The Shout (1979)

Strange, arty horror movie filmed in Devon, England about a mysterious traveller who turns up at the coastal home of John Hurt and Susannah York (who gets her clothes off several times) and claims to have magic Aboriginally powers. Indeed he possess a deadly shout, hence the title. Nicely filmed and compelling, with a great cast but if you can understand the ending then you are more clever than me! Just enjoy for the strangeness and visual pleasure.

Like a long day on the beach... with a psychopath. Not one scene shot in the dark, I think. It's always morning or lunchtime. Natural light and natural expressions on the faces of churchgoers. The film refuses to fall into that horror cliché of scary things happening at night. Beautifully shot and edited, almost like a music video, which makes sense because the story is about the sound. The scenes of experiments with sound effects seem like performance/installation pieces from an era when conceptual art made sense. The banality of the story is avoided because... it's just a story from a loony bin. The whole film is a flashback. The characters seen during the cricket match may or may not be husband and wife, the story could be just a figment of lunatic's imagination. The horror is in the mind and becomes a fascination. The cast is superb and as natural as the light. Nudity was not an issue for such acting talents back then. It was just natural.

This film may not be everyone's style of horror but it is my style of horror-thriller. It's not a typical story - quite different than most all horror-thrillers I have ever seen.This movie moves along a steady pace as Crossley (Alan Bates) tells Graves (Tim Curry) the story of how he moved himself into the home and the life of a married couple. Crossley tells the story of how he is not an average person, he is fluent in aboriginal magic and works his magic to get what he wants. Crossley also claims to have learned the killer aboriginal "Shout". Is all this true or is Crossley just a patient and not a visitor at the psychiatric hospital? Watch the film to find out.Yes this movie is GOOD - I personally think this one would make a great prime time movie to watch. (Some nudity and sexual content - so if you have young children you might want to wait until they are in bed to watch the film).8.5/10

The Shout is the kind of 70's horror film I love, where the grip on reality is tenuous at best, where things may or may not be what we see them to be and life as we know it is broken by something that may or may not be of this world, the normal and the everyday become concave and something dark and ominous can be faintly discerned at the bottom, and conclusions are not governed by logic and finality but rather erupt in wild emotion, guilt or pain or insanity, emotion masked/transfigured using supernatural terms. In some ways the notes Skolimowski uses to tell his story are the same as those used in Don't Look Now and The Last Wave, the basic means of expression are aesthetic, some of it even strike the same chords and capture the same atonal melody as those films, but in the end it's not quite the same tune.This is a story recounted to a third party during a baseball match in a mental institution, "always the same story" as the teller says, the sequence of events is not always in the same order, and we can only guess at how many times Crossley has said his story, how much of it is real or not and if any of it actually happened as we see. The flashback story where Alan Bates shows up in John Hurt's home to threaten his grip on sanity and his marriage is pretty straightforward though, it's like a fable about cuckolding come to pass with supernatural means.Susannah York is perfect for this type of film, she has the right measure of youthful and gauche that makes her distraught heroines seem so natural (like they do in Images and Freud), and she shines again here, although now it's John Hurt's turn to be confounded by the shattered reality around him and put the pieces back together.The scenes where he tries to pretend that everything is fine when he knows it's not, with that fragile forced smile and his fleeting movements, resonate with me in very immediate ways, his eyes always tell the truth though, and there's a scene right after he witnesses "the shout" for the first time where he's lying in bed visibly shaken and we hear Alan Bates going up the stairs coming to his room and his body tenses and clenches in anticipation. He doesn't want to be in the same room with that man but he must pretend everything is okay because he can't explain any of his terror to anyone, and he's even powerless to make him leave. Terrific acting by Hurt, I like him more every time.That we go back to the mental institution to realize we've been listening to an unreliable narrator takes out some of my enjoyment of the film, because things have just got interesting and they could be pushed much further, before a curious voodoo involving a round rock and shoes can take place and the police make their appearance, and because it's a device used in a plethora of films dating as far back as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Skolimowski is obviously not trying to make one of that plethora of films. In other words, whereas Don't Look Now takes time to blur the line between right and wrong, real and imagined, The Shout goes back and erases the line so that none of what we saw may have actually been real so that nothing really matters. It's like a game where the stakes are removed at the last minute.The last minute is amazing though, whatever it's supposed to mean, it's wild and chaotic, thunders strike, people flail naked in the rain, and someone's jaws are clenched in agony.It's still very good stuff, anxiety and uncertainty always work better for me than literal horror, and The Shout for the most part is like a strange painted round object someone has brought back from an exotic place, I like to take it in my hand and look at it from different angles and make up stories about it, but it loses some of that mysterious charm when I find out that it's nothing more than a painted round rock. It still could have been used for anything by the one who made it but that unspoken meaningfulness of it has evaporated a little.