than just a figment of Scott's imagination) saves her from drowning and announces that he faked his death eight years earlier and has returned to see how the family is doing. This is greeted with a certain amount of skepticism from Reed and Burrell, but Davion seems to know enough family secrets to be the genuine article. It's just a question of finding out what the interloper's intentions are. From there the twists keep piling up until you think there can't be any more, then Sangster throws in a couple more just for the hell of it. I'll be curious to see if he did the same for Nightmare, which Francis directed the following year.