The Night God Screamed

When a movie comes along with a title as awesome as The Night God Screamed it’s hard not to instantly start thinking what it could be about. What kind of monstrosity could be so evil that the big G himself would let out a sissy little yelp of terror? What ungodly act of brutal savagery could take place in this motion picture to warrant such a bold and, quite frankly, just a little big goofy title? The same could be said about 1971’S The Devil’s Nightmare. What exactly does God’s scream sound like? Sadly, we never do get an answer to that question. Nowhere in the credits of this movie was God listed as a voice actor or otherwise.

 

Incredibly misleading title aside, this 1971 shocker centers its plot around a middle-aged preacher and his estranged wife, who are setting up in a local high school’s auditorium for an assembly to convert the local, and quite crazy yuppies into God-fea… I mean loving normal’s. Things go wrong for the couple, as a cult of drugged-up hippies break into the school and crucify the preacher to his own cross. The wife finds her husband’s body, and testifies against his killers. The movie jumps ahead sometime, with the leader of the cult behind bars, and the masked executioner, who carried out the preachers murder, still on the loose. The rest of the film follows the preacher’s widow, who is still very much shaken by her husband’s demise, as she babysits for the children of the judge who helped put the cult away. When unknown lurkers start to close in on the house and torment our heroine, the children she is babysitting, and the audience, start to question if it is all in her delusional mind, or if the masked executioner is returning once more to finish the job he started with the preacher.

 

The movie is a total blast from start to finish, and the plot is constantly changing direction on you, up till the very end with, in my opinion, a very surprising twist ending. The movie is short, and for the most part very fast-paced, only slowing down to build tension in the last act. The soundtrack is memorable, if a little dated (nothing wrong with that), and it is very well shot and acted. The preacher’s wife is really a sympathetic character, but at the very back of your mind you can’t help but think she’s really just crazy. If you are looking for a bloodbath of tit’s and gore, you are not going to find it here. The Night God Screamed is pretty tame, even by 1971 standards, but it doesn’t need the sleaze factor to make a fun, enjoyable little pot-boiler.  Culturally speaking it plays well into the demonization of hippies that occurred starting around the late 1960s, which you can see in even bigger flicks like Dracula A.D. 1972 with Christopher Lee from the year we shouldn’t need to tell you.  After the ‘Summer of Love’ took a hit via The Zodiac Killer and The Manson Murders did in the rest, hippie cult flicks started to spread everywhere as the movement lost grounding.  Satanism and misunderstandings about it didn’t help much either. Anyway, we recommend you check this one out, you won’t regret The Night God Screamed.

 

The Night God Screamed (Full Movie)

Written by Johnny Dickie

The Night God Screamed
Trans World Entertainment
4 / 5