This is my review for the horror movie The House by the Cemetery (1981).

If you can’t be bothered to read my entire perspective on the film, then scroll to the bottom of the page for a quick summary of my thoughts and my rating.

I watched The House by the Cemetery on Shudder. They had recently added it as one of their October releases, and when I saw that it was released in 1981, I thought perhaps it was an 80’s gem that I hadn’t ever seen or heard about. In many ways, it was.

The Opening Kill

The movie begins with a young couple being murdered in the House by the Cemetery. It seems they had broken into the uninhabited house to have sex, as we’re instantly gifted with the image of a topless young woman who is just beginning to button up her blouse. As the young woman is calling out to her partner, she finds him brutally murdered and then meets a similar end herself. A grotesque hand wielding a knife stabs through the top of her skull and the tip of the knife comes out her mouth. The gore is very well done. Not in a realistic way, but it’s that lovely cherry red, gushing, mushy, messy gore that is characteristic of practical effects and classic FX techniques. This opening scene is exactly what you want. It made you interested and showed you that the film knew what it was doing technically.

The Story

So after our opening couple is good and dead, we are then introduced to the family we will be following throughout the rest of the film. We have a husband who is some kind of professor/researcher/scientist, the wife who is just that, and their son, who is very, very blond. The husband is told by an older, white man who is in charge of him, that he is to finish the research of a colleague who had murdered his mistress and committed suicide. One of them mentions that it’s especially tragic because the dead colleague had been researching suicide. The research itself isn’t gone into very much. The husband agrees to continue the research up in MA, at the very house where the colleague and the mistress had been staying when they died.

Once the young family gets to the House by the Cemetery, the father begins to research what drove the last researcher to suicide instead of whatever he is supposed to be studying. The mother begins to grow frightened as the house is getting weirder and weirder, and the young boy is alternatively hanging out with his severe looking babysitter or the ghost girl who is telling him not to go back in the house.

The set up was kind of generic but ended up being interesting. But it seemed like there were elements of the story that were removed from the final film, or that were odd red herrings. Like people in the MA town kept mentioning having seen the husband in town before when he visited his colleague before his death. One person even mentions remembering seeing him and his daughter. Each time the husband awkwardly asserts that he’s never been to this town before and that he has a son. I thought that this meant that the husband was in on whatever drove the last Researcher crazy.

And when we meet the babysitter Anne, she and the husband exchange some long, knowing glances. And at one point, the husband comes down the stairs to see Anne trying to pry open the boards from the basement door, and he tells her to stop. He doesn’t ask any follow-up questions about what the hell she’s doing. It made me think that they were familiar with one another, perhaps having an affair and that maybe they both knew what was locked in the basement. Yet the father eventually opens the basement like he doesn’t know what’s down there and Anne doesn’t try to stop him.

And after the basement is opened and the husband goes down to investigate, he finds a ring that was dropped by opening kill girl and hides it from his wife, as though he knows whose ring it is. And even later, the entity of the house brutally kills a realtor, and Anne cleans up the trail of blood it’s left behind and doesn’t seem scared and doesn’t try to talk to anyone about it.

But none of these weird moments actually lead to anything. Eventually, Anne goes down into the basement, seemingly not aware of the danger, and is promptly killed. And eventually, the husband leaves his wife and son alone in the house, only to return once he’s figured out what the entity in the house is and returns to defend them just as they’re being attacked. So the story is odd in that it seems like people know more than they actually do, and I have no idea what the point of all that was. And there’s a ghost girl that helps the boy. Meh. At least the ghost girl makes sense.

The Characters

These people are planks of wood on screen. There are a lot of long stares and pregnant pauses between characters. Which if I could figure out the subtext could have been an interesting directing choice. But because there were so many misleading moments it was difficult to know what a character knew or didn’t and what they weren’t saying in those long pauses. So they ended up just being bland, and not behaving like believable human people. I was not sad to see them die.

The Scares

Even with the wooden characters, and some of the misleading plot elements, the scares (which relied heavily on violence and gore), were pretty good. The house itself where all this was set looked generally creepy and uncomfortable. And when the movie started to drag a bit, there would be a death scene, which were all a good length, and very well done. And at the end, the finale in the basement was frightening, violent, and gory. Beautiful blood is this movie’s saving grace.

The Final Act

The final act of the film takes place in the basement, which is the creepiest place in any house, even when there’s a cemetery in your backyard. In the final act, we have Anne going down into the basement, being beheaded, and her head bouncing down the stairs. We have the boy going down to find his babysitter and seeing glowing eyes in the darkness (this is a top five from my childhood fears list), and then banging at the locked basement door as the monster comes to get him.

Then the father shows up with the reveal, announcing that the monster is the scientist who originally built the house and who feeds off the living to keep his shuffling, decaying body alive. Then we have the whole family in the basement, and we finally get to see the ancient scientist monster, who looks horrible and scary.

The husband fights the monster with a knife and as he cuts into the monster’s flesh, maggots and all other manners of gross stuff come out of this thing. Father gets his throat ripped open, mother gets dragged down the stairs, and the monster comes for the boy. The ghost girl saves the boy at the very last moment and the movie ends with the ghosts leading the boy out of the house, leaving his bloody, brutally murdered parents in the basement.

The final act was really the best part of the whole movie. It was creepy, it was scary, and it was gross, violent and gory. At that point it didn’t really matter who these characters were, I just wanted to see them die. Luckily, the scary undead scientist cannibal monster was there to oblige.

Summary and Rating: A young family moves into an old Victorian mansion in Massachusetts so that the father can continue the research of a colleague who recently murdered his mistress and committed suicide. Once in the House by the Cemetery, they realize that what drove the former occupant mad, might still be in the house. This film moved slowly and softly, with some misleading story elements, but when it was loud, it was brutal with an excellent build towards violent murders with visually stunning gore effects. And the final reveal of the evil entity of the mansion was frightening and visually engaging.

Rating: 3.5/5