The House Where Evil Dwells

No, I'm not writing about the White House and its current occupant.

Instead, I'm talking about a film I screened last night for my current project, which requires that I watch lots and lots of horror movies made during the 1980s. The film I'm talking about is Kevin Connor's The House Where Evil Dwells (1982), which focuses on a nice middle-class American couple (Edward Albert and Straw Dogs' Susan George), who happen to move into a haunted house in Kyoto, Japan. They found the house courtesy of their friend and business associate Alex Curtis (Doug McClure), and now Ted and Laura Fletcher (and their daughter Amy) think all their problems are solved. Only problem is this: Three ghosts "live" there already, and are hellbent on re-creating the love-triangle that resulted in their brutal triple murder/suicide back in 1840.

In essence, this movie has the same plot as a 1980 low-budget effort starring John Saxon entitled Beyond Evil. In both films, blissfully ignorant Americans move to a strange land without understanding the culture and are subsequently haunted by local spirits. It takes local knowledge (in the form of a zen monk in The House Where Evil Dwells and a doctor in Beyond Evil) to help the tormented Americans understand how they have trespassed in things they don't understand. Sometimes that help comes to late, but that's a lot like life, isn't it?

What I enjoyed about The House Where Evil Dwells is that its director, Kevin Connor (Motel Hell, The Land That Time Forgot, At the Earth's Core, Space:1999, From Beyond the Grave) takes no prisoners in his approach to the material. The film opens with a nasty decapitation, features several soft-core quality sex scenes featuring the lovely Ms. George, and then climaxes with lots and lots of blood and a totally unhappy ending. But in between the opening and closing bookend decapitations, Connor includes the best sequence: a scene in which helpless little Amy and her babysitter are mysteriously overrun by skittering crabs as they sleep. These (huge!) crabs crawl all over the sleeping girls, their mattresses and bed sheets, and then chase poor Amy up a tree. The special effects are rudimentary (though good for 1982...) but there's something intense and terribly disturbing about this scene. It absolutely works in a skin-crawling kind of way. I also love the look and texture of Connor's film, which was shot by Jacques Haitkin, the great cinematographer who also lensed Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984. This may be exploitation filmmaking, but gosh darn it, it's quality exploitation filmmaking.

The House Where Evil Dwells makes for an interesting B movie, and how long has it been since we've had one of those? I've always admired Motel Hell as a gonzo cult classic, and I had the opportunity to discuss it with Mr. Connor at Main Mission 2000, a Space:1999 convention held in Manhattan a few years back. The House Where Evil Dwells isn't quite as good as Motel Hell, in part because it lacks that's film's sense of campy humor, but I found the film watchable and entertaining, and even kind of tragic.

The core idea of the story (based on a novel by James Hardiman) is that the three ghosts are doomed karmically, to relive their past crimes again and again, but taking new prisoners along the way. Funny how personal vendettas often take just such turns. I also like the idea of strangers in a strange land, in this case Japan. "Demons and ghosts are not confined to your Christian world," warns the helpful monk near the film's climax, and that's a lesson that the film's doomed characters just don't seem to learn.

Anyway,this is a worth a look, especially within the context of director Connor's impressive (but mostly unexplored...) career in horror. Some energetic fan boy somewhere needs to do a retrospective on this guy. His films never fail to be unique, energetic and visually enthralling, even if slightly cheesy.