Horror Madness returns with two stories about houses that seem like perfect havens - until the ghosts show up.
On one side we have Stuart Rosenberg’s movie that begat a neverending franchise, 1979’s The Amityville Horror:
And on the other is Lewis Allen’s atmospheric take on the Cornish Gothic, 1944’s The Uninvited:
See the introduction and full slate here http://oftenveryvile.ghost.io/introducing-horror-movie-madness/.
Neither of these films is exactly original. The Uninvited is deliberately and self-consciously derivative; the setting on the wild and atmospheric coast of Cornwall would have reminded 1940s audiences of the hit Rebecca, which had come out a few years before. Cornwall had a special place in the gothic literature of the 20th century, largely due to Daphne Du Maurier, who set Rebecca and several other novels there. It was established, culturally, as a place where spooky things happen, a place where every old house is beautiful but probably haunted by something.
The Amityville Horror did not have an equivalent pedigree when it premiered, but it has achieved a similar one in the years since. Based on a novel, which was itself based on a “true” series of events (people argue over the accuracy), it resonated enough to inspire dozens of sequels and connected films. The name “Amityville” is now enough to evoke the idea of a ghost story for horror fans, as much as “Cornwall” was enough in 1944.
It’s surprising, maybe, that of these two rather predictable films the older one is a little more original and surprising. I wouldn’t call The Uninvited a subversion of the gothic, exactly. But it is very aware of itself as a particular type of story, and I think it deliberately zigs in a few places where you expect it to zag. It’s tied to a very specific time, for one thing – we are given the year 1937, and you wouldn’t think this mattered or needed to be stated until you remember it was released in 1944. It is an almost undercover period piece, a story that deliberately takes place before the war, and that would have meant something to audiences at the time. The film is telling you “that thing we’re all worried about? It’s not going on. The characters aren’t thinking about it, so you shouldn’t either.” It’s horror, but it’s escapist. The characters are in danger, but not the real world danger the audience wants to forget for a while.
Yet this knowledge – that there is a world war coming for these relatively carefree characters – lends a bittersweetness to the story. They don’t know, but we do, that their happy ending is perhaps temporary. The war is coming, the blitz is coming, and Cornwall will not be spared. It would, very soon, not be a timeless, atmospheric step into the past but a bombed out warzone studded with RAF bases. And in 1944, of course, the war was ongoing. The characters get a happy ending, ghosts are defeated and two marriages are on the horizon, and their dog even makes it; it’s an ending that moviegoers in 1944 probably needed. Yet there’s a sad feeling, a sense of foreboding that lingers. Ghosts are gone for now, but forever? Family secrets have been revealed, but is that enough to nullify their power? It’s difficult to say. Both Ray Milland and Gail Russell have a haunted affect; they are charming, but rather melancholy and sometimes unstable.
Margot Kidder, the star of The Amityville Horror, was an actress that might have had a better career if she’d been a contemporary of Milland and Russell. She had an old-fashioned, kind of screwball energy – I think she was really effective in horror specifically because she seemed like a person to whom horrific things aren’t supposed to happen. She’s good in Amityville, as she was good in most things. She seems like a real person, and Amityville is going for a kind of pseudo-realism that a lot of horror of the time tried for, though this had as much to do with low budgets as anything else. It isn’t glamorous or atmospheric in the way that The Uninvited is; it’s a little sordid, more akin to something like Last House on the Left. 1979 audiences weren’t being encouraged to immerse themselves in a past, recent or otherwise: they were instead confronted with the present. For all that it looks and feels very 70s, it’s not intentionally tied to a particular time and place, not purposefully dated as The Uninvited is. It could be any house, in any neighborhood: your house, your neighborhood.
Which is probably why Amityville keeps getting remade, and remade again, and reimagined, and alluded to. Some of that’s pure marketing, of course: put that word in the title and get at least a few more curious viewers. But the simplicity and non-specificity of the story is what gives it its staying power, in some sense; you can transfer it to any time and place. It’s got staying power, but not, in my opinion, any other kind. It’s precisely that lack of specificity that limits it. I’ve watched it several times, and each time was like the first: not because it’s still scary each time, but because as soon as the film enters my head it leaves again. There’s very little there there.
The winner, for originality, is The Uninvited.