If I was full of myself (I have a little space for something else still), I would say that this movie is "archetypical." However, a lot of people have ruined words like that, and so I am left instead with the word "generic." But that sounds caustic, when in truth I have an obviously favorable opinion of the movie. The Screaming Skull, along with The Ghosts of Hanley House and (maybe) The Dungeon of Harrow, is one of the most general horror movies I've seen. Even The House on Haunted Hill played with everything a little bit, because Vincent Price was in it. If you took an issue of House of Mystery or House of Secrets from the '50s and picked any one of their ghost stories, it would be this movie. Not hip enough to be Gothic, not gory enough to be a gross-out. Just creepy, with the bare bones of bare bones. I imagine there was indeed a time when skeletons were the epitome of horror. The idea of being confronted by anything skeletonoid was once the equivalent of waking up to see the inside-out baboon from The Fly riding on the back of Freddy Krueger wearing a trucker hat that says "Make America Great Again" on it. Skulls, being a product of skeletons, would thus conceivably be equally mindwarpingly awful, if not worse. The Screaming Skull becomes an examination into an era in horror movies that is almost impossible to imagine today. I am legitimately baffled by the market for this film. Was this considered to be edgy back in the day, or was it mildly spooky pablum (pinned by censorship) made for the "sensitive, sophisticated" horror audience? Or did it pass by entirely unnoticed by everyone? Mildness of yore always raises questions for me. Maybe this movie can help me answer some.
We open with a William Castle-esque intro offering a free funeral to those who die of fright during the movie. Our story concerns Jenni and Eric, a married couple who move into Eric's old house. Eric used to live there with his first wife, Marion, before she split skull in a rainstorm. Jenni has had a rocky history, mental health-wise, which of course means that a lot of people are going to tell her she's hallucinating, when a mysterious skull keeps cropping up around the house. Is Marion's ghost out for revenge? What about Mickey, the mentally handicapped groundskeeper? Is Jenni losing her mind? And what's that about Jenni having great wealth, wealth which will go to her creepy husband if anything awful happened to her...? Just when the mystery is explained, the rules are thrown out (in the film's own way) and it becomes a purebred supernatural thriller.
The Screaming Skull never exceeds the simplest of models. This is an entirely low-effort movie, and for that it is spectacular. The half-assed-ness of the blatant Castle rip-off shows AIP's lack of interest in creating what audiences at the time were into (and, for the most part, a lot of them were into Castle's gimmicks if the box office says anything). They similarly weren't interested in coming up with anything more original than the ol' killer-marries-unstable-rich-ladies-to-steal-their-fortunes-with-fake-madness-charges setup. I'm not sure if that was cutting edge at this time, but it makes sense that this movie was based on a short story written in 1906 (uncredited). I really feel like that formula is a Victorian thing, probably older--as old as the concept of murdering/committing people for inheritance, maybe. What makes The Screaming Skull worth watching, then?
Even if you're not fascinated by blandness, as I am, it is a creepy affair. While the old dark house of the piece is relatively featureless--it doesn't hold dark secrets, like a hidden acid pit, for example--it casts shadows well, and while the characters are bland, seeing them wander through the eerie darkness is, well, eerie. The subdued nature of everything works in its favor, much like The Witches' Mountain. I suppose it helps to say that the spookiness of this wormed its way into my nostalgia registers, as it was one that came on one of the many public domain box sets I picked up. If you can abandon your sensibilities and think of skulls as somehow being scary, it's worth the goosebumps you get.
But I think the main attraction of it is its weird lack of...features. There are no twists to it, no elaborations on what is essentially a formula. That a movie is capable of doing that touches something primal in the human brain. It stands out, uncannily. It invites analysis, though its so simple that it evades study. Or something.
I dunno. This movie hits my sweet spot, and it's guaranteed to strike those of at least several others. There has to be a reason why this movie keeps perpetuating--it shows up everywhere! It's probably as common a release as The Killer Shrews or Atom Age Vampire, or even House on Haunted Hill itself. Perhaps it's seen by some as a classic. I haven't bothered to research the audience for this movie, only the movie itself. It's nice for a flick like this to have some mysteries unsolved.
It's a movie that will bring you closer to a sense of a corpus of trash. Somehow this movie has the power to make the people who watch it feel more complete.
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