Scream and Scream Again

For the first fifteen minutes, I was lost.

Scream and Scream Again throws three storylines at you with zero explanation. A jogger wakes up missing a leg. A fascist spy kills with his bare hands. A London detective hunts a vampire killer. None of it connects. Yet.

This isn’t sloppy filmmaking. It’s bold. Director Gordon Hessler forces you to pay attention by refusing to hold your hand. The payoff comes in the final fifteen minutes, though you’ll leave with questions. That’s the point.

You came for Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing? Too bad. Amicus producer Milton Stubosky negotiated Vincent Price down from his standard rate of $75,000 to $40,000, and used the savings to book three days of Lee’s time, and one day of Cushing’s.¹

Thus, Cushing appears in a single scene, while Lee appears in a mere handful. Only Price gets substantial screen time, and he’s clearly lost but enjoying himself as a scientist whose experiments in human enhancement have gotten rather out of hand. As Lee later revealed, neither he nor Price understood the script.²

The real star is Alfred Marks as Detective Superintendent Bellaver. He’s so good I wanted a whole franchise built around him. When the vampire killer scales a cliff at superhuman speed, Bellaver’s solution is wonderfully practical: he throws a rock. “Right, get ‘em,” he says. I guffawed. Perfect.

Michael Gothard also deserves mention. He makes a terrifying villain—charming enough to lure victims, menacing enough to drain their blood. The car chase leading to his capture holds its own against big-budget Hollywood fare. Hessler shoots handheld, documentary-style. You’re in the backseat, helpless, feeling every turn as the car weaves in and out of traffic at maximum speed, with each bend or turn potentially masking an oncoming car.

The film walks a tightrope between serious thriller and camp. It shouldn’t work. A network of artificial humans with supernatural powers? Ridiculous. But Hessler grounds the absurdity in Cold War paranoia and scientific hubris.

The film’s greatest weakness is also its greatest strength: it leaves many questions unanswered. Some viewers will find this frustrating, but I found it refreshing. In an era when horror films often over-explain their mysteries, Scream and Scream Again trusts us to fill in the blanks and draw our own conclusions.

That ambiguity only amplifies its paranoid undertones. Don’t expect gothic horror. This is contemporary, gritty, and surprisingly thoughtful about the intersection of science, politics, and human nature. It’s the kind of film that gets better the more you think about it, connecting dots the film leaves scattered.

And Now, a Bit of Speculation

Here’s a wild thought: What if Hammer had made this instead of Amicus?

Picture this: Drop Peter Cushing’s existing scene and, after the film’s original ending, fade to an Eastern European lab. An officer reports to a man in a lab coat, back turned to camera:

“Browning has been terminated. Konratz too.”

The scientist grunts, keeps working.

“It was him.”

The man stops. Turns. It’s Cushing.

“What shall we do, Herr Frankenstein?”

Cushing smiles. Cut to credits.

Boom. Frankenstein rebooted as contemporary paranoid thriller. Cushing and Lee reunited as Cold War enemies. The franchise lives.

Instead, Hammer stuck with period pieces until it was too late. Their final film, To the Devil a Daughter, felt desperate—a weak attempt to chase Rosemary’s Baby’s success.

Maybe pivoting earlier would have saved them. We’ll never know. But Scream and Scream Again shows what might have been: classic horror monsters stalking modern streets, trading castles for laboratories, Gothic romance for political intrigue.

Sometimes the best films are the ones that got away.