Her dance hall showgirl mother unable to take care of her, young Thérèse Gravin (THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE's Cristina Galbó) is enrolled at the rural finishing school of Madame Fournier (MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE's Lili Palmer) whose clientele consist primarily of "difficult" girls whose conduct she rules over with an iron fist with the help of head girl Irene Toupin (CRUCIBLE OF TERROR's Mary Maude). Madame Fournier suspects the interest of her sickly teenage son Louis (THE DEEP END's John Moulder-Brown) in the girls and keeps him hidden away from them, promising him that one day he will meet a girl just like herself capable of taking care of him. What she does not realize, however, is that Louis has been seeing Isabelle (THE BLOOD-SPATTERED BRIDE's Mirabel Martin); that is, until she is stabbed to death on the night she and Louis planned to run away together and her disappearance is dismissed as yet another runaway. The current object of abuse by Irene and her cohorts – who have a hand in all of the illicit activities taking place under Madame Fournier's nose – Thérèse soon gravitates to Louis after rescuing him from being trapped in the air vents while spying on the girls' shower. Unfortunately, knowledge of these clandestine meetings gives Irene more opportunities to make Thérèse bend to her will until she can no longer bear it and plans to flee; but will she manage to escape or wind up another of the runaways who never left "the house that screamed."
The horror genre in Spain made up next to nothing in the country's state-funded and -approved filmography under General Francisco Franco and his nacionalcatolicismo-based dictatorship, constrained primarily to television including the landmark series HISTORIAS PARA NO DORMIR of literary adaptations produced, directed, adapted, and introduced by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, a Uruguayan expat who had started in television in his native country before coming to Spain where he would attain notoriety both as "the Spanish Rod Serling" for his aforementioned series and become a household name as the inventor of the long-running game show UN, DOS, TRES... RESPONDA OTRA VEZ (which he also sold to the British to turned it into 3-2-1 which ran from 1978 to 1988). As the Spanish film industry was making baby steps towards what would become a horror boom of the seventies with a quartet of French co-produced Jess Franco films – the domestic Spanish versions of which eschewed export nude body-doubled inserts for additional expository scenes – and weightlifter/extra turned screenwriter/actor (and later director) Jacinto Molina AKA Paul Naschy launching his "Waldemar Daninsky" series with LA MARCA DEL HOMBRE LOBO (or FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR was it was known in the U.S. or HELL'S CREATURES in other English-speaking territories) in 1967, Serrador was able to build on the popularity of his series with his feature debut LA RESIDENCIA or THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED on a higher level of production with international star Palmer and British leads Moulder-Brown and Maude, expansive an detailed sounds stage sets at Estudios Cinematografica Roma by Ramiro Gómez (HORROR EXPRESS), richly colored and composed Franscope photography by Manuel Berenguer (NIGHT OF THE DEVILS), and a lush score by Waldo de los Rios who would also score Serrador's other horror film: the disturbing WHO CAN KILL A CHILD?
In spite of this level of production – which critics compared to the look of Hammer Films productions – the film was still subject to Spain's production codes, including the prohibition against setting horror films in Spain – Naschy's debut was set in Germany and his lycanthrope protagonist turned from Spanish to Polish nationality while his follow-up WEREWOLF SHADOW would be set in France and Amando de Ossorio's TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD in Portugal despite some now all-too-familiar Spanish shooting locations – and the titular la residencia was set in rural France. Coming before the standard seventies Spanish horror practice of producing covered domestic versions and a version featuring gore, sex, and nude takes for export only, THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED is fairly tame visually in both its domestic Spanish and export versions since the film had to go through the censors at the scripting stage; however, in spite of an obvious indebtedness to PSYCHO and PEEPING TOM – although the film had not been shown in Spain since 1961, many of slavish imitators to follow in the United States, Britian, and other countries probably did not make it to Spanish theaters – and an easily-guessed perpetrator (the whodunit if not necessarily the why/how), the film remains intriguing for depicting the effects of the authoritarian setting and how various characters adapt to it either through open defiance or varying degrees of secrecy and clandestine activities through which her oppressive presence is still felt.
If the film can be said to anticipate the slasher genre, it is a film that depicts a universe in which there cannot be a final girl since even the most cynical of the girls are victims of the same oppression as the killer, and the one person in the film that should have been able to see the end coming a mile away has already proved willing to turn a blind eye to infractions so long as she is not seen to be defied. It is likely that following the ending, the rest of the girls would only realize that something was "wrong" by the absence of authoritarian presence. While there certainly are scenes during the climax that anticipate SUSPIRIA – both in their corridor stalkings and the more "vocal" parts of Waldo de los Rios' score – THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED might make an even more rewarding triple bill with Miguel Mardid's THE KILLER OF DOLLS (in terms of parallel psychoses) and Juan Antonio Bardem's THE CORRUPTION OF CHRIS MILLER (as another healthily-budgeted Spanish thriller masquerading as a prestige production). A few years later, Moulder-Brown would return to Spain as part of a young couple victimized by a secretly fascist intellectual before turning the tables on him in Eloy de la Iglesia's JUEGO DE AMOR PROHIBIDO. Galbó would play another schoolgirl in peril in the Italian/West German Edgar Wallace adaptation WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? and Martin would be menaced by another youthful psycho in THE BELL FROM HELL. Víctor Israel – who appears here as the school's sinister groundskeeper – would lend his distinctive visual presence to a number of Spanish horror films in the next decade including the likes of THE WEREWOLF AND THE YETI to HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD.
Released in Spain during the Christmas season of 1969 under its original title LA RESIDENCIA, the film was exported as THE FINISHING SCHOOL – with "La residencia" in parentheses under the English title – and would earn its better known English moniker THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED through U.S. release by American International in a version trimmed by ten minutes primarily for pacing (starting with the extraneous pre-credits sequence). While a number of American International titles found life on home video through deals with Warner Bros. through Filmways and HBO Home Video, Thorn/EMI, and Vestron through Orion's acquisition of the library and then subsequently MGM's ownership and restoration of the catalog, THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED was one of the few titles that never saw an official home video release. Determined horror fans had to seek out bootlegs of the cropped Australian VHS of THE FINISHING SCHOOL version before an old letterboxed master of the Spanish version turned up in Spain on VHS and then DVD which was the source of various fandubs in the grey market and "officially" when Shout! Factory released a line of DVDs of "Elvira's Movie Macabre" which married the original eighties television show hosting segments to usually uncut masters of films that would have been cut on television, with THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED turning up on a double bill DVD with MANEATER OF HYDRA but neither transfer was ideal. When Shout! Factory announced the film as part of a Timeless MOVIES 4 YOU quadruple feature with MGM titles THE BAT PEOPLE, THE SCREAMING SKULL, and THE VAMPIRE, it was hoped that we would get a new transfer; however, that release was delayed and THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED was replaced with THE VAMPIRE LOVERS.
In Germany, Colosseo Film attempted to improve on things by marrying the MGM HD master to film-sourced footage of the missing version; however, they utilized a French print which had all of its credits up front meaning that they had to remove a chunk of the footage from the arrival of the carriage at the school where the English and Spanish credits originally appeared; as such, it ran two minutes shorter than the Shout! Hybrid.
For their US/Canada/UK Blu-ray release, Arrow Video was able to access not only MGM's interpositive – through Park Circus who handles British licensing of international studios in the U.K. – but also the original Spanish 35mm camera negative which had been conformed to the export cut for branched 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 presentations of both the export version (105:11) and the U.S. version (94:22) in which both versions seem to be a composite of the best of both film elements. Both blow the earlier transfers out of the water with richer colors and textures that make the sets all the more impressive as lived-in environments with some minute instances of missing frames and subtle fluctuations in color and crispness that is nevertheless the definitive presentation thus far.
The export version is accompanied by an audio commentary by film historian Anna Bogutskaya who explains for the uninitiated – and even more seasoned Spanish horror viewers – just how much of a household name Serrador, the series HISTORIAS PARA NO DORMIR which included a few adaptations of stories by Juan Tébar whose story "Mama" was well-known and considered for a TV adaptation before Serrador decided to utilize it as the source for his feature debut (credited screenwriter Luis Peñafiel is a pseudonym Serrador used for several of his teleplays). In discussing the film, she makes some stimulating observations like the contradictions of Fournier's character, Palmer's unblinking performance, the way Mary Maude's Irene directly mirrors Fournier's mannerisms when exerting her own authority over others, and the way the film depicts the world of the girls at the school with more complexity than potential victims. She also discusses the career of Serrador's father Narciso Ibáñez Menta who had assisted Lon Chaney in Hollywood, appeared in genre plays in Uruguay, and was a regular of Spanish horror films in the seventies like THE DRACULA SAGA and NIGHT OF THE WEREWOLF.
Ported over from the Scream Factory edition is the 2012 Film Festival Q&A with actress Mary Maude (12:14) in which she recalls being cast in a smaller role and being promoted to Irene upon arrival, the film being the most expensive Spanish production at the time, and her clashes with Serrador over his direction of her.
In "The Legacy of Terror" (13:55), director's son Alejandro Ibáñez discusses his father's youth in Uruguay, his grandfather, his father's Uruguayan horror series which he showed to Televisión Española leading to HISTORIAS PARA NO DORMIR, his fathers two films, and the game show.
In "Screaming the House Down" (20:23), Spanish horror expert Dr Antonio Lázaro-Reboll places the film in the context of what Spanish horror was and would become, touching upon the works of Jess Franco and Paul Naschy, as well as the influence of Serrador's TV and film work on Spanish director's in the genre, noting that Serrador had a tough time finding genre directors when he tried to revive HISTORIAS PARA NO DORMIR in the eighties on television but that the 2006 series of TV movies – released stateside as under the banner "Six Films to Keep You Awake" on separate DVDs from Lionsgate – he helmed the first story while other were directed by Mateo Gil (screenwriter of Alejandro Amenabar's OPEN YOUR EYES and TESIS), Enrique Urbizu (one of the scripters of THE NINTH GATE), [REC]'s Paco Plaza, PERDITA DURANGO's Álex de la Iglesia, and DARKNESS' Jaume Balagueró.
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