The Screaming Skull
It has been two years since Eric Whitlock has been to his family home, a California mansion in spacious grounds better maintained than the house, the estate of his late wife Marion who fell and drowned in the pond and is buried in the gardens in a mausoleum decorated with her death mask, now returning with his fragile new wife Jenni, a woman who witnessed the tragic death of her own parents in a boating accident and has spent time recovering from the trauma.
A new city, far from the familiarity of all she knew, she becomes friends with Reverend Edward Snow and his wife but is less comfortable with groundsman Mickey who was close with Marion and keeps her memory alive, perhaps too alive, Marion becoming haunted by noises in the dark and visions, the screaming skull which lurks behind doors and in cupboards, pursuing her…
Directed by Alex Nicol who also appears as the simple but earnest Mickey, The Screaming Skull was adapted by John Kneubuhl from a 1908 short story of the same name by Francis Marion Crawford, though it takes the macabre details of that and places them in an altogether older frame familiar under many names, Jane Eyre, Rebecca, The Yellow Wallpaper, Gaslight, even a Gothic holonovel enjoyed by Captain Janeway, released in 1958 by American International but playing as a narrative from an earlier century.
The sporty gull-wing Mercedes in which they arrive at the once beautiful but now decayed home aside the only concession to mid-twentieth modernity, the house lit only by candlelight, The Screaming Skull plays like a Victorian melodrama, Jenni (Peggy Webber) running around the corridors and grounds in her satin nightgown looking perpetually afraid, a traumatised but conveniently rich and unstable orphan whose widower husband inherited a once-grand estate now whittled down to only the house and grounds.
With monosyllabic Mickey (director Nicol) a convenient scapegoat for the strange occurrences while Eric (John Hudson) dismisses his wife’s fears while doing nothing practical to make the bare rooms more liveable, the only decoration the glaring portrait of Marion, dialogue is less conversational than expositional, the gimmick on original release of a promised free burial for anyone who dies of fright more likely to result from incredulity and boredom.
Making its UK Blu-ray debut with a restoration which shows cinematographer Floyd Crosby’s work considerably better than the aged and damaged print obtained by Mystery Science Theatre 3000 in 1998, Eureka’s new edition of The Screaming Skull is supported by a spoiler free introduction from Stephen Laws expressing his personal connection to the film and Mary Going’s video essay on the Gothic literature traditions the film draws extensively from.
The Screaming Skull will be available on Blu-ray from Eureka from Monday 19th October
