THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1970)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, metaphysical*

Robert Bloch may not have provided the script for Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO, but he indubitably profited from the association. For many years afterward, films in America and Great Britain adapted a plethora of Bloch stories, even many that had absolutely nothing in common with the type of horror exemplified by Norman Bates.

HOUSE, another of the many anthology-films that the Brits do so well, is a conglomeration of Bloch stories from various eras, and as in Amicus’s earlier TORTURE GARDEN, the tales are linked by a dubious device. Here it’s an English manse that a number of doomed characters have rented over the years, and though there’s no specific malign entity in the house; the place seems to be fantastically unlucky. This idea might have worked well enough, except that not enough of the tales center upon the doomed characters residing in the house.

“Waxworks,” for instance, barely shows the victim dwelling in the house at all. Philip (Peter Cushing) mourns the memory of a lost love, but while tooling around the town, he comes across a waxworks, where the wax-sculptor has crafted a bust of Salome, reminding Philip of his beloved. This conceit might have worked reasonably well, except that Philip brings in an old friend who knew the lost love, and he too is amazed and astounded by the likeness. I don’t know if the friend was in the original story, but the effect here is of padding, since the crux of the narrative is the never-explained conflict between Philip and the weird wax-man. It’s a pretty haphazard plot, though it’s the only story to register in the uncanny phenomenality.

Similarly, when horror-actor Paul Henderson (Jon Pertwee of “Doctor Who” fame) moves into the house, he spends very little time there. Henderson is sort of a fan’s idea of what a horror-actor ought to be like, in that he’s obsessive about being an authentic titan of terror. When Henderson finds the young punks running his next film are insufficiently invested, he goes out looking for a cape befitting a master vampire. When he finds such a garment, Henderson begins to believe it has the power to make him into a real bloodsucker. Instead, he finds that his devotion to verisimilitude has earned him a fandom that includes actual vampires. Here too, the purported “twist ending” doesn’t track even at first glance, and the episode’s main attraction is the joined appearance of Pertwee and the delectable Ingrid Pitt.

At least Charles (Denholm Elliott) of “Method for Murder” moves into the house, along with his wife, for a specific reason. He’s a professional horror-mystery writer, and he wants a spooky joint to enhance his creativity. While there, he starts a new novel, and shows his tolerant wife a sketch of his new villain, a sttangler named Dominic. When Charles starts seeing Dominic around the house, he thinks that he’s either insane, or that the creation of his mind has come into corporeal being. The denouement moves into “Diabolique” territory, but again there’s a big twist conclusion. It’s not really any clearer than the other two, but a devoted filmgoer can, if he pleases, cook up a rationale that might make a little bit of sense.

“Sweets to the Sweet” also has its muddled aspects, but it’s the only one that shows a little symbolic potential. A strict-seeming fellow named Reid (Christopher Lee) rents the house for himself and his little girl Jane, and he also engages a local nanny, Ann (Nyree Dawn Porter) to give Jane lessons, as Reid has deep, dark reasons for not wanting the girl to attend regular school. Ann observes that Jane has a terrible fear of fire, and the nanny helps her get over it, though this has the unintended effect of unleashing certain demons in the girl’s psyche. Reid confesses to Ann that Jane’s mother, of whom Jane is a spitting image, was evil, and though he stops short of claiming that his late wife was a witch, clearly he’s been sequestering Jane because she’s inherited her mother’s hex-powers. Possibly the original story somehow involved the witch-mother suffering some sort of death-by-burning, though this remains a murky point. In any case, Jane’s evil nature comes to the fore, and she ends up killing her father with a wax effigy, though her animus is similarly vague. Lee’s presence expunges the story’s shortcomings, and Chloe Franks makes an adorably creepy junior witch.

On the whole, though I’ve not read any of the original prose stories, I suspect that they all deserved to be left on the shelf. Good performances alone make this house worth a visit.