And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973)

Thanks for the memories!

hyped garbage

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Recent young marrieds Ian Ogilvy & Stephanie Beacham move into Ogilvy's family estate and are soon haunted by a severed hand. Thinking Beacham is having a breakdown, Peter Cushing (who studies the "science of the mind") is brought in. Soon a family curse is revealed and all hell breaks loose. An entertaining Gothic horror film from Amicus. Director Roy Ward Baker moves this along briskly and the script (by Roger Marshall & David Case) is tightly wound. Beacham is terrific and any film that features not only Cushing but Patrick Magee & Herbert Lom has to be recommended. There's a great performance by Geoffrey Whitehead as Silas.

The title delivers on its promise - unfortunately. Women screaming their butts off is not why I watch horror films, it's IN SPITE OF IT that I watch them.The beautiful Stephanie Beacham (Catherine) doesn't have to wait long until she gets to starts screaming. She screams, gets attacked by a "crawling hand", then screams again, then gets attacked by a mutt, screams some more, then falls down a flight of stairs, screams again, then her scream becomes laughter (gets hysterical), and then she loses her mind (sort of). What astoundingly resilient fetuses those demonic unborns make! You simply can't prevent a red-marked Gorbachev from being born, you simply can't. If there is any message in ANTSS, it's that one.One question: why does Gorbachev Sr put a curse on Lom's descendants instead of on Lom himself? Lom rapes his virgin wife on their honeymoon, so I'd sort of expect that Lom gets the brunt of the curse, not some distant-in-the-future relatives. That's like someone hitting you in the face and you taking revenge by hitting the chair on which the guy who smacked you used to sit. (OK, perhaps not an ideal analogy.) Lom was presented as a debaucherous, immoral, hedonistic rapist, so why would he care if his descendants got cursed? Gorbachev: "Your children and your children's children will be cursed!" Lom: "Oh, yeah? Big deal. Better them than me. Cheerio!" I must admit that this whole curse business confounds me somewhat, because more often than not the curses (in these movies) fail to punish the perpetrator. To the movie's defense, the 5th Commandment wraps up the movie in the final scene. "Thou shalt have thine 3rd and 4th generation offspring cursed" or something like that. Not that the Great Book makes much more sense than ANTSS's script. Why the all-Just all-Forgiving all-Merciful God would punish those innocent of a crime is beyond me. Not to mention the strange decision/rule to make the curse run its course after the 4th generation. The 5th generations can relax, no more need for panic.Additionally, by cursing the future generations of a man, you are also cursing the spouses of the cursed, i.e. men and women who are NOT part of that genetic line. So what really happens is that for every additional generation that you curse, each curse gets "watered down", for want of a better term. In the 2nd generation it is 50% effective, 50% targets the innocent. In the 3rd generation it is 25% effective etc. Hence perhaps why God decided to limit all curses to the 4th generation. "Alright, alright, the curse loses its percentage value drastically with every passing generation, so I'll let you off the hook after the 4th generation." Hallelujah!

"And Now the Screaming Starts" is one of the better Gothic horror films of the time period.**SPOILERS**Arriving at their ancestral castle, newlyweds Charles, (Ian Oglivy) and Catherine Fengriffen, (Stephanie Beacham) move in and make it their home. Almost immediately, she feels that there's a strange presence in the house, which he writes off as her wild imagination. Thinking it's more, she decides to start looking into the family's past but more strange events plague her search. When news comes that she's pregnant, the staff realizes that a dark family secret is coming out. As she continues to slip away due to the strange family curse, they eventually decide to call for Dr. Pope, (Peter Cushing) to help her condition and solve the mystery. When the legend about his Grandfather, Henry Fengriffen, (Herbert Lom) and his sordid past is finally revealed and is found to be the cause of the strange events due to a lingering curse, they take drastic steps to ensure that the legend is thwarted.The Good News: This is a highly impressive Gothic effort. The house where it takes place is incredibly creepy, and gives off a great vibe that sells most of the scares. The twisting stairs in the house are perfect for such it's collection of scenes, the large windows in practically every room are perfect for giving their scares off and the house in general is just creepy. The overall design in the house gives it the best thrills. It also has a series of really creepy scenes that are quite scary. There's a repeated image of a bloody eyeless figure wandering around, and that it's constant appearances in windows or from portraits makes it seem that much more chilling. The portrait appearances are far better, though, as there's a ghostly aura surrounding them and the times when it appears from them make quite thrilling. The window shocks are also quite chilling, as the site of the bloody, black eyes are a wonderful vision, and it stays on them just enough to make it seem disturbing without losing their impact. This also features a wide variety of wonderful suspense scenes that actually manage to chill. The constant opening of windows through invisible forces are outright creepy, and the attack on the maid is simply thrilling. The pounding pictures, the shaking furniture, the swinging chandelier and the aura of a ghostly presence makes them all the more frightening. The sudden appearance of a hand bursting out of a painting also manages to work, and the whole thing in general is quite creepy. The pacing for the film is also quite great, as this begins it's freak-outs within the first minutes they arrive, and they only escalate but at an incredibly rapid pace that is fun to watch. That this also manages a slight exploitation angle amidst the classiness. Most of the film is brought on by the results of a rape, there's a large section of the film devoted to showing all sorts of debauchery and sleaze, and the entire curse is spread because of a second rape. That it would feel so comfortable with such sleaze inside such a classy film is a nice touch. All of these features make this a watchable film.The Bad News: There isn't a whole lot here that doesn't work. One of the few things wrong is that the idea of the mystery taking so long to come out gets a little tired and repetitious after a while. They're going to, they're not, it almost came out but now it's not, it's a little aggravating to know that it's such a struggle to get it out. That drags some of the film out in some areas with the whole repetition of everything, including the visions. While it is a creepy concept and does have some great moments, far too much of it is simply a repeat of what's been done before. Either the image is from the portrait or from a window and after a while it just becomes another one just like before. The other really big problem with the film is that there's no real conclusion to what happened. They touch upon all the story lines in some way but it's still a little hazy about what happened and that brings it down a touch as well. All in all, this one didn't have all that many problems with it.The Final Verdict: With only a few small problems and some really great moments, it's one of the better Gothic exercises out there and an overall great time. Fans of Hammer or the style in general will find a lot to like here, while those who are more into the fast-paced films might seek caution with it.Today's Rating-R: Violence, Brief Nudity and several Rapes

I remember being underwhelmed when I first watched this (a pan & scan airing on TV some years ago), but re-acquainting myself with it via Anchor Bay UK's exemplary DVD edition has proved surprisingly enjoyable - despite its utter lack of originality! Being Amicus' sole foray into full-blown Gothic horror, this film perhaps draws the most comparisons with the 'rival' Hammer films, and as such manages to keep its own in their company by virtue of its polished (if not expensive) production values - Denys Coop's intricate camera-work, Douglas Gamley's atmospheric score and Tony Curtis' handsome sets - and its top cast, comprised of any number of renowned genre stars.Stephanie Beacham (who screams and faints like the best of them!) actually manages to keep the audience involved in her plight, which is no easy feat seeing that precious little of the plot is revealed during its first half; Ian Ogilvy is an adequately brooding master-of-the house; Geoffrey Whitehead is a mysterious and vaguely sinister woodsmen who lives on the property (actually doubling as his own grandfather in the flashback sequence towards the end); Guy Rolfe and Rosalie Crutchley have small but fairly important roles in support. However, the film belongs to three thespians and it seems that the producers knew this as well, given they were top-billed: Peter Cushing, whose belated arrival does not disguise the fact that he's the true star of the show (nothing new for him here, really, but he's always worth watching); Herbert Lom as a particularly nasty descendant of Ogilvy's and whose misdemeanors have put a terrible curse over the entire house; Patrick Magee as the compassionate but eventually weak-willed town medic (who's regrettably thrown to the sidelines and eventually dispatched once Cushing, who's of a more analytical approach, arrives on the scene).The film features a number of effective moments: the hand bursting out of the painting; the many scenes involving the crawling hand (though a rather tired motif by now, especially since it was not a part of the original novel!); likewise, the many appearances of Whitehead's disfigured and spooky ancestor; the all-important flashback involving Lom's character (basically lifted outright from Conan Doyle's "The Hound Of The Baskervilles") which, apart from brutal (if not too graphic) rape and symbolic mutilation, also features some brief nudity - unless I'm mistaken, a first for Amicus (in contrast, Beacham's violation by the 'ghost' is presented in a lot subtler way which, by the end, only led to confusion for some viewers as to what had really happened to her!); the finale is quite interesting for this type of film (though, again, hardly ground-breaking in the broader scheme of things): Ogilvy going mad a' la WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968) and literally digging up his grandfather's corpse while Beacham, equally unhinged by this time, is perplexed by the presence of her new-born child who may or may not be 'possessed' (echoes of ROSEMARY'S BABY [1968]) - the sight of Cushing presiding over this scene and realizing that all his 'enlightened' advise has brought only misery upon the couple lends the whole a rare (and probably unwitting) poignancy.With respect to the video/audio department, Anchor Bay UK handles this area of the disc satisfactorily. The Audio Commentaries are the icing on the cake for this release - two excellent tracks that take in everything one would possibly want to know about the production, including the fact that all seemingly agree on the singularly unbecoming retitling of the film by producer Max J. Rosenberg, and then some (Ogilvy comes off as a very pleasant chap who looks back at his days in horror cinema with great fondness, though he continually underestimates his own memory of them!; Stephanie Beacham and Roy Ward Baker seem very glad to be once again in each other's company while also evidently very proud of their respective work here; moderators Darren Gross and Marcus Hearn, respectively, come up with relevant questions and general factoids so that both tracks remain, ahem, on track for the most part. Finally, there are film notes, bios, a trailer, some TV spots and a poster/stills gallery which, as with the other discs in this Collection, add up to a very nice extra touch.