House is a horror movie with a wicked poster and DVD cover.

And great animatronics, too!

Ant
Ant
Aug 23, 2017 · 3 min read

I came to know the DVD cover of House well. It was always in the DVD Horror section of Soundz, a now-bankrupt chain of New Zealand music and movie stores. Of course being New Zealand in the early 2000s, it randomly cost $39.99 and never went on sale.

It didn’t help that, while the cover is wonderfully graphic and evocative (it’s the floating zombie hand ringing the doorbell, with the tagline “Ding Dong, You’re Dead”), it didn’t really say what the movie was about. Even the title isn’t particularly inspiring. So I never got around to spending 3 hours’ worth of wages on a potentially average horror movie from the Eighties.

But now you can rent it online for a few dollars, so 1986’s House is about a character named Roger Cobb, who is a very Stephen King-esque horror writer. He’s having marriage problems. His publisher is leaning on him to write another bestseller. And his aunt hangs herself in her family home at the start of the film.

Even beyond all that he’s a troubled guy. It turns out that he was ‘Nam, and rather than write another horror novel, he wants to write a book about his war experiences. He decides to move into his now-dead aunt’s house to isolate himself and write his book.

But then Cobb starts seeing and hearing things around the house. Is he losing his mind, or is something supernatural going on?

The House.

Tone-wise, House reminded me a lot of early Peter Jackson movies. With the blend of comedy and horror, the over-the-top mutated creatures, and even the style of prosthetic. Though House did come out even before Bad Taste.

I love a good comedy horror, but I actually reckon that the movie would have been better with a more serious tone. The Vietnam tale was genuinely interesting and unsettling. And — SPOILER FOR A 30 YEAR OLD MOVIE — the platoon buddy coming back from the dead for revenge is a great plotline. And the anamatronics were creepy! There’s psychological tension, PTSD, weird family history stuff, a writer at the edge of his rope. It could have been a cool disturbing horror film, like a B-Movie The Shining.

Between that paragraph and this one I did some research (ie I looked at IMDb Trivia). And found that the original story writer Fred Dekker (who was responsible for a few other classic Eighties films, including Monster Squad) originally envisaged the movie as a serious horror. Which makes total sense given the themes mentioned earlier. It was the screenwriter, a fella named Ethan Wiley, who added the comedy elements.

If it was all serious, you’d miss out on George Wendt the wacky neighbour I suppose.

So I guess I’ll have to watch the sequels next. I didn’t dislike House at all, it just feels like a slightly misguided movie. Still love that cover though.

Every Day Is Movies

I watch a movie every day in 2017, then write about each one. It seems like a good idea here in 2016.

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Ant

Written by

Ant

Every Day Is Movies

I watch a movie every day in 2017, then write about each one. It seems like a good idea here in 2016.

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