The House By the Cemetery (1981)
HORROR-THON 2022 • HOUSE PARTY
7/10
DIRECTOR: Lucio Fulci
STARRING: Catriona MacColl, Paolo Malco, Ania Pieroni
RELEASED: 1981
RUNTIME: 1 hour, 26 minutes
WATCH ON: Shudder, AMC+, Tubi, Amazon, Apple TV
SCARE LEVEL: Medium, but the gore is high
LISTENING TO BOB: Yes. Always.
There’s a tombstone in the living room floor. A tombstone. In the floor. And this family still unpacks?
Dr. Norman Boyle moves his wife Lucy and their young son Bob from New York to a big old house outside Boston. He’s there to finish a dead colleague’s research. The house is literally next to a cemetery. The locals keep giving them looks.
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Before they move in, Bob sees a little girl named Mae in an old photo of the house. She starts warning him not to go. Nobody listens to Bob.
The basement door is boarded up for a reason. Something down there has been surviving for a very long time on whoever wanders too close. The babysitter, the real estate agent, and anyone else who goes poking around learn that the hard way.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
Children are always creepy, and let me tell you, a child named Bob is no exception. He’s a little boy with a blond bowl cut and a thousand-yard stare who keeps talking to a ghost girl. And Bob’s English dub is famously and astonishingly bad. It doesn’t sound like any child who has ever lived. Every time he speaks, any tension leaves the room.
The gore, on the other hand, is incredible and genuinely surprising. Fulci doesn’t cut away. Just when the scene is over, it goes even further.
The plot makes very little sense, which is normal for Italian horror of this era. It’s mostly vibes, fog, and blood, and I’m fine with that.
My rule for life now: if a child named Bob tells you not to go somewhere, you just freaking don’t.
FUN FACT FOR YOUR NEXT DINNER PARTY
One early VHS release of the film in America had several of the reels out of order, making the existing erratic storyline even more confusing.