Symptoms is a 1974 British psychological horror film directed by José Ramón Larraz and starring Angela Pleasence, Peter Vaughan, and Lorna Heilbron.

The film, based on a story by Thomas Owen, follows a woman who goes to stay with a friend at her family remote English manor where all is not as it seems.

The large manor, located near a lake in a forest, is overgrown with foliage and has mostly been untouched for an extended period of time.

The next morning, Helen stops by a chemist store in town, where the clerk Mr. Burke asks about her friend, Cora Porter; she tells him she is not with her.

According to editor Brian Smedley-Aston, Larraz financed the picture himself from his income as a comic book artist and photographer.

[5] According to the BFI, funding had come from Jean Dupuis, Belgian heir to the fortune generated by the success of The Smurfs, who had decided to go into film production and set up a company in the UK.

Pleasence described the film shoot as consisting of long days which required her to "get up at four in the morning, and not be home before eleven at night," and noted that director Larraz was controlling on set.

[9] The original prints of Symptoms were missing for many years; the film was last shown on British television in 1989, although it circulated privately through bootlegs.

[10] In 2016, the film was released in the United States on DVD and Blu-ray for the first time by Mondo Macabro home video.

[12][13] Time Out also noted the parallel, writing that it was: "the finest British horror movie from a foreigner since Polanski's Repulsion.

The comparison is inevitable, because thematically the films have a good deal in common, charting the gradual mental dissolution of their spectral heroines.

The muted love affair between Pleasence and Lorna Heilbron is etched with enormous suggestiveness, and Larraz’s eye for visual detail is mesmerizing.

"[14] TV Guide concluded, "a truly chilling atmosphere is created, but its effectiveness is lost when the gore takes over",[15] while the BFI wrote, "it’s a slow burner but John Scott’s excellent score and Larraz’s sparse but effective use of shock tactics (a face at a window; a briefly glimpsed figure at the edge of the frame that really shouldn’t be there) ensure a mounting sense of dread.

Pleasence steals the show but is capably assisted by Lorna Heilbron as the new object of her twisted affection and Peter Vaughan.