Scream Of Fear (UK 1961 82min.) Directed by Seth Holt, written by Jimmy Sangster.
"For maximum thrill . . . we earnestly urge you to see this motion picture from the start!"
Following a tragic accident in which she came close to drowning, a wheelchair-using woman decides to take a vacation in the French Riviera, but finds herself haunted by the corpse of her father. Psychological horror, starring Susan Strasberg, Ronald Lewis, Ann Todd and Christopher Lee also star.
When you think of the UK's Hammer Studio you tend to associate it with their "monster movie" quickies, the Dracula and Frankenstein series for example. They were, however, equally adept at the more calculated psychological thriller and produced many fine examples of the genre throughout the sixties and in to the early seventies.
This, though, is their finest moment in the field. Released within a year of the first showing of Hitchcock's Psycho it's clearly learned the lesson that a top class horror film doesn't require buckets of gore and severed limbs to be effective.
Jimmy Sangster's script is a beautifully realised thing : in a pre-credits sequence we see police in an unnamed European country removing the body of a dead young woman from a lake. We then meet Susan Strasberg (career best performance) arriving at the south of France home of her step-mother (Ann Todd) and father, who has left suddenly for a business trip.
Feeling alone in the strange house she befriends Robert(Ronald Lewis), her father's driver, and shares oddly staged meals with her step-mother and a local doctor friend of her father (Christopher Lee, best Robert Blanc French accent at the ready).
A series of strange and unusual events and meetings then unfold and the story seems to be taking us down the path of "driving her insane to claim her inheritance" path which has long been a staple of this branch of the old dark house story.
It's then that Sangster's script really shifts up a gear and the final third of the film brilliantly opens up the story to reveal that absolutely nothing is as we assumed it was. It's one of those films that bear a repeated viewing shortly afterwards in order to watch the pieces of the story being manipulated and moved into place.
A word for Seth Holt's direction as well, which is precise and effective throughout and throws in two very, very good underwater sequences.
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