THE SCREAMING SKULL (1958)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

The Wikipedia essay on SCREAMING SKULL mentions that when director Alex Nicol was trying to persuade his lead actress to take the part, he faked her out by claiming he intended to do a remake of Hitchcock's REBECCA. This was not a coincidence. The SKULL screenplay from John Kneubuhl has almost nothing in common with the F. Marion Crawford short story, which contributed the title and (maybe) the name of one of the characters, which happens to be "Marion." For the most part SKULL is a reprise of REBECCA, being about a second wife's anxieties as to her new husband's feelings about his deceased first wife-- though Kneubuhl also seems to have injected a fair amount of the pop-Freudianism found in the Hitchcock oeuvre.

The film starts with Eric Whitlock (John Hudson) bringing his timid second wife Jenni (Peggy Webber) to the estate Eric once shared with his first wife Marion. The estate seems lavish, with extensive gardens, live peacocks, and the grave of Marion, topped by a monument with her image. Curiously, the interior of the main house is largely bereft of furnishings. Eric explains that though the mansion was bequeathed to Marion by her late parents, she, upon marrying Eric, had all the furniture put in storage, intending to re-decorate, so that Marion could put her own stamp on the dwelling of her dead parents. This loosely implies that only a few months ensued between Marion's marriage and her accidental death, caused when she slipped near the swimming pool, cracked her skull and drowned in the pool. Eric inherited the property only, which circumstance will probably set off warning bells for detectives in the audience.

Jenni also comes from money, and both of her parents are dead-- though under more psycho-dramatic events. She tells her husband's pastor Reverend Snow-- one of only three other characters in the film-- that she Jenni at some point experienced an Electra complex. She became aware of loving her father and hating her mother, not least because she thought her mother disliked Jenni for not being "gay" like the mother. Jenni's fantasy of wishing her mother dead comes to ironic fruition when both parents drown at sea and she's unable to save either of them, despite her best (conscious) efforts. She enters a sanitarium to recover from a breakdown, and after being released she meets and marries Eric. To her horror, one of the few furnishings in the mansion is a portrait of Marion, which reminds Jenni of her dead mother. The other three characters are also living reminders of Marion-- Reverend Snow and his wife to a lesser extent, and to a greater extent, the retarded-seeming gardener Mickey (director Nicol). Mickey was raised on the estate alongside Marion, as if the two were siblings.

Then strange things start happening to Jenni as she sleeps by herself in the mansion. She hears screams in the night, but Eric tells her she heard the cries of the peacocks. She starts seeing disembodied skulls, and Eric tells her that crazy Mickey's gaslighting her. But as soon as the viewer sees ceramic skulls rolling around, he'll guess he's left the domain of Hitchcock for that of William Castle. Eric's hoaxing Jenni to get her money, just as he most probably killed Marion for the same reason. Unfortunately for Eric, his return to the scene of the first crime brings Marion back to undead life-- and she avenges herself by emulating the skull-motif of Eric's plot.

SKULL wasn't meant to grab the audience with anything more than penny-ante Gothicisms, so I can't claim the lousy second half of the movie was any sort of surprise. The first half does at least create some potential for Jenni to overcome her rather random complex, and it's for that unrealized potential that I grade the film's mythicity as "fair."