‘The House That Screamed’ or — ‘Psycho’ + ‘Suspiria’ = Pasolini?

For its first half or so Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s ‘The House That Screamed’ (1969) seems a fairly unremarkable Gothic mash-up pot-boiler: a touch Hammer Horror here, a splash of Henry James there all cooked-up in a mysterious boarding school for girls setting. It’s handsomely shot (this was Spain’s most expensive horror film at the time), nicely acted and dripping with atmosphere but the narrative doesn’t exactly grab you by the throat. That is until…

But let’s start at the beginning.

Teresa (Cristina Galbo), a teenage girl enrolled by her guardian into the boarding school of the strict Senora Fourneau (Lilli Palmer), slowly starts to suspect that things might not be quite right at her new place of education. Isolated in the French countryside there seems to be a mysterious presence spying on the girls. Not only that but bullying is rife with a strict hierarchy dictating the girl’s behaviour, even to the point of deciding whose turn it is to sneak out to the woodshed to be serviced by the local woodsman.

Disconcerting to be sure but it’s only when the girls gradually start to go missing (very gradually I should point out) that Teresa decides that staying might not be the best option.

So what we have here is a ‘girl’s-in-peril-in-a-boarding-house’ yarn that initially feels like a somewhat subdued version, both in terms of action and colour scheme, of Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’ (1977) before pulling in elements of ‘Psycho’ (1960) when Senora Fourneau’s peeping-tom son with a mother fixation fully enters the picture. And for the bulk of the movie that’s pretty much it with an emphasis on atmosphere, character and sexual overtones being the main focus as opposed to any real dramatic narrative thrust.

However, events really pick up as it enters its third act when Teresa decides to finally take action into her own hands and demonstrate some agency regarding her situation with the film really springing into life and Serrador pulling off some very impressive sequences of suspense and eerie threat. I could feel myself perking up, inching closer to the edge of my seat until… “Bloody hell! I certainly didn’t see THAT coming!”

It’s one of the most unexpected and jolting deaths I’ve seen in years and completely boosts the movie into high gear and leaving the viewer utterly bewildered as to what’s going to happen next because suddenly narratively anything and everything is now up for grabs. From there on the film barrels along towards an utterly ludicrous, yet highly entertaining, ending that’s really something else.

Not only that but an apparent political commentary seems to come more to the fore which, like the unseen presence stalking the girls, had previously been lurking only somewhat in the background. The abuse of power in the pressure cooker of a building full of young people, the demand to conform, the adherence to power structures and the threat of punishment for transgressions combined with how living under such conditions can lead to varieties of corruption (social, psychological and sexual) all suggest criticisms of Franco’s repressive dictatorship of Spain. In that respect Serrador’s film feels closer to Pasolini’s ‘Salo’ (1975) in spirit than anything else.

‘The House That Screamed’ is very much like its titular building because despite a seemingly austere and refined (if grubbily so) exterior there’s some serious darkness going on inside. All in all it’s deceptively brutal.