Arrow Blu-ray Film Review
Shock (1977) • Blu-ray [Arrow Video]
A couple is terrorized in their new house haunted by the vengeful ghost of the woman’s former husband, who possesses their young son.
Published in
13 min readJan 17, 2022
Shock could be glibly dismissed as one of those ten-a-penny Amityville Horror (1979) knockoffs, or a cheap Poltergeist (1982) wannabe, where a middle-class family move into a house that hides a sinister supernatural secret. But that’s before one realises which film came first…
Of course, Shock does have its own antecedents and its US distributors capitalised on the ‘possessed child’ aspect by rebranding it as the sequel to Beyond the Door (1974) — which, in turn, was an internationally successful Italian horror tied-up in a drawn-out lawsuit for copyright infringement of The Exorcist (1973). However, Shock was only linked to the former by its child star, David Colin Jr.
