"My mama likes the yams." Does that sound like good small talk for a first date? Well, it did to Stanley. Join your faithful Grue-Crew - Crystal Cleveland, Chad Hunt, Bill Mulligan, and Jeff Mohr - as they dig a little deeper into Stanley’s story as well as the other stories found in this lesser-known portmanteau featuring Vincent Price in the framing story, From a Whisper to a Scream (1987).
Decades of Horror 1980s
Episode 179 – From a Whisper to a Scream (1987)
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In the small Tennessee town of Oldfield, a historian, who is also the uncle of an executed murderess, relates four horror stories to a reporter: “Stanley” - an elderly man pursues a romance with a younger woman, even to the grave and beyond; “On the Run” - a wounded man on the run from creditors is rescued by a backwoods hermit with the secret to eternal life; "Lovecraft's Traveling Amusements" - a glass-eating carny pays the ultimate price for looking for love on the outside; "Four Soldiers" - Civil War soldiers are held captive by a household of orphans with strange intentions for them.
IMDb
From a Whisper to a Scream is a dark and twisty anthology featuring Vincent Price in the framing story, supported by recognizable faces leading each of the four segments. Bill first knew of this film as The Offspring, and remarks that it’s an unusually mean-spirited anthology with a helluva cast. He’s also impressed that director Jeff Burr is able to land Vincent Price as the film’s centerpiece, even though it is Burr’s first directorial effort. Crystal enjoyed From a Whisper to a Scream, adding that it pushes boundaries and agreeing with Bill that it’s pretty hardcore in terms of punishment. “What other movie gives you incest, necrophilia, a zombie baby, and child murder?” asks Chad. Along with the nice twists that end each segment, he loves Vincent Price’s Tennessee accent and calls From a Whisper to a Scream a fun, fun movie. Jeff picked the movie after watching Severin’s new Tales of the Uncanny documentary about anthology horror films. For him, From a Whisper to a Scream had the feel of Night Gallery episodes but with far more graphic violence and endings that go one, or even two, steps further than what are found in the 1970s TV series.
The Decades of Horror 1980s Grue-Crew all enjoyed the grizzly nature and twist endings of From a Whisper to a Scream. At the time of this writing, the film can be streamed on Amazon Prime, but unfortunately, the Scream Factory Blu-ray is currently out-of-print.
Every two weeks, Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror 1980s podcast will cover another horror film from the 1980s. The next episode’s film, chosen by Bill, will be Screamers (1981), a US version of Sergio Martino’s Island of the Fishmen (1979). You won’t want to miss that one!