Scream and Scream Again (1970)

Interesting facts

Scream and Scream Again is a 1970 British science-fiction horror film directed by Gordon Hessler for Amicus Productions, and starring Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Alfred Marks, Michael Gothard, and Peter Cushing. The screenplay was by Christopher Wicking, based on the 1967 novel The Disorientated Man, attributed to "Peter Saxon", a house pseudonym used by various authors in the 1960s and 1970s.

Production

The movie is based on Peter Saxon's science fiction novel, The Disorientated Man. For the most part, the movie follows the novel quite closely. In the novel, the antagonists turned out to be aliens. According to an interview with Christopher Lee, the characters were going to be revealed as aliens in the movie's climax, but all connections to that fact were cut out of the movie before it was released, leaving the enigmatic villains' backgrounds un…

Rights to the novel were bought by Milton Subotsky of Amicus Productions, who got financing from Louis Heyward, head of European operations for AIP. There was a script by Subotsky, but it was regarded as unplayable. Gordon Hessler says he got Chris Wicking to rewrite it:

That was really a pulp book, a throwaway book that you read on a train. There was nothing in it, just empty pieces of action. But it was Chris who gave it a whole new level by using it as a political process of what might happen in the future. That is what made the picture, he's the one that came up with all those ideas, yet he still managed to keep the nuances of the sort of pulp fiction novel.

This marked the first time that horror-movie icons Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee appeared in the same feature film, but they do not share screen space; Cushing appears with neither Lee nor Price; appearing in only a cameo. Lee and Price share a brief scene toward the film's climax.

The film was made in the span of a month, starting 5 May 1969 at Shepperton, with location work done at Trafalgar Square and Chertsey, Surrey.

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