house of seven corpses

For a movie with a title as morbid as The House of Seven Corpses ((1974), you probably couldn’t find a more family friendly piece of horror real estate. More often that not, the film looks and feels just like similar made-for-TV product produced in the same era (Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, etc) with a cast of past-their-prime stars and a plot not quite sensational enough for the big screen. That’s probably to be expected, since writer/ director Paul Harrison biggest claim to fame at the time were several episodes of H. R. Pufnstuf. Scary, indeed!

Although House actually played theatrically, any notoriety it still has today is thanks to local late-night creature features and various home-video releases, all of which made the movie look even more low-rent that it actually is. Now debuting on a blu-ray / DVD combo thanks to Severin Films, one can finally see the movie we’d all been missing…and we haven’t been missing much.

Oh, there’s so some fun to be had watching the great John Carradine pronounce his curse upon a visiting film crew making a movie about the tragic goings-on in a gothic mansion in which seven people were murdered. And actors like John Ireland Spartacus) and Faith Domergue (This Island Earth) bring some campy old-Hollywood appeal to their verbal sparring as a dictatorial director and high-maintenance movie star respectively.

But even for those with a deep appreciation for back-catalog horror films, House can be a real slog to sit through. Only in the final 20 minutes, when residents from the nearby graveyard are unearthed thanks to a passage read from a Tibetan Book of the Dead used as a film prop, do things begin to get appropriately spooky. Although we never get a good look, the film’s zombie make-up is impressively decayed, very reminiscent of Peter Cushing’s skeletal corpse from the original Tales from the Crypt.

In the end, The House of Seven Corpses just feels too limited by its small-screen sensibility to be of interest to anyone but collectors. And with those folks in mind, Severin has added an informative commentary track (featuring associate producer Gary Kent, who has great recall of all the details of the shoot filmed in the Salt Lake City Historical Museum, of all places) and a nice 30-minute interview with John Carradine from 1983 that covers his entire career in fine fashion, as well.