Silent Scream

Silent Scream (screened in limited theaters in 1979, wide release in 1980) aka The Silent Scream

Dir. Denny Harris

Written by Ken and Jim Wheat

Starring Rebecca Balding, Juli Andelman, Steve Doubet, Yvonne De Carlo, Barbara Steele

            In 1977, director and producer Denny Harris (a long career as a commercial director, which provided him not only the capital but a ready production company for this, his only feature film) decided to shoot a horror movie. He made one very, very good decision at that time: using, as a principal location, the Smith Estate in Los Angeles, which we also saw in the excellent SPIDER BABY and would see again in INSIDIOUS 2: THE SEQUELING. This Queen Anne’s style house perched on a hilltop in Highland Park not only has “haunted” written all over it (in blood), it actually has a real life spooky backstory: it was originally built to house Judge David Patterson Hatch, respected scion of the law by day, and a fervent scholar of the occult by night (he wrote works with titles like Scientific Occultism and The Blood of the Gods, and I don’t know this for a fact, but it stands to reason so I’ll go ahead and add “...and there were rumors of even darker pursuits, never shared with the public, which transpired behind the imposing walls of Smith Estate”). So, basically this fucking house is straight out of a Lovecraft story.

            So setting a horror movie at the Smith Estate was a great fucking decision. It was also, apparently, the only good decision Harris made in 1977; once completed, the resulting film was deemed unreleasable, which was a thing that movies could be while the concept of shame still existed. So Harris, in an uncharacteristically humble and self-aware move for a director and producer, thought, you know what, maybe I’m not really qualified for this kind of thing, maybe I should ask someone who is. This led him to not one but two someones arguably more qualified than him, those being the irritatingly almost-rhyming brothers Ken and Jim Wheat, genre veterans of… oh, actually they hadn’t done anything yet, so I have no idea how Harris landed on them. But he must have known they’d go on to an interesting career, writing NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4, AFTER MIDNIGHT, THE FLY II, and the original treatment for PITCH BLACK. (And also, ahem, EWOKS: BATTLE FOR ENDOR.)

            Why Harris would trust these two neophytes, who, at least on paper, were even less qualified than he was to take on a project like this, I have no idea. But trust them he did, even as they told him he would have to radically re-write the screenplay from the ground up and reshoot almost the whole thing. Nowadays, of course, it’s just a routine business practice that a studio would spend a colossal mountain of money on a finished movie, then decide at the end they don’t like it and reshoot the whole thing at great expense at the last minute, patching it up with a few clips of older footage until the whole thing is an indecipherable narrative nightmare. But there was a time when this would surely have seemed like a rather startling request, and frankly I can’t believe that Harris went along with it. Turns out he was right to trust his instinct on these two kids, though, because the two brothers completely re-wrote the whole thing, creating an entirely new conflict with completely different antagonists and, it’s strongly implied, also directed or at least guided the re-shoots (though they’re not credited), leaving reportedly only around 12 minutes of the original footage intact. And somehow, against all odds, this actually turned out pretty good.

            Superficially, the two movies seem to have had the same basic structure: a group of four college students move into some decidedly atypical off-campus housing, and are gradually butchered by a slasher. It seems like they mostly kept the same students (Rebecca Badling, THE BOOGENS, Steve Doubet, a busy career of TV guest appearances which seems to have ended abruptly and mysteriously in 1987, John Widelock, “Chuck E. Cheese, voice” in THE CHRISTMAS THAT ALMOST WASN’T [?], and Juli Andelman, MEAN STREETS and WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM!)  which was a good move, because they’re an unusually likeable, believable group of college kids, who have an easygoing, dorky group dynamic. But it seems that the Wheat Brothers completely re-imagined the killer; in an interview included on the DVD, the brothers explain they eliminated “an old man and lady” who were the original owners of the house, and completely re-imagined the character of Mason (originally played by Gong Show staple Murray Langstrom, but played by Brad Reardon [“punk” in THE TERMINATOR] in the final version), who originally was “something like a building manager” (and IMDB claims, “Ken Wheat said Langston played ‘an offensively exaggerated gay character, very broad, supposedly villainous because he was gay.’ As far as I heard, he never makes this claim in the accompanying interview, but maybe it’s on the commentary?). In the place of these characters, they added Yvonne de Carlo (The Munsters, CELLAR DWELLER, AMERICAN GOTHIC) as the matron of the house, and Barbara Steele (BLACK SUNDAY, THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH) in a role which I can say we do not see for a very long time, and will leave at that.

            Also, they threw Cameron Mitchell (MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE, WITHOUT WARNING, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND) in there as a cop, because come on, how are you going to have a movie without Cameron Mitchell, you just couldn’t, it wouldn’t make any sense.

            Anyway, with a solid core of ingratiating co-ed victims, a solid backing cast of veteran genre character actors, and a magnificent location, SILENT SCREAM has all the right ingredients in place for a solid single-locations slasher. That would have probably been enough right there to get me on its side, but then, to my enormous shock, it actually manages to take those ingredients and cook them into something rather satisfying, even something a little ambitious. In fact, the final product is more of a Hitchcock riff than a slasher (understandable, given that it was actually shot before the 1979 premier of HALLOWEEN inaugurated the American slasher wave), with a handful of very nicely staged suspense scenes. Yes, there is a knife-wielding maniac on the premise, but the movie is less interested in bloodletting than it is in simmering tension, taunting the victims with potential help just outside their reach instead of simply butchering them.

            Rebecca Balding helpfully brings some vitality and individuality to her role as the lead victim (which was by no means expected or necessary, but is immensely helpful), and de Carlo and Reardon also do solid, surprisingly nuanced work. But the MVP, of course, is Steele; (mild spoilers follow) without a word of dialogue, she creates a vivid character with a distinct and complex inner life which is instantly apparent and utterly unknowable to us. I’ve mostly seen Steele in roles which play off her ethereal, ghostly presence, but here she commits to something a little more visceral, and comes off with a wonderfully deranged, and yet surprisingly sympathetic, character. And all this in only four days on set. The Wheats claim that de Carlo and Steel were cast to get some “names” in the film, but they ended up getting a lot more than that.

            All this adds up to something of a modest masterpiece, which is all the more stunning given its tortured production. Editor M. Edward Salier (ALICE, SWEET ALICE; THE SLAYER) weaves old footage with new more deftly than many editors manage working from a single source of footage (for the most part; there’s a few continuity errors, but nothing movie-breaking). You'd never guess that it started life as a completely different movie, which is pretty impressive all by itself. But more importantly, the editing crafts a taught but unhurried escalation from vague unease to nutty, gialllo-esque mayhem. And through it all looms the menacing facade of that strange old house, seeming as isolated and lonely as a solitary tombstone perched over a gray and troubled sea.* That the actual house is neither lonely (it’s in a well-populated LA neighborhood five miles from downtown) nor seabound (it’s 20 miles from the nearest beach) is as worthy a testament as any to SILENT SCREAM’s surprisingly worthy second life, and a tribute to the filmmakers’ ability (on the second try) to perform that most vital of all cinematic magic tricks: to make something out of nothing.

            Anyway, if you are in the mood to watch a movie called THE SILENT SCREAM I can definitely recommend this one over the infamous 1984 anti-abortion documentary of the same name. Then again, if this experience teaches us anything it’s that even the most dire film is just an 85% re-write and re-shoot away from greatness. Maybe get the Wheat Brothers working on that other SILENT SCREAM and see if they can’t make it better, lemme know how that turns out.

*Setting it on a hill overlooking the sea gives it a markedly different --though no less effective-- vibe from its decayed Southern Gothic atmosphere in SPIDER BABY. Interesting that such a distinctive-looking place can feel so different simply due to the implied environment around it -- even more so given that it’s neither in the deep South nor near the Ocean.

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TAGLINE	Terror So Sudden There Is No Time To Scream. Which, fair, but that’s not exactly a silent scream, now is it? That’s just not screaming. And with NO TIME TO SCREAM just sitting there as a possible title, too!
TITLE ACCURACY	Certainly some stifled screaming.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher, “horror-of-personality” /Psycho rip-off.
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Yvonnne de Carlo, Barbara Steele, arguably the Wheat Bros.
NUDITY?	There’s a sex scene, I think there are some boobs in there.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No, although we see a scene on TV with a rape, which is actually footage from SILENT SCREAM version 1.0
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	There is a doll
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	Crazed killer
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None.
VOYEURISM?	The killer watches the unwitting tenants from a crawlspace, like Klaus Kinski in, uh, CRAWLSPACE
MORAL OF THE STORY	If there was more available low-income housing, poor college kids would never have to rent rooms in creepy old mansions and be subject to slashings.