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.”
