Histories of Spanish horror sometimes skip over Jésus Franco’s work, as well as Paul Naschy’s ragged monster romps, to give 1969’s La residencia aka The House That Screamed a place of honor as the beginning of the Spanish horror renaissance. Director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador had spent a decade writing and directing for TV, including a number of horror tales. He also penned the screenplay for Obras maestras del terror, directed by and starring his father Narciso Ibáñez Menta, the ‘Argentinian Vincent Price.’ Serrador’s first feature La residencia is no low-budget affair, but filmed in color and Franscope, with some prints blown up to 70mm. Toplined by the respected star Lilli Palmer, the production is first-class all the way.
Franco’s Spain encouraged film production with the proviso that topical political subject matter was taboo. Samuel Bronston’s epics, filmed in Spain, are costume pictures set long before the contentious Civil War, and therefore ruffled no political feathers. La residencia is likewise a period thriller set in the past, in France — its horrors aren’t directly associated with Spanish society.
The horror is psychological, not superstitious, depicting gruesome murders in a women’s dormitory warped by psycho-sexual sickness. Madame Fourneau (Lilli Palmer) welcomes new boarding student Teresa (Cristina Galbó) with a tour of the school’s facilities in a large, imposing mansion in a walled estate. Fourneau assures Teresa’s guardian that she runs the place with a firm hand, for some of her pupils are behavior problems. Teresa soon discovers that she’s landed in a snake pit of repressed sexuality. Some of the students seem enrolled because their parents don’t want them around. The place is run like a jail, with a regimented schedule and draconian rules.
Student Irene (Mary Maude of Crucible of Terror) is Mlle Fourneau’s special appointee, a trusty who enforces discipline, and who wields the whip when Fourneau dispenses punishments to girls that resist her authority. Irene ringleads other activities she keeps secret from the headmistress. A local man delivers weekly loads of firewood, and Irene decides which girl can join him in an outbuilding for sex. Irene dictates which girls can sneak away to see Louis, too.
Irene sneers at Teresa’s innocence and singles her out for special treatment. Teresa is warned that she must do whatever Irene says; in a cruel hazing session, Teresa is taunted with the accusation that her mother is a prostitute.
Mlle Fourneau’s sickly teenage son Louis (John Moulder-Brown) lives in the house as well. He’s supposed to stay separate from the young women, but spies on them at every opportunity. In one sequence he crawls into an access duct to peep at the girls in the shower room. Clearly fixated on her son, Fourneau visits him at night to insist that none of the students are good enough for him, that he will someday find a woman ‘like his mother.’ She bids Louis goodnight by kissing him full on the lips.
The perverse misuse of authority does indeed make La residencia play as a critique of political power. The students come from families that can pay Fourneau’s tuition; they’re a good cross section of turn-of-the-century teens. Some are passive and others resist the systematized pecking order of restrictions and casual cruelties. The insolent rebel Catalina (Pauline Challoner) receives a savage formal whipping for brazenly defying Fournier. Isabelle (Maribel Martín of Vicente Aranda’s La novia ensangretada) sneaks out at night for a rendezvous in the greenhouse. The sensitive and fair-minded Teresa makes an effort to befriend the mysterious Louis — without Irene’s permission.
When the murders commence and girls begin to go missing, La residencia becomes a succession of creepy midnight wanderings down dark corridors. Girls sneak about to see boys, betray each other, and spy for Fourneau.
Pauline Challoner, Mary Maude, Cristina Galbó, Maribel Martín.
Many Italian giallos are critized for what became blatant misogyny. More often than not, the sole subject at hand is the slaughter of attractive undressed women, displaying their terror and agony as prime entertainment value. La residencia has no direct nudity to inflame the censors in Madrid. When the girls take showers, they do so wearing thin cotton shower dresses. Serrador & company avoid confronting the most censorable material through cinematic stylization. Before a sex scene in a shed can go beyond a kiss, Serrador cuts away to the other girls back in the house. Close-ups show each girl thinking about what their colleague is doing, and makes the connection explicit by overlaying just the audio of the sex encounter.
The intimations of lesbian lust must have been disturbing in Spain of 1969. The theme is carried exclusively in wanton looks. Irene taunts Teresa with a perverse smirk-stare that sends shivers down the girl’s spine. The midnight ‘inquisition’ is clearly designed to prepare Teresa to be her toy.
On the other hand, Lilli Palmer’s Mlle Fourneur tries to deny her impulses and hide her own sexual instability. She doesn’t normally oversee shower day, and quivers nervously through the whole thing, especially when Catalina taunts her by taking off her shower dress. The clear message is that unchecked power always results in sexual abuses.
The identity of the killer is not very well hidden, but its eventual reveal is more gruesome than anything we expected. Instead of depicting the gory murders straight on, director Serrador again sidesteps censor intervention with editorial stylization. One slaying is presented as a near-abstract montage, overlaying superimpositions of a plunging knife. Another is curtailed with a freeze-frame.
As La residencia still showcases bloody violence and ‘unclean’ thoughts, Serrador and his producer Arturo González must have done some fancy footwork in negotiations, pointing out that they had followed the letter of the rules. They surely argued that the film was less violent and less sexually explicit than some of the foreign pictures the authorities were admitting into the country.
Well directed, acted and photographed, La residencia is exploitation filmmaking given a surprisingly classy presentation. It’s not difficult to find lapses of logic in the narrative. We never quite believe that the work staff at this hellhole could be so naïve as to keep its secrets from the outside world. Not only that, but when students disappear, Mlle Fourneau never so much as notifies the authorities.
Spoiler-ish: When the storyline rushes to a horror climax, all niceties are dropped: forget relationships and human values and just make awful, horrible things happen. The heart goes out of the film when the most innocent are sacrificed. In the final reel one of the cruelest students suddenly becomes a replacement heroine figure, but the ice-cold story spares nobody.
A couple of the young actresses are English in origin, as is former child actor John Moulder-Brown. Madrileña Cristina Galbó later starred in Jorge Grau’s Spanish horror picture No profanar el sueño de los muertos, an excellent zombie shocker set in present-day England.
International star Lilli Palmer has always been a favorite. She raises the level of anything she’s in, and after 40 years barely seemed to age. Palmer may have been cast in this show because of her association with similar story material: in 1958 she starred with Romy Schneider in 1958’s Mädchen in Uniform, a remake of the 1931 original. The story of a harsh Prussian boarding school becomes controversial when a lonely student falls in love with her teacher and enters into a ‘forbidden’ relationship.
Palmer’s final film was released a full 32 years after her death in 1986. She’s one of scores of noted actors that contributed scenes or cameos for Orson Welles’ famously abandoned feature The Other Side of the Wind, filmed in the first half of the 1970s. The picture was finally finished and released in 2018, through Netflix. As always, she looks terrific.
