Let’s just dwell for a moment on that title. Brilliant, isn’t it? One of my favourites. It doesn’t have a tremendous amount to do with the plot, but it strikes a pleasing note of terror and despair, which I think we can all get behind.
I Wake Up Screaming.
Lovely.
The film itself is a little less wonderful than its name, but only a little. It’s also extremely important, especially in the evolution of one of classic cinema’s most modern diversions: the swerve into the abyss that was film noir.
Noir, memorably described by Lee Server as “the genre that didn’t know its own name”, was a hybrid of German expressionism, French poetic realism and post-isolation American malaise, peopled by…