The Screaming Woman

I saw this TV movie as a kid with a babysitter and ended up so freaked out that I spent the night in tears waiting for a hand to reach up from under the bed and grab me. I saw it again as a young adult and it still sent chills up my spine with the side profile shots of the buried woman. Very haunting images.

As a very big fan of Mrs De Havilland ,it was a great pleasure for me to see her with her old partner in crime Joseph Cotten (some will remember "hush hush sweet Charlotte" ),even though the latter has a too brief appearance.

Ray Bradbury 's short story was modified and her heroine ,a young girl named Margaret ,was replaced by an older lady ,Laura.Actually the story recalls that of William Irish aka Cornell Woolrich ,"fire escape" (transferred to the screen as " the boy who cried wolf" ) in which a little boy told imaginary stories till a true crime happens.....just as the sheriff and his deputy do not believe that old bat who sees prowlers everywhere ...and who do not want "riffraff " around -the short scene where the "commoner" tells her :"you made my day,no you made my week" is worth the price of admission -

Jack Smight succeeds in confusing the viewer: is Laura a lunatic? (after all,she forgot that the greenhouse was destroyed by fire)has she really discovered a buried alive woman ? Or has she been framed by her daughter-in-law who covets her money and would like her to be considered irresponsible ?As cousin Olivia and her old beau Joseph wanted to do pitiful Davis/Charlotte away from her valuable property in "hush hush sweet Charlotte" .

De Havilland and Cotten met again in "airport' 77" but the movie was a spate of clichés and they were given poor parts.

The theme of a woman buried alive on the grounds of a wealthy woman's estate is nicely handled here for a maximum of shock and suspense. A bit overwrought at times, with Olivia de Havilland having to convince police, family and neighbors that they need to rescue a woman whose faint cries for help have startled her. The trouble is, she's a woman with a known mental illness and nobody believes her.

This was a highly popular ABC made-for-television movie and successful at the time. Nice to see the supporting cast includes Joseph Cotten, Walter Pidgeon, Charles Drake and Ed Nelson. Nelson has a pivotal role as the man who knows the truth about the woman's screams.

Suspenseful and worth viewing despite the now grainy print of this TV film being shown on cable. And by the way, it was photographed in technicolor, not black and white as a previous comment suggests. That viewer must have been having trouble with TV reception!!

Like many others, this is the one horror movie that really affected me when I saw it as a child. I used to have nightmares and get chills thinking about it. I remember really being frightened of the sounds coming out of the ground. Probably shouldn't have watched this type of movie at such a young age. As an adult, I have talked about this movie to friends who had never heard of it and told them that it would be great to find a copy so that they could see it. I'm sure it would still scare the heck out of me now. I would love to get it and invite a bunch of friends over and watch it in our theater room. The impact of this movie would be so much greater on a large screen versus the small television that we had in the 70's. It would be interesting to see how my teenagers would react to it and how they would compare it to the scary movies of today.

Obviously, for me, this horror movie did what it intended to do! SCARE ME!!!

I saw this on TV way back in the early 70's and it truly frightened the living daylights out of me.

Anyone from the industry reading this should surely consider a DVD release of this engrossing masterpiece