Alien. Jaws. Minions. Some movies say it all with a single word. House never achieved that level of mononymous fame, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. A movie about a haunted location of some sort, House entered wide release 40 years ago today and, like so many forgotten horror movies, it enjoyed enough financial success to get slapped with the cult classic label and spawn a series of cruddy sequels.
Roger Cobb (William Katt) is a popular author juggling several classic movie hero problems: he’s divorced, his young son has mysteriously vanished, and his attempt to branch out from pulpy horror novels to a serious book about his Vietnam War service has led to writer’s block and bad flashbacks. House opens with Roger’s elderly aunt hanging herself, and Roger, having both grown up in her house and watched his little Jimmy vanish from it while visiting, decides to move in and work on his book in, as he tells noisy neighbor Harold (George Wendt, essentially playing Cheers’ Norm), “solitude.”
That’s a straightforward premise for a movie that has “goofy” and “bonkers” show up a lot in its Letterboxd reviews. Is House a haunted house movie? Yes. A Vietnam War movie? Yes. A sitcom? Again, yes. House feels like it took elements from recent hit Poltergeist — a missing boy, a house connected to another dimension, an investigation aided by modern technology — put those elements in a blender, then stuck a cartoon stick of dynamite in the resulting concoction.
Grotesque goblins pop out of closets, a mounted fish comes to life, the well-meaning neighbor won’t stop coming by with snacks, we keep revisiting a dark, leafy soundstage that stands in for Vietnam, and Roger sports the sluttiest V-neck sweater you’ll ever see. By the time another neighbor (Bond girl Mary Stävin) aggressively hits on Roger, then pulls a switcheroo and dumps her little boy on him for a babysitting stint that culminates in Roger having to save the tot from monsters, you’ll give up on trying to guess what’s coming next.
House knows exactly how silly it is, and you can imagine yesteryear’s tweens making an early foray into the genre thanks to TV reruns and VHS tapes. Giving away too many of its strange twists and turns would spoil the ride, and “ride” is an apt word here. In most contexts, its out-of-left-field plotting and set pieces would feel sloppy and discordant. But if you approach House like a theme park attraction that’s going to throw a bunch of wacky crap at you, then it won’t come as too much of a disappointment when its internal logic fails to hold together. No one goes through Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion for the tight storytelling.
Of what plot does exist, it’s strangely the Vietnam element that’s the most interesting, in that it’s a reminder of how thoroughly the Vietnam War had permeated every facet of American pop culture. A now seemingly-stalled House reboot was announced in 2023, but it’s difficult to imagine its hypothetical hero having Fallujah flashbacks before a climactic showdown with a zombified squadmate seeking revenge.
There are many reasons why Iraq’s impact has largely been relegated to indies, flops, and brief asides in character bios, but seeing even a ridiculous horror-comedy make Vietnam-related PTSD central to its plot is a surprisingly stark example of the gulf between how the two conflicts are remembered. It would be a stretch to say that House has anything profound to say about wartime trauma, but it’s a remarkably big swing for a film that also features a well-endowed witch-monster waddling around with a shotgun. It makes you wish that modern movies could tackle similar subjects with such strange candor.
But House is a horror-comedy at heart, and in that it’s been helped by time, as creature effects contemporary reviewers derided as cheap now look delightfully old-fashioned. Roger’s eventual descent into another dimension hidden behind his medicine cabinet remains an impressive adventure, and even the rubbery creature suits fit the film’s charming tone. It’s no classic, but it’s the kind of load-bearing movie that kept movie theaters and Blockbusters occupied in between the hits. Four decades later, it can still shoulder that load when you’re staring down a long evening of scrolling aimlessly through Netflix.
House is streaming on Tubi.
