THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR
** out of *****

Genres
Haunted House
Horror

1969
Directed by
Michael Armstrong
Written by
Michael Armstrong
Gerry Levy
Cast
Frankie Avalon .... Chris
Jill Haworth .... Sheila
Dennis Price .... Inspector
Mark Wynter .... Gary
George Sewell .... Kellett
Gina Warwick .... Sylvia
Carol Dilworth .... Dorothy
Julian Barnes .... Richard
Veronica Doran .... Madge
Robin Stewart .... Henry
Jan Holden .... Peggy
Clifford Earl .... Police Sergeant
Robert Raglan .... Bradley

London in the Swingin’ Sixties. Carnaby Road. Parties and sex. Haunted houses in the countryside. For a film with such a crazy mix of elements The Haunted House of Horror is quite disappointing. Its main problems are that it isn’t very scary (one killing is quite well done, but there aren’t many of them), it’s too slow, and often the most interesting scenarios thrown up by the story aren’t pursued.

We spend the first forty or so minutes meeting characters before we get to the haunted house. That’s cool, a lot of good horror films build up the characters before killing them off or putting them in danger. But this film doesn’t kill many off, or put them in that much danger. While none of this build-up is cringe inducing, it’s not hugely engaging either.

Eventually we get to a group of friends who are all at a party hosted by Frankie Avalon (best known as the star of the Beach Party series of movies). But they think it’s too dull so they decide to go out to a spooky abandoned house instead. There they joke around and have the requisite seance.

Getting to the haunted house took a long time, and once they were there I began to appreciate the skill involved in creating an atmosphere of terror in other, more successful, haunted house movies. If that atmosphere isn’t created you just have shots of people walking around a dark house opening doors and calling each other’s names. A few lame jokes are thrown in here, like when the chubby girl can’t fit through a hole in the wall. Too bad there’s no tension for the jokes to break. I did like the way the characters who are spooked by the house try to hide it with recognisable lies like “I’m not scared, I just think this is boring”. I believed that they were scared, problem was that I wasn’t.

Without going into the details, one off them gets killed. No one knows if the murderer is one of them or if there is someone else in the house? Spearheaded by Frankie Avalon they decide that the fact that one of them is dead implicates all of them (who could possibly work out who the real killer is?), so they’d better just wrap the body in a rug and dump it some place miles away. An odd choice of tactics, sure. But he gets everyone on his side, and then we cut to the next day, bright and sunny.

Okay, it would have been cool to have something come of the fact that they’re alone in a haunted house with a mystery killer. But it didn’t, so I won’t be a dork and harp on about what I thought should have happened. The possibilities that this sudden shift threw up were potentially quite cool. All the friends are in on a conspiracy, but one of them may be a murderer.

But it isn’t developed. There’s some talking. I think one of them ran away from a scary sculpture (the scene was a little unclear to me). And then after a long while they get together and tell each other that they’re scared and formulate a new strategy while upbeat music is played as if the hosts thought that since guests were coming over they better put something on. It is an amusing counterpoint, but nullified any tension.

The Haunted House of Horror is not very successful as a haunted house horror, a paranoid plot-unravelling thriller, or as a time capsule of the Swingin’ Sixties in London. There are intriguing story ideas, but none of them are followed through.

According to IMDb trivia, co-writer/director Michael Armstrong originally wanted this to be much more psychedelic, and wanted to cast David Bowie in the role Mark Wynter plays. Of course, we can never know how that would have turned out, but a Dario Argento-style haunted house horror starring David Bowie could have been a movie that, unlike this one, would appeal to more than just completeist horror fans.

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