Terror in the Haunted House (originally titled My World Dies Screaming)[2] is a 1958 American horror film produced by William S. Edwards and directed by Harold Daniels.

Its plot follows newlywed Sheila, who moves with her husband Philp into a rural Florida mansion which she is horrified to discover was the subject of a recurring nightmare for which she sought psychiatric care in Switzerland.

"[6] After living in Switzerland for 17 years, Sheila marries Philip Justin and begins having nightmares about a mansion owned by the Tierneys, a family she does not know.

Caretaker Jonah Snell tells Sheila that the house was abandoned 17 years earlier and he has been waiting ever since for "the mad Tierneys" to come home.

Despite believing that she had never been there before, Sheila has vague memories of, as a little girl, falling in love with a boy who carved their initials on a tree trunk.

He admits everything and tells her that the two years she had spent in a Swiss sanatorium were not due to tuberculosis, as she thought, but because at age 7 she had had a nervous breakdown.

Jonah tells Sheila that at midnight, on the same day 17 years earlier, Matthew Tierney – Philip's grandfather – killed his sons Lawrence and Samuel in the attic with an axe.

Rather, producer Edwards met the developers of the Precon Process, liked the idea, and had them "dub in" the subliminal images after the film had been completed.

Also, according to the AFI, "in the [film] print viewed, the original subliminal frames were replaced by animated drawings created for the video release.

The second, A Date with Death, a modern-day crime drama filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, was released in June 1959, less than a year after My World Dies Screaming.

But in certain parts of the film, "white dots flashed momentarily on the screen, indicating the likely places where the subliminal messages originally appeared.

One version contained "subliminal messages" and the other "the exaggerated supraliminal symbols" which are visible to the naked eye and found in the film and video as they exist today.

[12] My World Dies Screaming was released theatrically in the United States on a double bill with Lost, Lonely and Vicious in 1958.

[15][19] However, My World Dies Screaming only "made it onto the British circuits in late 1961. playing second feature to the King Brothers' monster movie Gorgo (1961).

Hardy also notes that "The sole interest of the film is that (...) the horror was supposedly enhanced by words or images subliminally superimposed on the screen.

"[20] The subliminal superimpositions are described by academic critic Kevin Heffernan as "single frame, 'hidden' images such as skulls, knives, and spelled words like 'death' designed to trigger the audience's emotional responses."

But he gives the film a relatively favorable review, writing that it "is worth a look, if only to see how it was all done without the aide of copious amounts of Technicolour blood and gore that signified the psycho thrillers of the upcoming decades.

"[14] "Significantly," writes Ackland, "the film reiterates the idea that the mind has a secret life, one that can be accessed with specifically designed procedures and techniques."

Within the film, "induced dreams and hypnosis can recover deeply repressed memories, the associated horror being relived and re-experienced' by the characters and shared with the audience through the use of Psychorama.