However you slice it, horror movies are for the kids. Doesn’t matter if it’s R-rated. Doesn’t matter if it’s banned in whatever country you call home. By hook or crook, the kids always see them. Every horror fan and trash fiend I’ve ever met saw something at a young age that they shouldn’t have seen—and then they wanted more of it. Myself, I grew up with horror galore on 1980s cable TV. That’s how I saw House. Pretty much all of us cable kids and video store brats saw it back then. It’s one of the most kid-friendly R-rated movies ever. That’s both good and bad.
The good is that this breathes new life into the very old haunted house genre. There are no cliches about wind whistling through windows, spider webs, lights going out and strange noises in the night. When director Steve Miner wants to goose you, he makes a slime-beast jump out of the closet in a well-lit room. He’s not one for the slow tease. It’s a colorful film with terrific practical creature effects that cover everything from latex puppets to imaginative rubber suits to Harryhausen-style stop-motion monsters. Also, its lead character is a Vietnam vet (William Katt) turned bestselling horror author who’s just starting to delve into the real horrors in his own memories, which is a good idea.
The bad is that if you’re in the mood for horror, this movie feels like you accidentally ordered a non-alcoholic beer. It’s every bit as much a comedy as it is a scare flick. And it’s not a dark, strange, uncomfortable comedy or even a campy comedy. It’s broad, crowd-pleasing stuff about babysitting and nosy neighbors. Screenwriter Ethan Wiley, working from a story by Fred Dekker, would later write and direct the terrible sequel House II: The Second Story, in which he’d dive headfirst into the cuteness overload that his script strongly hints at here.
As a kid, I thought this movie was one of the best things I ever saw in my ten-year-old life. As an adult, seeing it for the first time in about thirty years, it’s not terrible, but the bloom is well off the rose.