'Screamer' - have I got this right??? (Spoilers!)

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The German tourist who the central character opened the door too when he called at her friend's house while she was there alone is stated, in the conversation between the German detective on his track and the British detective, to be believed to have been seeking the address out as the home of a former girlfriend during a previous spell in England. The main character was already frightened after seeing this man on the train after hearing a description of a rapist on the loose who answered his description, and this, the disturbed mental state we are told was already present by the psychiatrist at the end, and the man's subsequent, innocent, call at the house of her friends when she arrived there alone ahead of them, pushed her over the edge into killing him. One assumes that the German is not a good speaker of English, hence his silence, rather than saying 'Hello' politely, when he sees the girl looking at him in the carriage, initial silence with the ticket collector, and when calling at the house, which one now realises would be due to him searching in his mind for the right words, but, when one first watchs it, gives him an air of silent mystery onto which one can project a conception of menace.

The disarray in the house after the supposed rape, and the bruises we see the girl suffered, were from his attempted self-defense, not rape-although it is not credible that a medical examination after the supposed rape does not reveal a lack of vaginal bruising and presence of semen.

After this event, the central character simply projects the face of this man onto random men she sees, when her mental disturbance is in resurgence. My belief is the man who called at her friends' house with the limp was not in fact the man she had rammed with the car at the farm, but that he was given a limp in the writing so one might think he was, before one knew the mental condition that was the twist in the tale of the story. One imagines had the man with the limp actually been the man rammed with the car, he would most likely have recognised the central character as the driver, and also the limping man would not have been as affable and relaxed as he seems with the main character's friends, so soon after what appeared to have been a near-death experience.

The psychiatrist at the end alludes to some unnamed experience in the girl's past that has led to her disturbed state. Reading between the lines, one assumes this event must have been some form of abuse at the hands of a man who answered the description she heard of the rapist at large and who looked extremely similar to the German tourist who made the ill-fated call at the house-hence her traumatised and tragic response to hearing of the rapist and his appearance, then seeing the German tourist on the train and again at the front door. The violence she suffered in the man's attempt to defend himself must then have been distorted in her mind into a further episode of abuse.

This is my joint favourite of the Thriller episodes, along with 'If It's A Man-Hang Up.' Both are among the very darkest of all the stories-but 'Screamer' has the edge of blackness, for me. The scene in which we see her attack the caller at the house, then see him dragging himself along the rear window, all bloody, before he later still staggers through the back door, still barely alive, after the girl has attacked her male host after the trauma of the incident with the dying man, counts as what must be the most disturbing sequence in any of the plays. An impressively atmospheric episode, that communicates a profound sense of darkness and tragedy.