Film Review
It says something about Amicus's commercial sense that at the exact
point that the company's nearest rival Hammer had all but given up on
Gothic horror its producers Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky opted to
move away from a reasonably successful mix of contemporary horror and
anthology horror films and move into this almost totally mined out
territory.
And Now the
Screaming Starts is a film which, had it been made just five
years earlier, would doubtless have been a massive success, as Gothic
horror was then still very much in vogue. By 1973, it had missed
the boat and was pretty well doomed to fail even before it went into
production. Arguably the most impressively designed film to come
out of Amicus, the film has gained in stature in recent years, but at
the time of its release in the mid-1970s it was a notable commercial
flop, badly received in both the UK and America.
Whilst the story is hardly original - it is essentially a Grand Guignol
re-working of Daphne du Maurier's
Rebecca,
with elements borrowed from Conan Doyle's
The Hound of the Baskervilles and
Dennis Wheatley's
To the Devil a
Daughter - it is skilfully rendered and has enough chills and
shocks to satisfy any horror enthusiast. The wandering severed
hand from Amicus's previous
Dr. Terror's House of Horrors
(1965) pays a return visit, causing far more death and mayhem this time
round (which is handy...), whilst a sinister ghoul with a gory stump
and blood-rimmed empty eye-sockets provides further thrills, taking a
leaf out of Mario Bava's book in one heart-stopping scene. The pace
may be a little slower than your average Gothic chiller, but the film
manages to sustain its oppressive doom-laden atmosphere throughout and
ratchets up the tension with ease, building to a memorably grim
climax. This it achieves through a combination of inventive
camerawork, moody photography and compelling performances from a first
rate cast. A beautifully incongruous score from Douglas Gamley
adds to the film's eerie lyricism.
Director Roy Ward Baker lives up to his reputation as one of the most
talented filmmakers to have been lured into the Amicus and Hammer
stable. Baker is best known for his 1958 film
A Night to Remember, an
inspired re-telling of Titanic disaster, but it is in his series of low
budget horror films that he was most able to demonstrate his creative
flair. For Hammer he directed
Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
and
The Vampire Lovers (1970),
whilst for Amicus he helmed the equally stylish
Asylum
(1972) and
The Vault of Horror
(1973). Baker's horror films are to be noted for their brooding
atmosphere and fluidity, both of which are more than evident in
And Now the Screaming Starts, one
of his most elegantly crafted films.
And then there's the cast. Although it is some time before he
enters the fray, Peter Cushing is as superb as ever as the
investigative scientist who is dragged in to resolve the mystery,
combining the Van Helsing and Sherlock Holmes roles he had previously
played with such élan for Hammer. No other actor brought
as much class and authenticity to British horror films as Cushing did,
and here he does a fine job of making the fantastic appear terrifyingly
plausible. Herbert Lom does not disappoint as the main villain of
the piece, deliciously wicked in the film's most shocking scene
depicting a brutal rape. Patrick Magee, Ian Ogilvy and Geoffrey
Whitehead all offer up respectable performances, but none can match the
attention-grabbing turn from Stephanie Beacham, who is harrowingly
convincing as the gutsy heroine who is slowly driven out of her mind by
demonic forces and stray hands. With Beacham straining her lungs
in just about every other scene, the film certainly lives up to its
name...
© James Travers 2013
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Next Roy Ward Baker film:
The Vault of Horror (1973)
Film Synopsis
In 1790s England, Charles Fengriffen takes up residence at his large
family estate with his new bride Catherine. Almost immediately
after she has entered the old gothic mansion Catherine begins to
experience a bizarre series of hallucinations, some involving a bloody
severed hand, and she is strangely drawn to the portrait of Charles'
grandfather. Suspecting that they know something she doesn't,
Catherine questions her husband and servants, but no one is capable of
telling her what she knows to be the truth: that there is a terrible
curse attached to the Fengriffen family. Her husband's solicitor
is on the point of revealing this dark secret to her when he is
brutally murdered on the estate. The obvious culprit is a
mysterious woodcutter, Silas, who evidently knows something about the
Fengriffens' terrible past. One night, Catherine is attacked in
her bed and later finds she is pregnant. She fears that her child
is not her husband's...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.