The House That Screamed

In nineteenth-century southern France, a teenage girl named Teresa arrives at an isolated boarding school for girls run with harsh discipline by the widowed headmistress Mrs. Fourneau. Fourneau keeps her son Luis apart from the pupils and under her close control, while the students live under a regime of punishment and fear. When girls begin to disappear from the school, the tension among those who remain grows.

The film is a Spanish production directed and written by Chicho Ibáñez Serrador, the first feature he directed in a career that continued with Who Can Kill a Child?, El Trapero and Blame. Lilli Palmer plays Mrs. Fourneau, with Cristina Galbó as Teresa, John Moulder-Brown as Luis, and Maribel Martín, Mary Maude and Cándida Losada among the cast of twenty-three credited performers.

Released in late 1969 and running one hundred minutes, the film mixes horror, mystery and thriller elements. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.8 from roughly 4,800 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.5 from about 133 votes. The larger and stronger IMDb sample suggests a reasonably settled reputation, and the two ratings sit close together, indicating that audiences on the whole respond to it in a similar way.