Recent young marrieds Ian Ogilvy & Stephanie Beacham move into Ogilvy's family estate and are soon haunted by a severed hand. Thinking Beacham is having a breakdown, Peter Cushing (who studies the "science of the mind") is brought in. Soon a family curse is revealed and all hell breaks loose. An entertaining Gothic horror film from Amicus. Director Roy Ward Baker moves this along briskly and the script (by Roger Marshall & David Case) is tightly wound. Beacham is terrific and any film that features not only Cushing but Patrick Magee & Herbert Lom has to be recommended. There's a great performance by Geoffrey Whitehead as Silas.

Virginal newlywed Catherine Fengriffen (Stephanie Beacham) moves into her husband's ancestral home where she suffers from horrific visions of a man with a severed hand and bloody eye sockets. Catherine thinks she's losing the plot, but hubby Charles (Ian Ogilvy) knows better: his family is under a curse brought about decades earlier by his wicked, hedonistic grandfather Henry (Herbert Lom) who violated a woodsman's wife on her wedding night. Psychologist Dr. Pope (Peter Cushing), who has been brought in to treat Catherine, slowly begins to unravel the mystery...And Now The Screaming Starts sets out to do two things—jangle the nerves, and stir the loins of its male viewers—both of which it does well. Seasoned horror director Roy Ward Baker expertly handles his spooky material, carefully crafting a creepy atmosphere that keeps the viewer on edge throughout, and peppers proceedings with a few effective jump scares for good measure; meanwhile, gorgeous star Beacham sets the pulses pounding, her heaving bosom barely restrained by her long line of cleavage enhancing outfits.Admittedly Beacham's incessant histrionics can get a little irritating at times, and the pacing is perhaps a little too slow for some, but there's enough good stuff here to keep most fans of Gothic '70s British horror more than happy, including a cool crawling hand (a nifty 'clockwork' special effects creation), Cushing in a foppish wig, Lom being utterly despicable as horrid Henry (the actor delivering his debauched dialogue with relish), and Ogilvy desecrating a grave with an axe, pulling the mouldy corpse out and giving it a damn good kicking!

This movie screamed me to death when I was sixteen hiding under the covers, eating butter popcorn. I saw this not too long ago on AMC.It is about a recent married couple moving into a huge mansion-castle, in late 1700s in England. The Bride is haunted by a painting of her husband's grandfather's portrait. She is frighteningly drawn to it. She sees a floating severe hand coming out of the portrait. Her husband at first thinks it is nerves and brings a doctor to come to her side. The doctor wants him to tell her the truth of a dark family secret, her husband refuses insist that it is fairly tale. The doctor tells him, "If you don't I will." Then suddenly he is afraid and does not.What Dark Family Secret is her husband hiding? Why won't he tell her the truth? Why is portrait of his grandfather haunts her so?

I remember being underwhelmed when I first watched this (a pan & scan airing on TV some years ago), but re-acquainting myself with it via Anchor Bay UK's exemplary DVD edition has proved surprisingly enjoyable - despite its utter lack of originality! Being Amicus' sole foray into full-blown Gothic horror, this film perhaps draws the most comparisons with the 'rival' Hammer films, and as such manages to keep its own in their company by virtue of its polished (if not expensive) production values - Denys Coop's intricate camera-work, Douglas Gamley's atmospheric score and Tony Curtis' handsome sets - and its top cast, comprised of any number of renowned genre stars.Stephanie Beacham (who screams and faints like the best of them!) actually manages to keep the audience involved in her plight, which is no easy feat seeing that precious little of the plot is revealed during its first half; Ian Ogilvy is an adequately brooding master-of-the house; Geoffrey Whitehead is a mysterious and vaguely sinister woodsmen who lives on the property (actually doubling as his own grandfather in the flashback sequence towards the end); Guy Rolfe and Rosalie Crutchley have small but fairly important roles in support. However, the film belongs to three thespians and it seems that the producers knew this as well, given they were top-billed: Peter Cushing, whose belated arrival does not disguise the fact that he's the true star of the show (nothing new for him here, really, but he's always worth watching); Herbert Lom as a particularly nasty descendant of Ogilvy's and whose misdemeanors have put a terrible curse over the entire house; Patrick Magee as the compassionate but eventually weak-willed town medic (who's regrettably thrown to the sidelines and eventually dispatched once Cushing, who's of a more analytical approach, arrives on the scene).The film features a number of effective moments: the hand bursting out of the painting; the many scenes involving the crawling hand (though a rather tired motif by now, especially since it was not a part of the original novel!); likewise, the many appearances of Whitehead's disfigured and spooky ancestor; the all-important flashback involving Lom's character (basically lifted outright from Conan Doyle's "The Hound Of The Baskervilles") which, apart from brutal (if not too graphic) rape and symbolic mutilation, also features some brief nudity - unless I'm mistaken, a first for Amicus (in contrast, Beacham's violation by the 'ghost' is presented in a lot subtler way which, by the end, only led to confusion for some viewers as to what had really happened to her!); the finale is quite interesting for this type of film (though, again, hardly ground-breaking in the broader scheme of things): Ogilvy going mad a' la WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968) and literally digging up his grandfather's corpse while Beacham, equally unhinged by this time, is perplexed by the presence of her new-born child who may or may not be 'possessed' (echoes of ROSEMARY'S BABY [1968]) - the sight of Cushing presiding over this scene and realizing that all his 'enlightened' advise has brought only misery upon the couple lends the whole a rare (and probably unwitting) poignancy.With respect to the video/audio department, Anchor Bay UK handles this area of the disc satisfactorily. The Audio Commentaries are the icing on the cake for this release - two excellent tracks that take in everything one would possibly want to know about the production, including the fact that all seemingly agree on the singularly unbecoming retitling of the film by producer Max J. Rosenberg, and then some (Ogilvy comes off as a very pleasant chap who looks back at his days in horror cinema with great fondness, though he continually underestimates his own memory of them!; Stephanie Beacham and Roy Ward Baker seem very glad to be once again in each other's company while also evidently very proud of their respective work here; moderators Darren Gross and Marcus Hearn, respectively, come up with relevant questions and general factoids so that both tracks remain, ahem, on track for the most part. Finally, there are film notes, bios, a trailer, some TV spots and a poster/stills gallery which, as with the other discs in this Collection, add up to a very nice extra touch.