Yes, I must confess, I collect movie stills where actors are screaming or trembling with fear. They always make me laugh. Those freeze-frame publicity shots of mock fright and terror. There’s something so ludicrous and wonderful about them. I have an endless supply thanks to eBay which I mount in plexiglass box frames and plaster across my bathroom walls. Who doesn’t need a good laugh in there?
Maybe the first one I ever collected was the hilarious shot from Tarantula with actors John Agar and Mara Corday running screaming over a desert terrain (see above). It’s so sublimely silly and perfect, But I often rotate my pictures, and I have a great fondess for this movie still from Tarantula with Agar and Corday clutching each other in fright. Look at the crazed gleam in Agar’s eyes. He looks psychotic.
My other favorite is this glorious still from Curse of the Demon, a terrific Jacques Tourneur chiller, with actress Peggy Cummins screaming her damn fool head off. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall at that studio shoot where they told her to put her hands up over her ears and open her mouth in a wild scream.
William Castle’s 1959 horror film The Tingler is one of my favorite childhood memories but I only recently acquired this hilarious shot of actor Philip Coolidge, who played the owner of the silent movie theater the “tingler” gets loose in.
Then there’s a great shot of his mute wife (Judith Evelyn), frozen in a state of quiet terror.
Here’s Vincent Price from the same film, freaking out after injecting himself with LSD in a scientific experiment exploring “fear.”
Can anything be better than this ludicrous still of actress Lugene Sanders in the Bert. I. Gordon vengeful-ghost-in-the-lighthouse horror film Tormented?
Or this posed look of fright from actress Kathleen Hughes in the sci-fi classic It Came from Outer Space. The fact that she is barely in the film doesn’t seem to phase the publicity department.
Now Barbara Rush is a lead in It Came From Outer Space but looks here like she’s being held up outside a convenience store.
The Giant Claw is one of my all-time favorite dumb monster movies- it’s about a giant prehistoric bird flying over the country causing havoc- but it looks like a pissed-off Big Bird. Here’s actress Mara Corday again, only this frightful look might be when she realized how laughable the monster looked in the film.
Here’s actors Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday from The Giant Claw nervously looking skyward at their careers plummeting to the earth.
Actress Peggy Webber is caught in mid-scream as a tormented newlywed haunted by ghosts and floating skulls in the 1958 drive-in favorite The Screaming Skull.
Black Zoo, about the evil owner of a zoo (Michael Gough), who sends out his animals to kill his enemies, had some of my favorite stills. Especially actor Jerome Cowan’s look of mock horror realizing he plays a victim in this horror flick.
Or Elisha Cook Jr. who plays a doomed zookeeper, with a look on his scarred face wondering how he went from The Maltese Falcon to this.
Oh hell, here’s another favorite still from Black Zoo just for the hell of it.
Joan Crawford expresses fear promoting her film Sudden Fear, but this might have been her expression if she lived long enough to read her daughter’s hateful book about her.
Bette Davis is either screaming with terror in Robert Aldrich’s gothic thriller Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, or shrieking with joy at the news Joan Crawford is dropping out of the film and Bette’s good friend Olivia de Havilland is stepping into the role.
Jeanne Crain cradles her face in horror at the prospect of a Manson-like gang coming after her in The Night God Screamed, which is many moons away from singing “It Might as Well Be Spring” in State Fair.
Beverly Garland was one of the best screamers from the old Roger Corman days of low budget filmmaking. Here is one of my favorite stills from a pretty crummy horror movie Curucu, Beast of the Amazon.
At least she gets to marry a man who turns into a reptile in the inadvertently hilarious The Alligator People.
Actress Peggy Castle cowers in fear before the shadow of the giant grasshoppers that will pursue her (by rear projection) in the wonderfully ludicrous Bert I. Gordon film Beginning of the End.
Maybe she deeply regrets not having listened to The Boy Who Cried Werewolf.
Servicemen who secretly take photos at a Hindu snake ceremony find themselves stalked by a vengeful, shape-shifting beauty (Faith Domergue) in Universal’s 1955 horror film Cult of the Cobra. How Marshall Thompson kept a straight face making eye contact with this rubber snake I’ll never know.
I have the poster for The Killer Shrews in my living room. This is a hilarious still from the movie with actor Ken Curtis looking in horror at the overgrown monsters attacking some shipwrecked travelers on an island. Or is he recoiling in embarrassment at the fact that they’re just dogs wearing masks?
Connie Stevens shrieks at a skeleton which she finds in her late magician father’s (Cesar Romero) spooky mansion in the sublimely stupid Two on a Guillotine.
June Cunningam feigns fear in Horrors of the Black Museum (but her questionable acting ability is not enough to keep her from being beheaded in this sleaze classic).
I just adore this mock scream from the 1957 drive-in film that put Michael Landon on the map- I Was a Teenage Werewolf.
I relate more to this still from Attack of the Puppet People, since that’s what I do every time the phone rings.
They all pale next to Susan Strasberg’s frozen, full-throated cry in Scream of Fear (an excellent Hammer psychological thriller). It looks like she utilized her dad’s Method theory to conjure this iconic look of fright. Maybe not. But, who cares? Fuck Edvard Munch’s The Scream– I’d rather hang this prominently on my wall of scream shame.
These were such a joy to look through! Thank you Dennis.