HOUSE OF SCREAMING GLASS (2024)

New On Demand and DVD from DeskPop Entertainment!
Directed by David R. Williams.
Written by David R. Williams, Costanza Bongiorni, Tom Jolliffe.
Starring Lani Call
Check out the trailer here!!

Elizabeth (Lani Call) inherits her grandmother’s schoolhouse and moves into the large property attempting to find out more about her past and cope with mental issues as well as a troubled relationship with her mother. Once in the abandoned building, Elizabeth’s mind begins to fracture piece by piece as the ghosts of her past begin to overwhelm her in her solitude.

First off, man, what a freaking title. HOUSE OF SCREAMING GLASS. I absolutely love the title of this movie. It’s compelling without really telling you anything and evokes some of the best giallo horror titles of the past. Even before knowing what this movie was about, I was interested simply from the awesome title.

Now that we have that out of the way, HOUSE OF SCREAMING GLASS is an arthouse film through and through featuring only one character wandering around a house and encountering strange memories, bizarre phenomena, and losing her freaking mind in the process. This means this is a slow film that lingers on scenes for long periods of time, sometimes with some kind of weird payoff and other times not so much. If you’re good with that, then HOUSE OF SCREAMING GLASS will be something you might want to look for.

Personally, I found HOUSE OF SCREAMING GLASS to be tedious at times, fascinating at others. There are a few scenes, where Elizabeth is doing something in the foreground and something is lurking towards her, that are elegantly done and filled with tension. Still, I found myself looking at my watch quite a few times as this story went on. There are pacing issues and at times, I feel things were communicated a few times too many. We get it. Elizabeth has a screw loose and is barely coping with it. But HOUSE OF SCREAMING GLASS is a movie the director wants you to experience along with the protagonist, so these long scenes are intentional.

I did find HOUSE OF SCREAMING GLASS to be compelling because when things do happen, they are very creepy and suspenseful. Director David R. Williams provides enough development in these scenes, increasing the strange background happenings as it goes as well as mapping out a convincing descent into madness. Lani Call is a strong actress, proving herself capable of taking up the entire screen and the entire story solely by herself.

There is a surprising amount of pretty gnarly gore that occurs in HOUSE OF SCREAMING GLASS. I found myself pretty nauseated by some of these scenes because it involves Elizabeth consuming some pretty disgusting stuff and seemingly have no feelings about it. So while this is a film for the arthouse crowd, I feel those folks will be absolutely revolted by some of the grosser places HOUSE OF SCREAMING GLASS go.

So HOUSE OF SCREAMING GLASS is a strange one. Enter it at your own risk. In the end, I was moved by Elizabth’s plight. I feel the choice to basically open the film with the final moments is a mistake as something should compel the viewer to keep watching and spoiling the final moments in the first few minutes kind of takes the knees out of all of that. Still, if this film has anything going for it, HOUSE OF SCREAMING GLASS is one hell of a cool title for a movie.