This reminds me of another anthology movie from Amicus (the lower-budget version of Hammer), Asylum. A man and his girlfriend murder his wife, dismember her and store the parts in the freezer in the basement (wrapped up in brown paper, no less). The body parts, however, want revenge and there are not only crawling hands, but legs and a torso and the head, the last visibly and creepily breathing through its brown-paper wrapper.
I think I was mixing “The Crawling Hand” and “The Thing That Couldn’t Die”.
The scene I remember was a hand crawling across the back of a couch.
I’m beginning to wonder if that wasn’t a nightmare instead of a dream 
I did say the movie gave me nightmares!
MANOS: Hands of FATE!
I know it’s not but I just had to say it.
Yet another crawling hand movie: The Beast With Five Fingers.
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I think I was mixing “The Crawling Hand” and “The Thing That Couldn’t Die”.
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Glad to be of help!
(Serving all your “What was that movie about the head in a box?” needs…) 
You don’t say what date you were growing up. 1981 is too late, but when is the latest it could be?
I first thought of The Beast With Five Fingers, but IIRC that just has a hand and no head.
Perhaps the movie Asylum (1972) or is that too late? Also, it’s not B/W, but there is a head.
Various parts of a dismembered body start crawling about (wrapped up in paper), commanded by a head.
Is that it?
Edit - just noticed that someone already suggested it. Still, look at the youtube video. It might be what you saw.
Possibly The Crawling Hand?
1963 flick, dead astronaut’s hand comes out of the grave and strangles folks.
Hey, while we’re at it, I am trying to pull up the name of a B&W horror movie I saw as a child. The only thing I can really remember is near the end, when a woman is frantically running around her darkened house or apartment turning off dripping faucets. The drip, drip, drip was terrifying somehow, as it had something to do with a dead man coming back - at one point as she comes out of a room after turning off another dripping faucet, his dead face comes out of the shadows.
That really got me, and 45-ish years later I can still get deeply creeped out by the sound of a slowly dripping faucet in the dark at night. I keep thinking if I can find the movie and watch it it will dispel that particular fear reaction.
I never got the impression that the head was commanding the body parts. But I have to say that head’s mouth trying to breathe and sucking the paper in and out, in and out was the stuff of nightmares. :eek:
I saw a movie around 1987 while in lawschool. It was on TV and I tuned in after it started, but I saw most of it. It had some archeologists digging up a mass tomb site in S. America where they found all the corpses had no right hand. They found a locked metal case with a disembodied hand in it. Unfortunately for them, they let it loose, and the rest of the movie is about the hand killing everyone, except the protagonist, who manages to escape thousands of miles away back to the USA, only to find the hand crawling in his house one day. I have been looking for this movie for a decade. It does NOT have the word “hand” in the title, I can assure you. I hope this helps on this old thread. I’m still searching for it!
I think al the possibilities have been mentioned. as the OPoster says, it was probably a mixture of The Crawling Hand and The Brain that Would not Die*, although you might also be getting a bit of The Frozen Dead in there – that also featured a talking disembodied head commanding stuff.
If you liked The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, you should watch Frankenhooker, which is basically a remake of that film by Frank Henenlotter (who gave us Basket Case and its sequels). It has the same plot, but with a lot more gratuitous nudity. And the Monster in the Closet at the end is made up of leftover hooker boobs and butts and other such stuff. The reklationship between the movies is cemented by the appearance in the opening scenes of a Brain in a Glass Jar, with one big eye on it – something that appears in the poster of The Brain that would not Die, but not the actual film. Kinda like the way *Escape from New York featured the head from the Statue of Liberty, which wasn’t in that film, but we did get to see it in Cloverfield.
*The Thing that Would not Die is yet another disembodied head that talks movie, but it doesn’t quite fit with the others here.
Are you sure you aren’t thinking of the first episode in the horror anthology, Black Sabbath? One episode is “The Drop of Water” and it features an ugly old woman (not a man) who dies and then keeps horrifying her nurse. It was scary as hell. The old woman keeps popping out of the shadows and gliding around the room.