I Watch Films: Scream Bloody Murder

 

Scream Bloody Murder

As a boy Mathew’s father is killed when Mathew (Fred Holbert) starts a tractor his father is working on; he loses his hand in the accident. He’s sent away to a psychiatric hospital and has his hand replaced with a prosthetic hook. At the age of 18 he returns home to discover his mother (Leigh Mitchell) has remarried. Uncomfortable with sex, and not liking his new stepfather, he kills him; when his mother discovers this he kills her too and leaves town, hitchhiking.

The couple stop by a stream, and then Mathew snaps, seeing his mother’s face, and kills them too. He makes it to the next town where he meets Vera (also Leigh Mitchell) painting outside her house. She’s also a sex worker, though he’s not interested in that and is unhappy when she invites a sailor in. When the sailor leaves Mathew kills him.

Obsessed with Vera he talks his way into a mansion, then smothers the woman who lives there, kills the maid with a kitchen cleaver and beheads the dog. Taking possession of the mansion (and the car) he invites Vera to see, but she refuses to move there so he takes her prisoner. He robs people to buy groceries, kills the doctor who comes to visit the woman who lives there.

When Vera has to take a bath she starts to understand that he’s uncomfortable with her sexuality. She tries to seduce him, then, while distracted, tries to escape. This leads to the final bloody even more self-destructive rampage.

Does this film have something to say? Or is it just a repressed, violent man with a hook for a hand, getting obsessed with women and then destroying himself, in a proto-slasher horror film intended to shock? Probably the latter to be honest, though the scenes where Vera explains herself, how she likes her freedom, how having sex is natural, makes the nature of Mathew’s monstrosity clearer. He doesn’t just destroy families and couples, he wants to control the women and if he can’t he’ll kill them.

Watch This: Hook-handed man goes on a rampage
Don’t Watch This: Hook-handed man goes on a rampage