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If you spend enough time pan­ning through a genre’s schlocky back­wa­ters, you can turn up an intrigu­ing lit­tle gem.  Case in point: Silent Scream.  This tidy lit­tle hor­ror opus is often lumped in with the slasher boom of the late 1970’s/early 1980’s but, despite a few knife-kills, is actu­ally a fas­ci­nat­ing lit­tle propo­si­tion all its own.

This film was the brain­child of one Denny Harris, a middle-aged com­mer­cial direc­tor who decided to try his hand at hor­ror in 1977 by mak­ing a film called The Boarding House.  The end result was deemed a dud by most who saw it but Harris didn’t give in.  Instead, he turned to young brother/writer duo Ken and Jim Wheat, who helped him sal­vage the pro­duc­tion by exten­sively rewrit­ing the script.  Harris kept 12 min­utes of his orig­i­nal film and did exten­sive reshoots to flesh out the rest, adding sev­eral name char­ac­ter actors in cameo roles.  The end result was the sur­prise indie hit of 1980.

So what’s it like?  Silent Scream is an inter­est­ing throw­back to both the “old dark house” genre and the backstory-driven thrillers that came out in the wake of Psycho.  The nom­i­nal hero­ine is Scotty (Rebecca Balding), a col­lege kid who takes a room at a creepy old Victorian house with three other stu­dents.  It’s run by a per­pet­u­ally ner­vous high-school kid (Brad Reardon) and his shut-in mother (Yvonne DeCarlo).  The price is right but nei­ther of the land­lords men­tion that there is some­one liv­ing in the attic.  Said mys­te­ri­ous pres­ence soon turns on the young board­ers, lead­ing to slash­ing knives, the unleash­ing of long-dormant fam­ily secrets and plenty of ‘cat & mouse’ sus­pense scenes.

Despite a few dol­lops of skin and blood, Silent Scream is sur­pris­ingly a slow burner.  The first hour of the film piles on the atmos­phere, with Harris mak­ing great use of the Victorian house set­ting and some nice inte­rior sets as he method­i­cally ratch­ets up the ten­sion.  There are a few shocks to keep fresh blood in the pac­ing plus a sub­plot involv­ing Cameron Mitchell and Avery Schreiber as cops (both are fun to watch) to add a bit of variety.

This early por­tion of the film works well for two rea­sons.  For one thing, the young actors car­ry­ing the first part of the film are a like­able group that give effec­tive, nat­u­ral­is­tic per­for­mances: Balding, who would later pop up in the cult fave The Boogens, does par­tic­u­larly nice work as the hero­ine.  The other rea­son is Harris’s direc­tion, which is far more styl­ish than nor­mal for this era of indie hor­ror.  He deploys visual devices like crane shots and step-printing with skill and cre­ates some really impres­sive flour­ishes that cap­ture the viewer’s eye, like a great mini-sequence that takes the viewer through the secret pas­sages of the house via rov­ing cam­er­a­work and dissolves.

Thankfully, Silent Scream jus­ti­fies this slow burn setup with a crack­er­jack third act that throws out the stops.  The writ­ers assem­ble a series of tense set­pieces that cul­mi­nate in the kind of eleventh-hour rev­e­la­tions that Jimmy Sangster used to come up with when he was pen­ning Psycho knock­offs for Hammer Films.  Harris makes these set­pieces crackle with ner­vous ten­sion.  Better yet, Reardon and DeCarlo really get to strut their stuff here, with Reardon’s twitchy nerd com­ing unglued in mem­o­rable style while DeCarlo han­dles some nec­es­sary expo­si­tion with old-school class.  Without say­ing too much else, there is also an impres­sive turn from Euro-horror icon Barbara Steele in a sur­prise role.

In short, Silent Scream is the kind of retro-horror indul­gence that is likely to endear itself to any­one who grew up on hor­ror of the 1970’s/early 1980’s vintage.