EDITOR’S NOTE: My World Dies Screaming was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 9, 1964 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, July 16, 1966 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, August 2, 1969 at 1:00 a.m. under the title Terror In the Haunted House. That was its TV title, which was used as part of the 22 film Allied Artists Sci-Fi for the 60s package.

Sheila Wayne (Cathy O’Donnell) has just married Phillip Justin (Gerald Mohr). She’s spent the last 17 years in Switzerland, a place where she had nightmares of a Florida mansion where the mad Tierney family once lived. It’s been abandoned for — you knew it — 17 years. At least that’s what the caretaker, Jonah Snell (John Qualen), says when Phillip drives Sheila to the door, telling her it will be their new home. She freaks out, but just as you’d figure, the car breaks down before they can leave.

Sheila has been dreaming of this place for years and remembers that a tree says SW+PT. When she looks at the actual tree, that is carved into it. When Mark Snell (William Ching) visits, he calls her Ms. Tierney and that’s when she starts to put it all together. Phillip is PT, Phillip Tierney. He tells her that the two years she spent in a hospital as a child were to forget what happened in this house, but if she goes into the attic, she will be cured. She refuses.

Jonah tells her that Matthew Tierney – Philip’s grandfather – killed his sons Lawrence and Samuel in the attic with an axe. This makes Phillip, Samuel’s son, the last of the Tierneys. Or maybe not, as Mark accuses them of gaslighting her. That’s when she finally goes to the attic and remembers that Jonah is Mark’s father and that he killed everyone out of jealousy, then paid for Sheila and her family to go to Switzerland for treatment. Mark ends up killing him before he can tell her, but after he battles Phillip, he gets stabbed on his own axe.

This was originally filmed with the Precon Process — called Psychorama — which used subliminal messages and exaggerated supraliminal symbols. Only one other movie, A Date With Death, uses Psychorama. However, most of the subliminals are edited out of the versions that are available today. In Kevin Heffernan’s Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business 1953–1968, the messages are described as “…single frame, hidden images such as skulls, knives, and spelled words like death designed to trigger the audience’s emotional responses. These subliminal imprints remain below the level of consciousness of the viewer, supposedly causing a palpable but unexplainable dread and horror.” He also claims that other messages include “a devil face, a bug-eyed face, a skull (in red), a cobra head and the message “scream bloody murder.””

You can watch this on YouTube.