The film is often dismissed as a classless key party gloss on The Haunting, but there's quite a bit going on here. For one thing it's one of the saddest films I've ever seen. Sad at how inescapable the past is, sad at how we often hurt the worst the ones who love us the most, and sad at how we would not be quite so helpless in the face of evil if we would actually work together on occasion. The melancholy gives the pulp a strange dignity, and the whole affair is of a kind with that breed of seventies horror. The kind that feels cheap or forgettable on first pass, but somehow settles into your skin, like dust from an old house, leaving you troubled well into the night... Happy Halloween everybody.
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