THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR

UK, 1969, 92 minutes, Colour.
Frankie Avalon, Jill Hayworth, Dennis Price, Mark Wynter, Richard O’ Sullivan, Julian Barnes.
Directed by Michael Armstrong.

Audiences nowadays would not consider this a horror film. Rather, set in an allegedly haunted house, it is more of a murder mystery.

It is very much a film of the Swinging 60s, looking at fashions, behaviour, styles of talking. Frankie Avalon, from so many American musicals and Beach Blanket Bingo styles of film, has to be rather subdued in this British film. The costumes and décor are very much Carnaby Street imitations – and thus appear very dated today.

The film is very conventional in the setting up of a romance between a young man who works in Carnaby Street and a young woman. Another woman who works in the shop is having an affair with an older man. He follows her, to the party where she is with a number of friends. They are bored, somebody suggests that they go to a house with a reputation for being haunted. The older man follows them.

Very conventional material in the haunted house, searching it, a couple of scares. However, one of the young men is brutally slashed. The group decides not to reveal anything to the police and dispose of the body. , the police (with Dennis Price as the lead inspector) do the questioning, find out about the house, find that the older man has also been knifed and disappeared.

The group worry, are wondering which of them is guilty.

They decide to go back to the house, one of the young men, the one who suggested they go to the house in the first place, is revealed as the murderer, full moon mad, explaining at some length his psychotic behaviour, fear of the dark, being lost in the haunted house – but, to the surprise of all, actually murders Frankie Avalon, stabbing in the groin and slicing him. The payoff for horror fans has to be only in the last few minutes.

Considering the slasher films of forty years later, this is a very slight film – and not particularly well acted at all.