House (1986)

★★
There has been only one horror movie that made me scream out loud, and that was 1986's House, a horror/comedy production from the Friday the 13th team (producer Sean S. Cunningham, director Steve Miner). My dad took me to the theater to see it, and I remember the moment it happened. The entire theater blew up with a deafening noise. It was that good, and what made it better was the timing. I think we all expected something was going to happen after a well-placed false alarm, but it was scary anyway because of some effective editing and the gruesome special effects work. I'll go ahead and declare House's jump scare as one of the greatest in horror movie history, ranking up there with Wait Until Dark's iconic leap from out of nowhere courtesy of Alan Arkin. It doesn't matter that I was 10 years old when I saw it. A theater full of adults reacted the same way.

I start out with this high praise of what House got right because it is a wildly uneven picture. On the plus side, this is a haunted house story with an original premise and plenty of morbid humor. The soundtrack, by Freddy the 13th veteran Harry Manfredini, is perfectly balanced between the scary moments and the comedic scenes. The lead performance by William Katt (T.V.'s The Greatest American Hero) is terrific. He acquits himself well to the horrors going on around him. The house itself is a beautiful Victorian-style mansion with a light-blue façade and spires on the roof, but it has a sinister side thanks to the exterior lighting and camera angles. The negatives include some shoddy internal logic and several overwritten supporting characters. This movie came at a time when horror/comedies were popular, with Re-Animator and Return of the Living Dead being the best examples. House had the basics down pat and could have stood proudly alongside those other two, but alas it does not. That jump scare, though.

Roger Cobb (Katt) is an author and veteran of the Vietnam War. For the last three years, he's been coasting off the success of his previous book, with fans begging for another story. He finally decides to write about his experiences in the war. Initially affected with writer's block, Roger moves into his aunt's house. She committed suicide there as the movie opened, but it's also the location of another tragedy. His son went missing during a visit. Roger's marriage with Sandy (Kay Lenz) fell apart, though his Aunt Hooper (Susan French) didn't help calm matters when she insisted that the house did it. Roger moves into the house both for inspiration and because he partially believes his aunt. He had a vison of his son drowning in the swimming pool soon after his abduction, so maybe there's something to her warnings. Roger does eventually see strange things around the house. His deceased aunt makes an appearance. The trophy fish in the living room comes to life. The biggest sign that something is very wrong here is the creature in the closet, which Roger amusingly describes as a raccoon as big as a St. Bernard.

Mr. Cobb has an unbelievably robust disposition. He never once considers leaving the house after several attempts on his life. Monsters, eerie sounds and ghostly gardening tools all take a stab at him, yet he goes to sleep soundly every night. His neighbor is Harold (George Wendt), who is extremely nosy, to the point that he walks in on Roger uninvited and brings him a midnight snack. At one point, he calls Sandy to inform her of Roger's eccentric behavior, and later he calls the police after hearing a gunshot from next door. I don't object to anyone calling the police to report an act of violence or a suicide attempt, as Harold thinks this is, but he then strolls next door after the police arrives to take credit for the call. His character was included to increase the number of outside eyes peering at Roger, who already shot a lookalike of his ex-wife and stashed the body under the stairs, but the script assigns him actions to undertake under spurious assumptions. Another character added as a distraction is Tanya (Mary Stävin), who looks like she might become a romantic interest for Roger, but the movie pulls the rug out by revealing her true intentions: She needs a babysitter. That may have been the joke, but it doesn't work because she thrusts his son onto him one night when she barely knows him, all for the sake of a protracted sequence in which Roger must be wary of the house's attempts to take the boy too.

The movie stumbles for sure, but the good parts are really good. As Roger writes his book, we see flashbacks to Vietnam, where Big Ben (Richard Moll) is a cocky soldier begging for combat. It's a different side of Moll, considering that at the same time he was appearing as his signature role Bull Shannon in Night Court (my favorite sitcom). The jungle scenery is weak (obviously filmed on a sound stage), but Moll's brief appearances are golden. The comedy is inventive. Roger gets the upper hand on an overweight ghoul, whose defeat is amusing enough, but its fate is even better. There's an awesome sequence in a void, which Roger explores after correctly interpreting one of his aunt's paintings. Manfredini's choice of instrument when scoring this sequence is inspired, as it perfectly captures the mystery and foreboding danger of Roger's predicament. Finally, there's William Katt holding the whole picture together. He's no stranger to horror, having appeared in Carrie as Carrie's doomed prom date, and he's adept at comedy, as he showed in his superhero spoof series. The entire movie rests on his shoulders, and he carries it with confidence. The house throws everything at him, yet Roger believes he can win. His interaction with Tanya, though her character is superfluous, is amusing and slightly off-kilter thanks to the overweight ghoul's attempt to foil the conversation.

I like House, but its weaknesses are noticeable. Movies featuring supernatural events are by necessity largely exempt from providing sound reasons for the events we witness. How did Freddy Krueger come back from the dead and infiltrate dreams? Wes Craven provided no reason, although Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare retroactively gave us one. We did get a reason for Poltergeist's haunted house, but what of House? Something about this narrative begs for an explanation. Every haunted house movie that I've seen (The Amityville Horror, The Entity, House on Haunted Hill, etc.) gave us an origin story for the ghosts. Once we realize who is pulling the strings in House, we start to wonder how the house got this way. Maybe I'm asking for too much, but the analytical part of me wanted to know more. The movie isn't a complete success, but… That jump scare, though.

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