'The Shout': The British horror about a man who can kill with his voice

Hollywood has monopolised the genre as it tends to do with virtually all of cinema’s most popular forms, but it should never be overlooked that British horror has been responsible for a cavalcade of the all-time greats.
From the glory days of Hammer to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin via The Wicker Man, Don’t Look Now, The Innocents, 28 Days Later, The Descent, and countless more besides, the United Kingdom’s filmmakers know what it takes to burrow into the psyche and chill an audience to the bone.
Not all of them gain lasting reputations and are held up in generations to come as among the very best British horror has ever had to offer, but that sentiment surely applies to what surely has to be the only one that boasts a high concept premise, a metatextual framing device, and a soundtrack composed by two members of Genesis.
Adapted from the short story of the same name by Robert Graves, The Shout is told in flashback as Alan Bates’ Crossley finds himself under psychiatric supervision, where he recalls his story to one Robert Graves, played by Tim Curry. From there, the film asks the question of whether or not the events depicted from then on out genuinely happened, or if they’re nothing more than the mutterings of a man decreed to be a risk to himself and society.
Crossley maintains that he picked up a particularly deadly skill during his time spent with the indigenous population of Australia, which has given him the ability to cause death through shouting. Deciding the best way to cope with a potentially fatal gift is to immediately ingratiate himself with a married couple; he shacks up with John Hurt’s experimental musician Anthony Fielding and his wife, Susannah York’s Rachel.
Seduced by his murderous capabilities, she embarks on an extramarital affair with Crossley, even if she seems more enamoured with his innate gifts rather than his personality. Obviously, sound design is key to The Shout, given the way the entire premise hinges on the terrifying power of its central character’s vocal cords, with the movie fittingly going down in the history books as the first British feature with a Dolby soundtrack.
Director Jerzy Skolimowski also co-wrote the script, but he wasn’t the first choice of the producers. Instead, they wanted to recruit Nicolas Roeg under the presumed intention that he’d worked wonders with Don’t Look Now and could do something similar with The Shout, but scheduling conflicts saw him rule himself out of the running.
The Polish filmmaker had more than a dozen features under his belt at that time after kicking off his career on home soil before taking up residence in the UK and carrying on notching credits, and he proved to be an ideal fit for the material. Slow-burning, psychological, and unsettling, The Shout could have easily turned into something hokey, but in Skolimowski’s hands, it was personified by an underlying sense of dread, which was far from being limited to the prospect of Crossley screaming his lungs out.
As for the Genesis connection, the music was crafted by Michael Rutherford and Tony Banks, with the main theme ‘From the Undertow’ making its way onto the latter’s A Curious Feeling album, adding another curious footnote to an altogether unheralded exercise in cinematic terror that failed to crack £500,000 at the box office during its initial run on the big screen.
The Shout retains its ambiguity, too, with Skolimowski refusing to clarify for certain whether or not the events relayed by Crossley have even happened at all. That seed of doubt is one that lingers afterwards, even if the suspension of disbelief is an obligation when entering a film that revolves around a troubled man who returns from the other side of the world with de facto superpowers.

Categories: Music