More Favourite Horror Flicks, Alphabetically: The Shout

The Shout

Dir: Jerzy Skolimowski. Cast: Susannah York, John Hurt, Alan Bates. 1978.

The Shout would make a perfect and gloomy double bill with Andrzej Żuławski's excellent Possession, featuring a truly outstanding performance from Isabelle Adjani. The Shout, however, is a unique, unusual, and intimate horror film in its own right, that builds in volume, and echos long after it’s over. 

It tells the story of a couple who lives in rural Devon; he’s a composer who works with weird electronic sounds. One day a stranger (Bates) comes into their lives. He claims to have learned a shout from an Aboriginal shaman that results in the death of those who hear it…

Watching the The Shout is like watching a couple’s relationship implode in slow motion. All the hints are there, too large to ignore, and popping up like warning signs as things become inevitable - the subtle clues that their connection is in danger, the suspicions that something not right is going on, the feeling of being forced out. 

In fact, it’s the central relationship between York and Hurt, and the third that Bates brings to the dynamic, that truly gives The Shout its impact. These three actors deliver outstanding performances that bring the viewer in when it’s required, push us out when necessary, and keeps us guessing and hoping for 86 minutes. 

There are other things at work here too, concepts that are undercurrents, or maybe more fittingly, tones that add weight to the slow motion catastrophe taking place in front of us, and which, as only viewers rather than participants, we are unable to do anything about. For example, the natural world is very much present and at odds with the artificial world (the unnaturally natural shout vs. Hurt’s electronic recordings). Present too, is the way the old world, represented by the shout itself, becomes at odds with that most British of sporting events, the cricket match.   

It’s the nature of the shout and its impact on our modern world that has me thinking that The Shout very much belongs to the category of Folk Horror, an enticing and unsettling type of horror film that hints at the power of things we have buried long ago, not because they were useless embarrassments, but because they were all too powerful.