There are few things I enjoy more than a horror film about people making a horror film, particularly when the people making the film are idiots who decide to shoot it inside an allegedly cursed house where a bunch of people were brutally killed. This is essentially the premise of The House of Seven Corpses, a wonderfully strange little slice of early-’70s horror that spends most of its runtime watching a film crew make a terrible decision after terrible decision before eventually remembering that it’s supposed to be a horror movie.
The film follows Eric Hartman (John Ireland), a director making a cheap horror picture about the Beal family, seven members of which met grisly ends inside their old mansion. Keen to give his production a bit of authenticity, Eric decides to shoot the film in the actual house, where the caretaker, Edgar (John Carradine), is on hand to explain the family’s rather unpleasant history. Edgar even interrupts the filming to correct the actors when they get the details of the deaths wrong, which is a pretty good indication that this isn’t your average filming location. Eric, however, is more interested in getting his fucking movie finished than listening to warnings about the house’s past.
Among the cast are ageing actress Gayle (Faith Domergue), playing one of the Beal women, and Christopher (Charles Macaulay), an alcoholic former Shakespearean actor who spends much of his time being an obnoxious bastard. Meanwhile, Anne (Carole Wells) and her boyfriend David (Jerry Strickler), who’s working on the production, discover a copy of a forbidden occult book. No, not the Necronomicon – this was before Sam Raimi had the bright idea of copying Lovecraft’s homework.
Instead, it’s The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which David starts reading aloud because apparently nobody in horror films has ever encountered an ancient book full of potentially dangerous supernatural knowledge and thought, “You know what? Probably best to leave that alone.” Things get decidedly weird when Anne spots Edgar climbing into a coffin in the cemetery outside, and Gayle’s cat subsequently disappears and turns up dead. Eric suspects the caretaker is responsible, but Edgar denies it, leaving the crew to carry on filming in a house that seems increasingly keen to make their lives miserable.
The trouble really begins on the final day of shooting, when David reads an incantation from the book while Gayle performs a scene involving the resurrection of the dead. The combination appears to do considerably more than improve the authenticity of their little production, as a zombie emerges from a grave and strangles Edgar in the cemetery. Before long, the creature makes its way into the mansion and starts picking off the crew, while Gayle grabs a gun and accidentally shoots Christopher after mistaking him for the approaching monster. She subsequently dies by hanging, and Anne discovers the body before collapsing in horror.
Things get even stranger when Eric and David return to the cemetery to film some additional footage and discover Edgar’s corpse beside an empty grave. During a scuffle, David falls into it, revealing a gravestone bearing the name David Beal, dated 1847–1896. Yes, the bloke Eric has been working with is apparently a long-dead member of the family, and he promptly rises from the grave as a zombie himself. Eric flees back to the mansion, only to discover the rest of the crew dead and his precious film reels destroyed. In a final act of cinematic criticism, the zombie hurls a film camera down the staircase onto Eric’s head, killing him before carrying Anne’s body back to the cemetery and disappearing into the grave. It’s a fairly spectacular way for a film production to go wrong, although I suspect the insurance paperwork would be an absolute fucking nightmare.
The whole movie-within-a-movie idea is actually pretty entertaining. We’re watching a cast and crew make a cheap occult horror film while simultaneously being surrounded by the real history they’re attempting to recreate, and there’s something amusing about how determined Eric is to get his fucking movie finished regardless of what’s happening around him. Faith Domergue gives the film some old-school Hollywood gravitas, while John Carradine is exactly what you’d hope for as the creepy caretaker. Carradine spends much of the film wandering around the mansion looking like he was born approximately 300 years old, and frankly I could watch him do that all day.
The problem is that The House of Seven Corpses is very slow. We’re nearly an hour into a 90-minute film before things properly kick off, with most of the runtime devoted to the production itself, the history of the house and various members of the cast behaving like complete dickheads. I don’t necessarily dislike that approach because there’s some charm to the slow-burn atmosphere, but if you’re expecting a film called The House of Seven Corpses to quickly offer up corpses, you might find yourself checking the fucking clock.
Thankfully, the mansion itself does a lot of the heavy lifting. Its dark corridors, creaky staircases and surrounding cemetery give the film a suitably gloomy atmosphere, and the relatively confined setting helps create a sense of isolation. The low budget works in its favour here, lending everything a slightly grubby quality that feels appropriate for an old occult horror film. It’s not especially frightening, but there are moments when the house genuinely feels like somewhere you shouldn’t be spending the night.
The final act is where the film finally gets its shit together. The zombie attacks, the increasingly bizarre revelations about David and the deaths of the remaining cast and crew provide a welcome burst of activity after all that wandering around and talking. There’s something particularly amusing about the way Eric’s precious film production collapses around him, culminating in his death by falling camera. It’s hardly sophisticated horror, but there’s a certain poetic justice in a director being killed by the very equipment he’s spent the entire film worrying about.
The House of Seven Corpses isn’t a particularly good horror film, and I can understand why its slow pacing will put some viewers off. But there’s something about these forgotten little horror curiosities that I really enjoy, especially when they have an unusual premise, a bit of atmosphere and enough weirdness to keep things interesting. The film takes far too long to get to the good stuff, but the old mansion, the occult nonsense, Carradine’s wonderfully creepy presence and the gloriously daft finale make it worth digging up.
It’s a haunted-house movie, a zombie movie and a film about making a shitty horror movie all rolled into one. It might take the scenic route to get there, but at least it eventually delivers the fucking corpses.
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