Terry (Alex Leppard), a small-time crook, takes his girl-friend Valerie (Andrea Allan) on the kind of night-out every girl dreams of - he is going to rob an empty countryhouse, while she sits in the car and waits for him. It would probably have been useful if he had told her what he's planning to do. Not knowing what's really going on, Valerie soon follows Terry into the building, where both are disturbed by someone else entering. The two hapless burglars quickly get into the nearest wardrobe, and witness how a man wearing black leather gloves murders a woman.
Afterwards, Valerie is able to escape the killer, but Terry never gets out of the house again. After hiding in a junkyard, the woman has to hike back to London.
As luck will have it, Terry's car contains enough information (including Valerie's portfolio as a model) to let the killer track her down easily.
From now on, someone seems to watch the woman, as if he was waiting for the right moment to strike.
Could the killer be the new neighbor from the flat below Valerie's? He seems to be quite nosy and studies the most malevolent of all animals - the pigeon.
And isn't the young woman's new boy-friend Paul (Karl Lanchbury) kind of strange? Living with his aunt, having an incestuous relationship with her, and so on...
Scream...and Die! (isn't the title just great?) is one of Jose Ramon Larraz' good films, to my relief without goat sex. The film was made in Britain, with a British cast and written by a British script-writer and is very gialloesque in its plotting and themes; but where many of the Italian representatives of the genre revel in the colors and the designs of their time, Larraz uses cold and dirty gray and brown tones for his film to give it a less fanciful and more threatening look.
Even more important for the film's effect (and keeping very much inside giallo conventions) is a very deliberate pacing that some people would surely call boring. If one has the necessary patience for it, one soon starts to see the slowness of the film as a way to manipulate the viewer into looking differently at details than she is used to. Suddenly, small gestures and minute things are imbued with deeper meaning. It is as if the film is waiting for something terrible to happen, and a receptive viewer can catch this feeling from it, like the protagonist of a Japanese horror movie can get infected by a ghost just by entering the wrong house.
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