Mr. Sleeman Is Coming

     The Scariest Prop in the Movies

     The Screaming Skull (1958), directed by and starring Alex Nicol, is a loose remake of Rebecca, directed by Hitchcock, from the Daphne du Maurier novel.  Eric Whitlock, played by John Hudson, is the kind of father figure-type husband who says to his wife, "I forbid it," and other controlling directives.  Jenni Whitlock (Peggy Webber) is new to Eric's house out in the country, a big white place with long columns, a big property, a cement-enclosed pond with lily pads and frogs, and a worker, Mickey (Alex Nicol), missing some brain matter, but intensely loyal to the late Mrs. Whitlock, whose body, nothing creepy about this at all, is buried on the property under a trimmed lawn by a marker shaped like a squat white obelisk.

     For some reason, Mickey has Mrs. Whitlock's skull.  He dug it up, I guess.  He uses it to terrify the mentally fragile new Mrs. Whitlock.  In Rebecca, Joan Fontaine plays the "Second Mrs. De Winter," unnamed, overpowered in lost majesty by the first Mrs. De Winter, Rebecca, whose portrait and other possessions are closely guarded by the servant, Mrs. Danvers.  Danvers, of course, is Mickey in this newer version, although Danvers has her shit together and can speak English.  

     Mickey seems to live outside, or in a toolshed.  He grunts, seems to be mute.  Jenni Whitlock freaks out, believing Mickey's skull antics are real visitations by her ghostly predecessor.  Why would the late Mrs. Whitlock want to torment Jenni?  What does she care?  Turns out her husband killed her.  Making matters worse, he married Jenni for her father's money.  She's an heiress, source of father's wealth not specified.  

     To keep the male interest, Alex Nicol has Jenni in a nightgown, removing her sweater in a different scene, white brassiere almost as voluminous and filled with 1950s actress breasts as Janet Leigh's bra in Psycho.  

     The film benefits from shortness.  If Marvel could make a sixty-eight minute long movie, I'd watch that, gladly.  

     William Castle-style, The Screaming Skull opens with a warning:

     "Free!!  We guarantee to bury you without charge if you die of fright during Screaming Skull!"

     Yeah, and Donald Trump promised he'd pay the legal bills of anyone assaulting another person at one of his campaign rallies, except that no one ever died from watching The Screaming Skull.  It does suggest the idea of art that kills, affecting the nervous system, a negative force taking the place of a life form, the in-the-dark Jenni Whitlock.  

     Peggy Webber, born in 1925, is still alive.  Thirty-three in the film. 

     Mrs. Whitlock, the new one, when she isn't looking good in tight-fitting dresses and in her underwear, spends the entire film in a state of perplexity and fear, like the side effects of an anxiety medication.  We the viewers can perceive a bigger vista of what's going on more than she can.  When Eric Whitlock's hands are throttling her in the upstairs hallway by a very nice polished wooden banister and stairway, he's interrupted by a repeated rhythm of three knocks on the front door.  We've heard it before, it's the same thing: Mrs. Floating Skull herself, this time wearing a white dress.  This thing is a ghost!  Also, an actual skull that used to be Mrs. Whitlock dug up, apparently, by either Eric or Mickey.  Eric, beset by the floating skull, musical near orgasmic intensity on soundtrack making spit accumulate inside brass instruments, stumbles like a nerve gas victim toward the frog pool.

     He fights the skull, actor John Hudson doing the greatest fight with an inanimate object since Bride of the Monster (1954), the octopus thing versus Bela Lugosi.

     Hudson had to bring the skull to his neck as if his former wife is biting him.  He had to act his part while acting the skull, too.  He bashes it against his forehead, he rubs it against his face.  He earns his pay!  A true tour de force, and I'm not sure if I'm being sarcastic or sincere.

     Some of the clumsiness in the direction may be due to this being Alex Nicol's first film.  He'd been an actor for many years.  At forty-two he directed this movie.  One shot of the grounds of Whitlock's property starts to pan to the left, then cut to next shot.  His transition shots show Nicol trying out basic movements like pan, track, focus in on something, shoot footage at night, yielding black blots of foliage showing up on film stock not used for night shooting.  Abstract art on a cinema screen.

     That he gave himself the role of the mute devotee of Mrs. Whitlock the deceased, speaks to his ambition.  It could be that as an actor, he found the movie compelling, if not as a director.  Eager to make his first film, he used a script written by the producer.  I imagine the producer felt some kind of vanity glow to have his very own script shot as a film.*

     I'm thinking too much about this movie so I'll end it.

 

     *Correction: John Kneubuhl has one producer credit and forty-seven writer credits on IMDB.  His career spanned the years 1953 to 1970, the last thing he wrote for the screen was a Mannix episode.

                                                                             Vic Neptune