Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Are we all watching the same movie here?? I'll admit that SCREAMS OF A WINTER NIGHT is a great title for a movie, and a sound premise which would eventually be put to better use: Nine or ten college aged acquaintances who don't seem to really like or even know each other take a road trip to a summer camp cottage closed for the off season where a gruesome mass murder (oddly heard but not seen during the opening credits) took place 30 years prior. On the way they stop at a local hick cracker gas station operated by what appears to be the evil twins of the Beverly Hillbillies, who try to warn them off to no avail. So far so good.The problem begins when the kids start sitting around telling each other ubran legend-ish scary stories to pass the time. Which would be just fine except that they seem to be telling each other these stories because they don't have anything else to talk about. There is no exposition, no character development, and no visible bonds exist between them except for one couple who don't even have sex on-screen since the movie was only rated PG.Then there is John, the knucklehead who organized the road trip. To call him annoying is complimentary. He is insufferable. The idea was to try and portray his character as some kind of a nerd or dork whose family used to frequent the cottage. The film unintentionally does a good job as setting him up as a potential lunatic who lured his associates to this setting just to brutally murder them all, but no dice. He's just annoying and we don't even get the satisfaction of watching him die in an amusingly ironic manner after being inflicted with his presence for an hour plus.The horror anthology angle is interesting though, and all three of the stories shown have effective moments. The CREEPSHOW films are still the modern day kings of the horror anthology tradition, one that stretches back to the 1940s with the incomparable DEAD OF NIGHT, another classic being Mario Bava's fabulous BLACK SABBATH from 1963 and the overlooked H.P. Lovecraft collection NECRONOMICON: BOOK OF THE DEAD from 1992. Usually a horror anthology has some sort of linking story connecting three or four segments that each tell their own twisted tale of the macabre. The unique angle this time is that the stories are actually populated by the people in the linking segments as sort of alternate identities.Which could have been a great idea except that the people are so unlikeable that the story segments don't serve as a reprieve from their company. There's one really odd part when the "kids" start tapping & clicking out a rhythm which slowly builds into a cacophony that drives one of the females into a rage. I would have cold-cocked them all for being so childishly obnoxious. They don't even seem to be drinking from the empty beer cans they wave around as props, and John's antics of deliberately trying to startle the females in the group quickly becomes unlikely. Somebody would have knocked a couple of his teeth out for being such a dick and split the scene. It isn't funny, it isn't scary, and the tension that builds is not based on fright but a diminishing ability to be patient with him.Eventually the film does build to a satisfyingly gruseome supernatural climax that apparently took so much of the movies' low budget production cost that the filmmakers appear to have literally run out of money while four of the ten were making a frenzied escape through the woods. The movie ends with a freeze-frame of them running hand in hand, and I can't help but wonder if maybe the last few minutes of intended action was abandoned at the film lab when they couldn't afford the processing bill.So again I ask, are we all watching the same movie here? I enjoy low budget regionally made horror movies starring no-name talents and have a particular fondness for anthology chillers. But the legends surrounding the film are more interesting than anything which takes place on screen. One of the college dorms used for one of the story segments is rumored to be haunted, and maverick wunderkind Quentin Tarentino has championed the movie, supposedly owning his own print which he screens for people who don't know any better than to go do something else just because it's Quentin Tarentino showing it. He could show old toothpaste commercials and people would watch in rapt awe.The film was pioneering in the sense that it did beat "Friday The 13th" into theaters by over a year with a story of college kids being menaced at an off-season summer camp. And it also proceeded THE EVIL DEAD with a story of college kids sitting around a disused cabin running afoul of some sort of hyperkenetic supernatural force of evil. But since this evil is never explained and the summer camp angle isn't ever explored as a setting the result is a null-sum gain. They could have been anywhere, the summer camp angle only serving as a device to make it more difficult for them to seek out help when their lamps start running out of fuel. Which might be the most frightening aspect of the movie: Being stuck sitting around in the dark with John and his creepy, disturbing sense of humor & not even having a radio to listen to. A college road trip to a disused cabin with no tunes? Come on.So I just don't get it. My expectations were perhaps a bit high, especially based on the title which suggested a winter time setting and horror hijynx involving snow, sleighs, rusted shovels, colorful scarves, lost mittens, homicidal Christmas elves, maybe a possessed snowman. If you ask me it looks like they made the wrong movie. Great title though!4/10

I watched this on Halloween night that year with the whole town and it scared the heck out of everyone at the theater. Good enough for me to look it up after all these years. Just something way creepy about the green light scene I can't forget. Im sure some of it is my youth perspective in 1979 but I think its in the class of something like Legend of Boggy Creek which is a classic because it brought something new though campy as all heck. Screams is dated by now Im sure but still good fun compared to a LOT of other bigger budget movies. Be nice to see it posted somewhere like on you tube as Im sure its a rarity! I gave it a seven meaning you ought to check it out for yourself.

I have this movie on the absolute WORST DVD bootleg in my entire collection of substandard DVD bootlegs. I remember seeing it though in the early 90's on a professional VHS tape, which more or less did justice to a low-budget 16 mm semi-professional film like this. This is an anthology/portmanteau-style film, but I don't know that ALL the stories were really based on urban legends (and this is definitely NOT the first horror film to mine popular urban legends anyway). This does have, as its first story, the old "couple parked in lover's lane, boyfriend gets out, and girlfriend hears scratching on the roof of car" tale, but it also manages to somehow throw bigfoot into the mix (bigfoot films at that time being very popular among low-budget, regional filmmakers). The second story though, about three guys spending the night in a haunted dormitory, is so idiosyncratically bizarre that it's hard to believe it could even be an urban legend. (The end of this story somehow manages to be jaw-droppingly stupid yet at the same time hauntingly disturbing). The third and final story about a female serial is more ho-hum. It COULD be an urban legend, but it's not one I've personally ever heard.The "frame story" here is especially effective. A group of young people are staying in a remote cabin and telling each other these stories(strangely, the characters in the scary stories are played by the same actors who are in the "frame story" even though they are not supposed to be the same people)while an ominous "ghost wind" howls increasingly loudly outside. The sound effects are very effective and the ending is GREAT and really makes the whole thing worthwhile.It really wouldn't surprise me, as another reviewer said, if this movie, like the early 70's stop-motion epic "Equinox", was a great influence on "The Evil Dead". This one certainly doesn't need the deluxe Criterion treatment "Equinox" recently received (complete with the $40 price tag), and it's possible the original elements aren't in too good of shape. But it certainly deserves some kind of halfway decent DVD release. Quentin Tarantino reportedly likes it a lot so maybe there's hope.

I rented this film way back in 1987. I had never heard of it and the PG rating had me expecting the worst. Still I love horror films so I gave this a try. I saw it on a dark, cold winter night. There was a snowstorm going on outside, I was alone in the house and I turned off all the lights. Under those conditions this film scared me silly.The opening is all sound effects against a black screen of something attacking a family in their house on a winters night. It gets in and kills them all. Very effective--the sound effects are realistic and NOT seeing the monsters makes it all the more scarier. That opening alone is worth seeing this for.It's an anthology movie--a bunch of kids telling horror stories around a campfire. The movie is tame (remember--it's PG rated) and the stories are kind of predictable but the middle one got me going. It's about a bunch of guys spending the night in a deserted, supposedly haunted house. They're on the first floor...and then they hear noises on the floor above...THAT scared me silly. The ending was REAL bad but, for a while, that had me shaking.So, it's not a good film, but there's something about it that really works. I (cautiously) recommend this.