And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973)

Amicus arose to compete with Hammer's horror films, even borrowing many of Hammer's familiar faces such as Christopher Lee and, in this case, Peter Cushing.

And Now the Screaming Starts! stars Stephanie Beacham as Catharine Fengriffen, who played Van Helsing's ancestor in Hammer's groovy Dracula A.D. 1972 the year before. She moves into her newlywed husbands' family's castle at the beginning of the film. Unfortunately, she begins to see visions linked to a painting in the castle. The visions include a severed hand not unlike the severed hand haunting Christopher Lee in Amicus' Dr. Terror's House of Horrors in the early 1960s. Her counterpart vision is a man missing a hand and missing eyes with rivulets of blood streaming from the empty sockets.

To complicate things, she has become pregnant. Her mental health deteriorates and she is suspicious of the local woodsman. The legendary Peter Cushing finally appears halfway through the film as a psychiatrist to help her through the recomendation of her physician played by Patrick Magee. The mysteries slowly become uncovered and a curse is revealed involving actor Herbert Lom in a flashback sequence.

The film kind of drags a little until Cushing's onscreen presence reinvigorates the story and his character works to unravel what is happening to her.