Spain’s first major horror film production, The House that Screamed is a stylish gothic tale of tortured passions and bloody murder that bridges the bloody gap between Psycho and Suspiria.
Thérèse (Cristina Galbó) is the latest arrival at the boarding school for wayward girls run under the stern, authoritarian eye of Mme Fourneau (Lilli Palmer). As the newcomer becomes accustomed to the strict routines, the whip-hand hierarchies among the girls and their furtive extra-curricular methods of release from within the forbidding walls of institutional life, she learns that several of her fellow students have recently vanished mysteriously. Meanwhile, tensions grow within this isolated hothouse environment as Mme Fourneau’s callow but curious 15-year-old son Louis (John Moulder-Brown) ignores his mother’s strict orders not to get close to the “tainted” ladies under her ward.
Directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador (Who Can Kill a Child?), this landmark title in Spanish genre cinema has been restored to its director’s original full-length vision for the first time.
STARRING: Christina Galbó, Lilli Palmer, John Moulder-Brown