The Shout

Another horror-ish movie that TCM is running as part of their October horror spotlight and which is on my DVR from a previous TCM showing is The Shout. The next showing is early tomorrow (October 25) at 5:00 AM; as TCM runs its daily schedule from 6:00 AM to 6:00 AM the next day, their schedule makes it look as though the movie is on October 24.

The movie starts oddly, with Rachel Fielding (Susannah York) walking into some sort of facility in Devonshire, England, where she's directed into a dining room. There, on three of the tables, are three dead bodies laid out, covered with sheets! (Frankly, that seems exceedingly unhygienic to me.) She pulls the sheets back, and seems most surprised by the third body.

Cut to a guy on a motorcycle driving to the same facility. He gets there at the same time a woman in just a dressing-gown is coming down the stairs, very much disturbed by this man. The place in fact is a mental hospital/sanitarium, and the woman happens to be one of the patients; her presence is only to establish that this is in fact an inpatient mental facility with a rather large grounds. The man, Robert Graves (Tim Curry), is a young doctor who one might think is coming to work at this facility. But before that, he's shown up on recreation day. And the doctors are busy setting up a cricket match between mixed teams of doctors and patients.

Graves is being asked to help keep score for the match, a process which requires two people to do all the statistics, one for each side. The two official scorekeepers are in a little cabana off to the side; accompanying Dr. Graves is one of the patients, Charles Crossley (Alan Bates). Except that Crossley doesn't seem quite nuts enough to be a patient here. However, he has a story to tell that may just explain why he's at the facility....

Crossley claims to be a world traveler, and to have killed his wife and children. That was as a result of his having spent time with the Aborigines in Australia, and having learned many of the traditional rituals that Westerners would simply disparage as "magic". Of late, Crossley wound up in Devon, where he made the acquaintance of an avant-garde composer/sound designer, Anthony Fielding (John Hurt), who is the husband of the aforementioned Rachel Fielding. Crossley is a bit of a smooth operator in addition to everything else, so he worms his way into the Fieldings' lives, including staying in their guest room.

And then Crossley tells Mr. Fielding that among the Aboriginal "magic" he learned was The Shout. That's a sort of bellow that can be used as a weapon to kill someone nearby (albeit not the person who actually produces the noise), although the range is a bit too much for it to be really useful to kill one person. Anthony is understandably curious but also disbelieving. He'd like to hear The Shout, even though Crossley insists it would kill him. The two play a bit of a cat-and-mouse game, but as this is going on, Crossley also seems to be seducing Mrs. Fielding. He's also getting rather more erratic, and that might cause a danger to everybody around him.

The Shout is an movie with an intriguing premise, but at the same time I have to think that it's not a movie that's going to be for everyone. The narrative structure jumps back and forth in time and, even though it's a relatively short movie by even 1970s standards at a bit under 90 minutes, it feels very deliberate in its pacing, as though there's more atmosphere than plot. I didn't dislike The Shout, but I can see why some will and I can also see why there are people who are going to love it a lot when that isn't quite my reaction.