THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED (Spain - 1969; US release 1971) Written and directed by Narciso Ibanez Serrador. Cast: Lilli Palmer, Cristina Galbo, John Moulder Brown, Mary Maude, Candida Losada, Tomas Blanco, Maribel Martin, Pauline Challenor, Teresa Hurtdao, Conchita Paredes, Victor Israel. (PG, 94 mins) It's not nearly the exploitative grinder that American International's poster art promised when it opened in the US in 1971, but 1969's THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED is a slow-burning and quietly effective Spanish chiller that's certain to find a new audience now that it's been rescued from obscurity by Shout! Factory's new Blu-ray release. Never released on VHS and all but impossible to see in a decent-looking presentation for many years, THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED looks terrific on Blu-ray with its "old dark house" sets and late 19th century period detail. The entire film takes place at a French boarding school for wayward girls run by Mme. Fourneau (Lilli Palmer), a strict spinster-type who lords over her charges and doesn't hesitate to dole out stern punishment, such as headstrong, rebellious Catherine (Pauline Challenor) being thrown into the "seclusion room," where Fourneau has her whipped by sadistic teacher's pet Irene (Mary Maude). The girls welcome the arrival of new resident Teresa (Cristina Galbo), dropped off by a friend of her family, which consists of her absent mother who may or may not be a prostitute. There's a gloomy cloud hanging over the proceedings, whether it's the unbending rule of Fourneau, who harbors a barely concealed desire for the girls--watch the way she leers at them while they shower or gently kisses the bleeding flagellation wounds in the middle of Catherine's back--or her sheltered and sexually curious son Luis (DEEP END's John Moulder Brown), who's prone to spying on the girls and seems to be developing a fixation on Teresa.
Writer/director Narciso Ibanez Serrador (the disturbing 1976 masterpiece WHO CAN KILL A CHILD?) spends nearly half the film methodically establishing an unsettling and perverse atmosphere (with some help from a moody score by Waldo de los Rios) before he even introduces a killer into the proceedings with the unexpected murder of Isabelle (THE BLOOD SPLATTERED BRIDE's Maribel Martin), a shy girl who angered Mme. Fourneau by having romantic feelings for Luis. It's only later that we discover several girls have vanished over the last few months, their disappearances unaccounted for and swept under the rug by Mme. Fourneau. The ultimate reveal of the killer isn't a big shock, but THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED surprises in other ways. The best example is the unexpected character arc of Irene, who spends much of the film behaving even more despicably than Mme. Fourneau, exacting mean girl revenge on Teresa after her overt lesbian advances are rejected (the agonizingly long scene where she terrorizes Teresa is almost too uncomfortable to watch), but having a change of heart when she realizes Fourneau has been negligent about the missing girls and has been using her as a puppet to bully the other girls and keep them under her thumb. Irene's transformation from bitchy villain to hero-by-default is tough to pull off in a believable fashion but Maude does, and her performance really is the film's secret weapon. Serrador also displays some sly bits of dark humor, as evidenced in one scene where quick-cut shots of girls frantically knitting is used to symbolize intense sexual frustration as they listen to one of the others having sex outside with a local stud who secretly visits the school once a week.
With its horny schoolgirls, lesbian undertones, a weirdo mama's boy, rampant sexual repression and a knife-wielding maniac, there's an undeniable sense of tawdry sleaze permeating THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED, but it's usually presented in as subtle and tactful a manner as possible. For lack of a better term, it could be called a "gothic giallo," with the look and feel of a Hammer horror period piece with a plot that prefigures the Italian thrillers that would be popularized by the likes of Dario Argento and Sergio Martino in the next year or two. It's one of the earliest "schoolgirls in peril" subgenre offerings, coming not long after Alfred Vohrer's krimi THE COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS and Antonio Margheriti's THE YOUNG, THE EVIL AND THE SAVAGE, and a few years before Massimo Dallamano's essential giallo/krimi hybrid WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? (which featured Galbo), initially released in the US as THE SCHOOL THAT COULDN'T SCREAM, and its semi-sequels WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS? and ENIGMA ROSSO, There's only a couple of onscreen murders, but they're handled in an unusual fashion, with one playing with de los Rios' score and having it slowly grind to a halt as the victim dies. Factoring out the supernatural element with which Argento ran wild, SUSPIRIA also owes a bit of a debt to THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED, especially with its girls trudging through a miserable ballet class and Palmer's Mme. Fourneau being cut from the same cloth as Joan Bennett's Mme. Blanc and Alida Valli's Miss Tanner in the Argento classic. Argento also incorporated the schoolgirl theme into his 1985 film PHENOMENA, aka CREEPERS, with Daria Nicolodi's psycho headmistress Miss Bruckner another variant on Mme. Fourneau. THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED goes pretty bonkers in its unforgettable closing minutes, and without going too deeply into spoiler territory, it'll become clear to fans of the legendary 1983 Spanish splatter classic PIECES where that film got one of its craziest ideas.
Based on the plot, it was probably easy to sell THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED as a trashy drive-in horror flick to American audiences, but like many Spanish films of that era and into the mid '70s, it takes some not-very-veiled swipes at the regime of Francisco Franco. There's no aggressive political statements being made, but certainly Mme. Fourneau's forcing the girls to shower in their nightgowns, refusing to allow them to be nude even while bathing--this is another thing against which Catherine rebels and Fourneau can't stop herself from staring with obvious desire at the young woman's breasts (Palmer plays this moment perfectly)--is a jab at the pervasive censorship of the arts under Franco. Such critiques were common in Spanish cinema of this period, most notably in the works of Luis Bunuel (1961's VIRIDIANA) and Carlos Saura (1975's CRIA CUERVOS), but also Victor Erice's 1973 classic THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE. THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED is ultimately a film firmly ensconced in the thriller/horror genre and doesn't take quite the line-in-the-sand stances that Bunuel, Saura, and Erice did, or that Serrador would do seven years later with the still-shocking WHO CAN KILL A CHILD?, but it's got a little more going on than the typical AIP B-movie exploitation import you'd see in 1971. Born in Uruguay in 1935 and in apparent retirement now, Serrador's family moved to Spain when he was 12, and his career dates back to the late 1950s, much of it spent doing gun-for-hire work for Spanish television, often under the pseudonym "Luis Penafiel." He's best known in Spain for creating several TV game shows, including the hugely popular UN, DOS, TRES...RESPONDA OTRA VEZ, which ran in prime time from 1966 to 2004. He compiled a handful of screenwriting credits over the years and didn't aspire to be a "horror guy" but oddly, his mere two outings as a feature film director have cemented his status as a major figure in Spanish cult horror cinema to those outside of Spain, while to Spanish audiences, his association with game shows and variety programs have basically made him that country's Merv Griffin. Shout's Blu-ray includes both the 94-minute American cut of THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED and an extended 102-minute version with standard-definition inserts of footage cut by AIP that included some additional gore and nudity but primarily consisted of dialogue that slowed the pace a bit. There's also interviews with Moulder Brown and Maude that make this as comprehensive a package as you can get for a horror gem that's been long forgotten except by a small cult of devoted fans.
Made by Makinov. Cast: Vinessa Shaw, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Daniel Giminez Cacho, Gerardo Taracena, Alejandra Alvarez. (Unrated, 86 mins)
This remake of Narciso Ibanez Serrador's 1976 Spanish cult horror classic WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? (based on a novel by Juan Jose Plans and released in the US in 1978 by AIP on the grindhouse and drive-in circuit in a re-edited version under the titles ISLAND OF THE DAMNED and TRAPPED) is almost slavishly faithful to its source film, which may have been an influence on Stephen King's short story "Children of the Corn." The initial set-up of COME OUT AND PLAY differs in that it eliminates the rather heavy-handed political subtext--the original Spanish version of Serrador's film opened with an eight-minute montage of documentary footage of war atrocities commited against children--and gets right to the story. Running nearly 30 minutes shorter than WHO CAN KILL A CHILD?, COME OUT AND PLAY improves on the pacing of the original film by nixing much of the endless travelogue footage that comprised its opening half hour or so, as well as utilizing a droning, nerve-jangling synth score and demonstrating a creepily effective use of sound throughout. Beyond that, it's WHO CAN KILL A CHILD?, right down to many sequences being restaged in their entirety, almost exactly as they were in Serrador's film.
Francis (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and his pregnant wife Beth (Vinessa Shaw) are vacationing in Mexico before the arrival of their third child (the other two are back home with Beth's mom). They rent a boat and head to the distant island of Punta Hueca, only to find it almost entirely abandoned except for some strange children. It appears that people left in a hurry, and Francis realizes that something is seriously wrong when he finds a group of children killing an old man. Then he starts finding bodies around the village as he and Beth are pursued by packs of crazed, murderous kids.
COME OUT AND PLAY is the writing/directing debut of one "Makinov," a mystery man who presents himself as a sort-of Banksy of the horror genre, reputed to be some kind of masked Belarusian performance artist with no filmmaking experience, speaks only Russian, hates giving interviews, and laid out his artistic goals in an online manifesto from his "Dark Forest" headquarters shortly before last fall's run of film festivals. He has never allowed himself to be photographed without a mask or a hood, and even wears it on the set. According to an interview with Moss-Bachrach, who's likely just going along with the joke, Makinov indeed worked masked/hooded at all times (even, according to the actor, when the two went on a fishing trip during a break in filming), and was more concerned with "image," while more or less letting the actors do what they wanted. This sideshow act is an obvious publicity stunt, and with some stellar copyright detective work by Video Junkie's William Wilson and some assorted two-year-old Twitter posts that can be found via a simple Google search, there's a good amount of evidence that points to "Makinov" really being Mexican filmmaker Gerardo Naranjo, who received some arthouse acclaim a year or so ago with the thriller MISS BALA (there's also some comments on an IndieWire article as far back as 2011 that specifically mention "the remake of WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? that Gerardo Naranjo's doing." Why Naranjo--or whomever--had to create this ridiculous and extensive fake backstory to direct a remake of a relatively obscure Spanish horror film is a mystery. Other than personal amusement, ego, or a sociological experiment designed to punk some of the horror scene's more sycophantic fanboys (that I could actually get behind), there's really no point, other than "Makinov" being yet another in a string of recent would-be horror "auteurs" who think they're the star of the show and the films are secondary.
Allegedly budgeted at around $150,000 with presumably a skeleton crew (there are no credits other than five actors and, of course, Makinov), COME OUT AND PLAY doesn't really have a reason to exist, but as far as remakes go, it's decent in spite of the predictable need to ratchet up the grossout factor (needless to say, Serrador's film didn't show the kids playing with limbs and organs and making necklaces out of ears and fingers). While its admirable that Makinov didn't eliminate the finale that has the male lead (Australian actor Lewis Fiander in Serrador's film) graphically machine-gunning a bunch of kids, the staging of the scene in the remake is much more brief and with much fewer children, but it's probably harder to get away with in 2013 than it was in 1976. Sure, Moss-Bachrach is shown taking an oar and smashing kids' heads in, but having revisited Serrador's film just before watching the remake, that shot of Fiander mowing down about 50 kids is still shocking today. Serrador's film remains powerful but isn't flawless: the pacing is extremely slow and it takes forever to get going, and Makinov's version unquestionably is an improvement in that department. The film is hardly great, but it's credible enough that it can stand on its own without all of Makinov's shenanigans and pre-fab cult horror flim-flammery. And why dedicate the film "to the martyrs of Stalingrad"? And who is Makinov that he can call the film "Makinov's COME OUT AND PLAY," and end it with the words "Made by" and the letters "M-A-K-I-N-O-V" going across the screen in a huge font one-by one? I'll say this much: I'm highly skeptical that masked guerrila filmmakers from Belarus who live off the grid in the Dark Forest and post YouTube manifestos about the nature of their art agree to sign posters for a Dread Central contest.
