NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Eureka Blu-ray (October 2026): Eureka have also transferred Alex Nicol's The Screaming Skull to Blu-ray. The film looks very good in 1080P from Eureka. It is dual-layered with a video bitrate over 1.3X that of the 2017 Shout! Factory release, which was single-layered. The two transfers appear to come from the same source. The 1.85:1 framing matches exactly in every comparison capture, and contrast and the gray scale are very close throughout, with no sign of boosting or crushing on either disc. Where the Eureka gains is in the rendering of the grain, which looks a shade tighter and more consistent, especially in close-ups such as Mrs. Snow and the Reverend and in darker interiors like the balcony shot. The differences are subtle, and the Shout! still holds up well, but the Eureka makes better use of its higher bitrate. It shows Floyd Crosby’s (The Snow Creature, High Noon, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, The Haunted Palace, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, The Raven, Tales of Terror, The Premature Burial, The Pit and the Pendulum, Night Tide, The Wonderful Country, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Beast with a Million Eyes,) black-and-white cinematography at its best on home video so far, with good depth in the garden exteriors and solid black levels in the candlelit night scenes. The image is clean with no damage. The most obvious visible difference in the captures is that the optional subtitles are white on the Eureka and yellow on the Shout.

NOTE: We have added 46 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

Eureka offers the original mono as an uncompressed linear PCM 2.0 track in 24-bit, where the Shout! Blu-ray used a 24-bit DTS-HD Master 2.0 track. Both are lossless, and I can’t say I heard much of a difference. The film’s sound design depends on its effects: the echoing screams, creaking doors, howling wind, and peacock cries come through clearly. Ernest Gold’s heavy gothic score, with its swelling strings and stingers, has decent presence within the limits of the mono source. Dialogue is clean and consistent. Shout! Factory offer optional English subtitles on their Region 'A' Blu-ray and Eureka offer optional English (SDH) subtitles on the Region ‘B’ Blu-ray disc.

Eureka’s Blu-ray supplements are new and don’t duplicate any of the Shout! Factory Blu-ray content. Horror novelist Stephen Laws provides an introduction running a dozen minutes. He places the film in context and talks about its long afterlife on television and its appeal to a young horror fan. The main extra is Ghosts and Gaslight – Gothic Horror and The Screaming Skull, a new video essay of about 1/2 hour by film and literature scholar Mary Going. She traces the film’s roots in F. Marion Crawford’s source story and the Rebecca / Gaslight tradition of the imperiled second wife, and looks at how the film balances its rational explanation against its supernatural payoff. There are also two trailers. The first 2,000 copies come in a limited edition O-card slipcase with new artwork by John Dunn and include a collector’s booklet with new writing by Jon Towlson on the production and marketing of the film. Shout! Factory owners should note that the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode and the This Film May Kill You featurette are not on the UK release.

Alex Nicol's The Screaming Skull is a cheap, compact gothic chiller. It borrows the Rebecca / Gaslight template of the fragile second wife haunted by the first and adds a dose of William Castle-style ballyhoo. The pacing is padded and the dialogue stiff, but the deliberate emptiness of the house and Floyd Crosby's shadowy black-and-white cinematography generate a surprising amount of atmosphere. The film also makes a genuinely interesting choice in its final reel, letting the supernatural in after establishing a purely rational explanation. Peggy Webber (The Space Children, Macbeth) commits fully to Jenni's unraveling and gives the film more sincerity than its budget suggests. Russ Conway, a familiar face from dozens of bit parts in film and television (The Time Tunnel, Our Man Flint, The Beverly Hillbillies, Perry Mason, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Leave It to Beaver, Jennifer, The War of the Worlds, The Turning Point, I Was a Communist for the F.B.I., Woman in Hiding, Twelve O'Clock High, The Heiress, Flamingo Road, An Act of Murder, Larceny, The Naked City, A Double Life, T-Men, The Web), brings quiet authority as the Reverend Snow. Ernest Gold's (Jennifer, The Last Sunset, The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind, Cross of Iron, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, On the Beach, The Secret of Santa Vittoria, Dementia, Unknown World etc.) heavy gothic score underlines every skull sighting. It may be closer to "so bad it's good" than to a lost classic, but it has more going for it than its MST3K reputation suggests. The Eureka Blu-ray offers a dual-layered transfer with a much higher bitrate than the Shout! Factory, showing tighter grain from what appears to be the same source, and an uncompressed 24-bit LPCM mono track. The new extras, Stephen Laws' introduction, Mary Going's Ghosts and Gaslight video essay and Jon Towlson's booklet, add real context. As the Shout! is OOP (out of print) owners may want to hold on to their disc - especially for the MST3K episode, however for the best presentation of the film to date, the Eureka is recommended. 

Gary Tooze