If you ever wanted to be personally menaced by a disembodied hand, ravished by a ghost, and tormented by the sins of long-dead ancestors all while sipping tea in a crumbling English manor, And Now the Screaming Starts! is your twisted invitation. Amicus Productions — best known for its anthology horror — dared to go full feature-length with this gloriously overripe Gothic horror story, and against the odds, it works.
Despite a title that sounds like a Monty Python skit (even director Roy Ward Baker agreed it was “silly”), the film is anything but a joke. Anchored by a strong cast, anchored further by Peter Cushing’s towering cheekbones, and dripping with atmosphere and dread, Screaming Starts is a potent blend of Victorian repression, supernatural revenge, and good old-fashioned decapitation. Let’s dig in.
Catherine’s Nightmare: The Ghost is in the Details
The story follows Catherine (a luminous Stephanie Beacham), a young bride who marries Charles Fengriffen and moves into his ancestral home — Fengriffen House, a place that might as well come with a welcome basket of cryptic whispers, bloodstains, and haunted tapestries. From the moment she sets foot on the estate, the ghostly horror begins: shadowy visions of a birthmarked corpse with empty eyes, a severed hand crawling about like it’s late for tea, and, most harrowingly, an unseen assault on her wedding night. Catherine’s horror is ours to share, and Beacham manages to walk a difficult line — portraying helplessness without ever seeming passive.
The true villain here isn’t just the supernatural presence — it’s legacy. The Fengriffen name carries a curse, a rotting inheritance of rape and mutilation left by Sir Henry Fengriffen, played with aristocratic menace by Herbert Lom in ghostly flashbacks. The crimes of the past — specifically a brutal act committed against a servant’s bride — echo violently into the present, targeting Catherine as the first “virgin bride” to enter the home since the curse was uttered. It’s basically Downton Abbey, if Lady Mary had to fend off a cursed hand between brunch and embroidery.
Peter Cushing: Paranormal House Call
Just when things threaten to veer into repetitive séance theatrics, the film delivers its secret weapon: Peter Cushing as Dr. Pope, the Enlightenment-era psychiatrist whose arrival feels like Van Helsing with a clipboard. Cushing is predictably excellent, blending skeptical science with open-minded courage. His crisp diction and razor-sharp profile make even exposition feel like a grand reveal.
Cushing’s scenes are where the film truly tightens. His inquiries — and eventual confrontation with Charles Fengriffen (Ian Ogilvy, playing it tortured and buttoned-up) — peel away the polite veneers of upper-class respectability, revealing rot beneath. He doesn’t just believe in the supernatural — he seeks justice through reason. And in a genre often content to throw crosses at problems, Cushing’s Pope brings welcome intelligence to the tale.
The Curse with Teeth — and No Hands
The central haunting is a masterpiece of restraint and suggestion. The corpse Catherine sees — a ghostly figure with hollow sockets and a gnarly birthmark — becomes a constant, inescapable symbol of the past refusing to stay buried. And the severed hand? Think Thing from The Addams Family, but less witty and more stabby. It strangles, crawls, and struts around like it has union rates. In one scene, it literally commits murder, vanishes into the ether, and somehow manages to be more frightening than half the slashers of the 1980s.
These moments — wonderfully tactile, practical effects — embody what makes Screaming Starts so effective. Roy Ward Baker avoids cheap thrills and instead allows dread to uncoil slowly, like a Georgian-era fever dream. You never quite know if Catherine’s suffering is psychosis, spectral vengeance, or some intersection of both.
Tragedy Wears a Cravat
At its core, the film is a bleak condemnation of hereditary guilt and patriarchal sins. Charles’s denial, his refusal to tell Catherine the truth until it’s too late, marks him as a man loyal to legacy rather than love. When he finally reveals the family secret — a gruesome tale involving rape, mutilation, and a curse spoken in blood — it’s already too late. Catherine’s child is born, deformed by the ghost’s revenge, a living embodiment of ancestral rot.
That final image — a child with a birthmarked face and no right hand — is the stuff of pure Gothic horror. Not a jump scare. Not a monster. But an inherited curse, passed down like silverware, and just as tarnished. It’s no surprise that Charles chooses to murder the innocent woodsman who bears the mark of his father’s crime, then tries to exhume and destroy his grandfather’s corpse. It’s symbolic patricide on a shovel budget.
Gothic by Design
Visually, the film is a triumph. The set design oozes dread — tapestries that could strangle you, hallways that never end, and a nursery so cursed it practically deserves its own chapter in the Book of Revelation. The cinematography captures shadows with elegance, and the sound design is particularly unsettling — from a creaking hand on wood to the chilling lull of ghostly whispers.
What elevates the film, even with its pulpier edges, is how seriously it takes its premise. It doesn’t wink at the camera. It doesn’t shrug. It leans in — fully — to its tale of intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and supernatural retribution. In a genre crowded with exploitative nonsense, And Now the Screaming Starts! gives you real substance with your shrieks.
Final Verdict: A Scream Worth Hearing
While Amicus was known for anthologies, this standalone Gothic tale proves they could stretch their legs in full-length form with elegance and horror in equal measure. It’s a film haunted not just by ghosts, but by morality, history, and the weight of sins that can’t be buried — even in family crypts.
4.5 out of 5 severed hands
Because sometimes, the screams don’t start with the ghosts. They start with the family name.
