I don’t know how you chose movies to watch when you were growing up, but for me it consisted of walking up and down the isles at the video store (ah yes, remember those) until a box cover caught my eye. Sometimes the focus pulling artwork would steal my attention immediately, sometime I did a double take, and other times they would magically appear next to something I was looking at like a stalker in a slasher film. There where so many ‘Oh My God’ moments hidden in those stores that my head almost exploded on a weekly basis, which does sound like a terrible superpower to have.

But there were always films I was never sure of when I first started choosing movies for myself. One of them was a movie with a very intriguing box cover of a ghoulish, decaying hand floating in the middle of a black ground, forefinger outstretched ready to ring a doorbell on the left of the cover.

It was a haunted house story, and at the time, horror movies with serial killers, masked slashers, and movie monsters of all varieties seemed fun and charged my imagination. But a haunted house or ghost story scared the ever-loving shit out of me. Which was odd looking back, as Ghostbusters was, and still is, one of my favourite films. Still is.

Anyway, this box cover was one I came back to over and over again before I had to the nerve to rent it. And I remember thinking that I was glad that our house didn’t have a door bell because the tag line for this film was, ‘Ding Dong, You’re Dead!’. Yeah, my pre-adolescent brain came up with some weird things.

The film, in case you were wondering, was the 1985 horror comedy, House. I didn’t see the film until my third year if high school, close to a decade after the film was released. And to this day it is among a handful of films that I kicked myself for not watching earlier in my cinematic education.

 The film opens with a delivery boy for the local grocery store discovering the elderly home owner has committed suicide after he walks into her feet as she hangs from a noose. We are then introduced to the film’s protagonist Roger Cobb. He is a Vietnam vet with PTSD who is now a horror novelist. The woman from the opening scene was his aunt. Cobb inherits the house and moves in rather than selling it so he has a quiet place to work on his new book. Which is a book about the horrors of what he experienced in Vietnam.

We quickly learn through flashback, that a year previous to this story taking place, Cobb’s son went missing from the back yard of this very house. AS a result of this, his marriage to a famous television actress, and the mother of his child, fell apart. Roger befriends the neighbours and tries to write. But then the ghosts start to appear and the haunting starts. At first Roger believes what he is seeing is all in this head, brought on by writing about past traumas. But the paranormal activity becomes impossible to ignore and we find out that the haunting, the death of his aunt and the disappearance of Cobb’s son was orchestrated by the ghost of Cobb’s old Vietnam war buddy Big Ben, who blames Cobb for his death. Roger fights, wins and there is a nice reunion style happy ending.

The filmmakers, which included some established talent and newcomers at the time that would go on to bigger and better things, but here they did something I thought was rather ballsy. They intentionally put comedy into a horror film. What! That’s no big deal today, I now. But the horror movie parodies in the 70s and 80s were not funny. You might get a chuckle, but that was about it. And many other horror films that were seen as funny, achieved this unintentionally. The ‘so bad its good’ genre. But with House, the filmmakers didn’t lean on the horror to tell the story, and didn’t push the comedy to keep you watching. They seem to have gone to great lengths to blend the two elements together.

I have read reviews and seen online video reviews that say that with this film not being a comedy with horror elements or a horror film with comedy elements, that the film doesn’t know what it wants to be. That because of what they refer to as a disjointed film, that the film doesn’t work on any level. That because it doesn’t go one way or the other that the film is somehow ‘less than’. Which I think is doing the film a massive disservice. We have all seen comedy films that are just not funny, and some are painful to watch, which I would say are a horror to try and sit through. And remember, a horror film doesn’t have to be scary to be a horror film. It’s the elements within the genre storytelling that make it a horror film. With or without the gore effects and jump scares.

The situations characters in horror films find themselves in, especially anything of a fantastical nature narratively speaking, are rather absurd. No matter how ridiculous the setups and situations are, most films are played straight. But why not lean into the Looney Tunes nature of these situations without going full cartoon. House does it and I believe does it well. Saying this is all well and good, but the film wouldn’t work without a cast that is in on the joke. The actors ground the film with their performances. Especially that of William Katt who is in almost every scene and utilises his comic skills and dramatic talents to equal effect in telling this story.

Katt’s character of Cobb is a man that has been beaten down by life, even if the world sees him as successful writer. He is suffering from PTSD from not only his time spent in Vietnam, but also with the loss of his son and the breakup of this marriage a year prior to this story taking place. He has gone through some shit, and when the hauntings start up around him, he reacts like this is just part of his trauma and that these things he is seeing are not really there. But when the crazy funhouse elements announce themselves (made believable on screen by effective special effects and creature design. Seriously, Google the film and check out the images) that become something he can’t ignore or explain, that the ride starts to get interesting. Katt’s reactions to some of the events taking place, his facial expressions, are worth the price of admission. 

Katt’s career started with films like Carrie and Big Wednesday, but became well know for this role as Ralph Hinkley, the average school teacher that was gifted a suit that gives the wearer super human powers by aliens, which he lost the instruction manual for, in the sitcom The Greatest American Hero. But he is not the only actor in this film with comedy experience. George Wendt, who plays the neighbour and friend Harold, played Norm of Cheers for 11 seasons. Also in the sitcom gene pool is actor Richard Moll, who played mostly villains in his early career due to his height and amazing face, (and here plays the bad guy Big Ben), played the character of the loveable court bailiff ‘Bull’ Shannon in 8 of the 9 seasons in the underrated Night Court. All three of these sitcoms where staples of the 1980s, and all three of them filmed this story in the break between seasons of their respective shows.

The director Steve Miner used his love of horror movies and his experience in the genre having directed the first two Friday the 13^th sequels to do something different with the genre and to show the higher ups at the studios that he could do other types of storytelling. And I think he did just that. He later went on to direct the cult favourite Warlock in 1989, Forever Young with Mel Gibson and Jamie Lee Curtis in 1992, My Father the Hero in 1993, Halloween H2O in 1998 and one of my personal favourites Lake Placid in 1999. And working on House he was working with friend, the director of the first Friday the 13^th, producer auteur and horror legend Sean S Cunningham. Both of these men have great senses of humour, just watch an interview with them or listen to an audio commentary of one of their films.

If you have gotten this far reading this, to can tell two things about me. There is really no structure to these cinematic ramblings as my mind just seems to vomit what it know without rhyme or reason,  and that I love this movie. There is a charm and a mischievous wink to this movie that tickles me in the right way. Which is a shame in some ways, mainly because the film has largely been forgotten. Well, except for the hardcore horror fans. Their love of this film, and the House franchise, have helped it earn it cult statis.

And because this film doesn’t go the gore route, has no nudity and is light on the profanity (rarely a ‘Shit’ and ‘Fuck’ in site), this film is perfect for someone who wants to get into horror and doesn’t know where to start. You could, in my opinion, sit a 10-year-old in front of this film and they would enjoy it. In many ways, you could say this is the perfect gateway drug to the happy pharmaceutical cinematic excellence of the horror film. The sequel, House II: The Secord Story, is a film that goes the full comedy route, so I think that one is safe for the casual viewer too. But watch out for House III: The Horror Show. That swings for the fences in the opposite direction and is rather disturbing. Watch after you have a few more under your belt first. Trust me on this.