And Now the Screaming Starts! *** (1973, Peter Cushing, Stephanie Beacham, Ian Ogilvy, Herbert Lom, Patrick Magee) – Classic Movie Review 3095

Director Roy Ward Baker’s 1973 British chiller is a bizarre, gruesome and handsome-looking Amicus horror tale about a family curse in which a disembodied hand comes through a picture on a wall and avenges the rape of a servant’s virgin bride by a handless spirit.

Peter Cushing stars as Dr Pope, who comes to the rescue of young Charles Fengriffen (Ian Ogilvy) and his new young wife Catherine (Stephanie Beacham) in a kind of Hand of the Baskervilles with a little added sex appeal.

Catherine is just about to marry Charles in England in 1785 and moves into his ghostly gothic manor house, where she is drawn to portraits of the Fengriffen family. The one of Charles’s grandfather Henry Fengriffen seems to have an evil entity possessing it. While she is admiring it, a severed hand attacks Catherine through the picture on the wall. She marries Charles but becomes the victim of an old curse on the family and is raped by a ghost on her wedding night and gets pregnant.

It also stars horror favourites Herbert Lom as Charles’s grandfather Sir Henry Fengriffen, who was born in 1697 and died in 1759, and Patrick Magee as Dr Whittle.

And Now the Screaming Starts! does exactly what it says on the tin, offering good value with plenty of shocks and plenty of screaming. And it is a visual treat in Denys N Coop’s Technicolor cinematography and with Tony Curtis’s production designs. Roger Marshall’s screenplay is based on David Case’s novel Fengriffen.

Also in the cast are Geoffrey Whitehead, Guy Rolfe, Rosalie Crutchley, Janet Key, Gillian Lind, Sally Harrison, Lloyd Lamble, Norman Mitchell, John Sharp, Kay Adrian and Frank Forsyth.

Filming took place at  Oakley Court, Windsor Road, Oakley Green, Windsor, Berkshire.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3095

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