-- And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973)
Directed by Roy Ward Baker

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...

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...