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Film: The House that Screamed( La Residencia)
Format: Streaming video from AMC on Fire!

It’s not a shock that there would be some similarities between Italian horror and Spanish horror. The House that Screamed (originally La Residencia) is a film that makes that connection very clear. The film takes place at a girls’ boarding school in France where a series of grisly murders are going to take place. In a sense, this feels like a Spanish Suspiria in large part. It’s a lot more sexually charged, though, with elements of women in prison movies, young girls showering (while clothed, which is oddly more sexual), and some lesbian overtones. I wasn’t sure what to think going into this one, but the reality of the film is very different from what I expected.

Before I talk about this, I need to talk for a moment about where to find the film. It’s currently available on Tubi TV, but the transfer is terrible. It’s grainy and hard to watch, and more importantly, there is a noticeable and terrible hiss. It’s barely watchable. I got about 30 minutes in before I looked for a better version of it, which is available.

As mentioned, The House that Screamed takes place in a French boarding school for girls. What is going to soon become apparent is that this is a school for “troubled” girls. We begin with the arrival of a new student, Teresa (Cristina Galbó). We also meet the headmistress, Madame Fourneau (Lilli Palmer), who runs the school much like a prison. She is assisted in large part by an older student named Irene (Mary Maude), who she sees as a sort of protégé. We also learn of her son Luis (John Moulder-Brown), who is of an age where looking at girls (especially in the shower) is something he desperately wants to do despite his mother’s objection and her insistence that none of these girls are good enough for him—he should be looking for someone like her.

Another thing we discover soon is that Madame Fourneau is a believer in corporal punishment, something we learn when we see one of the girls whipped for disobedience, in a scene that feels straight out of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS. It’s also worth saying that Irene is a part of this as the one doing the whipping. So right off the bat we’ve got Oedipal impulses, strong lesbian vibes, and sado-masochism. This is ramped up in the scene where the girls shower while still wearing shifts, which is actually more sexual than if they had been nude. And, of course, Luis is watching, so we can add voyeurism as well.

Of course, the girls start disappearing one by one, and we’ll see not just that they are running away, but that they are being rather brutally murdered. And so, much of the latter half of the film concerns this, who is doing the murdering, and why. The best part of this is that The House that Screamed genuinely sets up a number of possibilities and points us in a lot of potential directions, some more than others. The ultimate conclusion is a bit of a surprise, as are a few of the moments that lead up to it. There are some real risks taken in the narrative, and they work surprisingly well.

I’ve never been shy about not really appreciating Italian horror as much as many other people do, so I went into this more or less expecting to check off a box. I can sometimes get a sense of film quality in terms of where it falls on the They Shoot Zombies list, and this is just a bit outside of the top third of the list. However, that’s true of a lot of horror films of this style that ultimately leave me flat. The House that Sceamed managed to exceed all of my expectations, especially once I found a transfer that actually looks the way it’s supposed to.

The truth is that for a horror film that is this lurid, the expectation is that it’s going to play essentially about that forbidden sexuality. It’s easy to think that this is going to just be as lurid as possible—tits and murders. And sure, that’s a part of the appeal of The House that Screamed, but it’s almost as if it draws in the audience with the promise of nudity and violence and gives them something far more interesting instead.

If this had the visual flair of Suspiria, this would be one of the top 100 horror movies ever made. Yes, that’s a bold claim, but I stand by it, especially because of how the third act plays out. No spoilers here, but a lot of what you expect to happen is going to be radically upset.

Why to watch The House that Screamed: It’s surprisingly smart for the type of film it is.
Why not to watch: Look carefully for the best transfer—there are some really bad ones out there.