Editorials
Low-Budget British Anthology ‘Screamtime’ Is Rich in Charm [Horrors Elsewhere]
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The anthology is a unique subgenre of horror. In addition to the offbeat structures and a predilection for the strange and unexpected, these films generally do as they please. There are of course specific traditions almost all anthologies adhere to, but there is no set rule for how they come together in the first place. Films like Creepshow are made from scratch, but the 1980s saw the rise of a new kind of anthology; the ones pieced together from preexisting material. An early example of this format, sometimes referred to as a “Frankenthology,” is a little-known British chiller called Screamtime.
Michael Armstrong and Stanley A. Long, who are collectively credited as Al Beresford, pooled their previous short films to make 1983’s Screamtime. They then linked them to an original segment filmed in Manhattan. This obscure gathering of the weird and unexplained takes place in New York in spite of its thoroughly British innards. The transcontinental setup only adds to Screamtime’s growing list of quirks. The wraparound begins with two loafers, Ed and Bruce (Vincent Russo, Michael Gordon), lifting three tapes from the Video Shack once located at 49th Street and Broadway, and prominently next to an adult theater. Ed and Bruce immediately barge in on a friend, Marie (Marie Scinto), who is in the midst of getting ready for a “date.” Until then, Marie allows her uninvited guests to watch their haul.
The first video is “Killer Punch”, a domestic disturber about a dejected Punch-and-Judy operator named Jack (Robin Bailey). When things at home become much too sad for Jack to handle, he seeks comfort from his Punch puppet. His refuge from the world is soon spoiled when embittered stepson Damien (Johnathon Morris) sets fire to the puppet stand. Wife Lena (Ann Lynn) then plans to leave Jack and take Damien along with her, but a force inside the house refuses to let them go.
“Killer Punch” is a short and sweet stab at the slasher formula so prevalent in American horror back then. In the subgenre’s early days, it was not unusual to see these kinds of films trade high body counts and indiscriminate carnage for psychological drama and deliberated tension. Jack’s simmering dysfunction finally boils over, and up until the hairy reveal and ending, the audience naturally wonders if the puppeteer’s unrest has in fact manifested as a murderous Mr. Punch.
Ed, whose only takeaway from the first video is, “Dem British movies; I can tell by the way they talk,” pops in the next tape. Although this segment was originally called “Dreamhouse” when it played in theaters back in 1981, here Armstrong’s short is called “Scream House” on the cassette box. Yvonne Nicholson and Ian Saynor respectively play Susan and Tony, newlyweds who move into what appears to be a haunted house. Susan is the first to pick up on the paranormal activity, which includes vivid visions of the home’s sordid history. In time the devastating truth comes out.
Anthologies can have a “get in and get out” attitude about themselves, but so far, Screamtime has been considerate with its pacing and plotting. The second slot, which is arguably the strongest of the pack, boasts appreciable scares and buildup. The outcome is also novel as well as surprising even by today’s standards. If this chapter has one glaring drawback, though, the production values run on the meager side. Nicholson’s character sports the same top in nearly every scene regardless of shifts in time, and the actual slaughter is limply executed. The story proved to be appealing enough to warrant a full-length adaptation; Reg Traviss directed a 2010 film called Psychosis. Anyone who has seen both versions can agree the short is more potent, seeing as the film’s padding only dilutes the big twist.
As Bruce gets to know Marie better back in her bedroom, Ed keeps the marathon going on his own. The last video, “Garden of Blood”, follows a motocross rider named Gavin (played by former pop singer David Van Day), who is in desperate need of money. After he accepts the job of handyman for two spinsters (Jean Anderson, Dora Bryan), Gavin breaks into his employers’ house in hopes of stealing the small fortune inside. If Gavin had been more mindful of the women’s stories about protective garden gnomes and naughty fairies, he might have lived long enough to find better employment.
In terms of segment arrangement, Screamtime could have exercised more thought. The empirical rule for anthologies is to expect inconsistency in the story quality. “Garden of Blood” is without a doubt the film’s weakest link, but Armstrong and Long could have easily remedied that by moving it to the front rather than saving it for the coveted last spot. Following it with the other two offerings, both of which are superior in every way, would have made up for this middling yarn had it played sooner than later. It is much too mild to be the ultimate tale in this otherwise delightful collection.
As is custom with nearly all anthologies containing a wraparound, the main characters are never safe regardless of their distance from the featured stories. Screamtime’s framing device has this in common with Amicus’ strand of portmanteau films. However, Armstrong and Long’s film takes an innovative approach to how Ed, Bruce, and Marie come upon these cursed videos and meet their doomed fates. It all feels like a precursor to more recent anthologies, such as V/H/S.
There is no denying this anthology feels like a quick money grab. Yet, even as low-cost as the film comes across, the content itself is for the most part entertaining and not as uneven as other slapdash compilations that cropped up later. What Screamtime lacks in budget it makes up for in charm.
Horrors Elsewhere is a recurring column that spotlights a variety of movies from all around the globe, particularly those not from the United States. Fears may not be universal, but one thing is for sure — a scream is understood, always and everywhere.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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