Project House Rewatch: Introduction

My memories of the House films are vague, to say the least. As a kid, I watched a lot of horror. We’re talking the late eighties here. We had a VHS player, and a woman would drive her van down the street, and we’d go out to see her. She’d pull out trays of films, and we could rent pretty much what we liked. They may have had age ratings on, but it was my mum’s account, and she was over 18, so that’s all that mattered!

What did we have to go one when we chose a film? Well, we were given a list of the films available, which were ordered by genre, so we had an idea of what horror films they had. Otherwise, we were judging by the cover, or from trailers.

If you like horror though, that’s a pretty enticing cover.

Now I don’t know if they were the distributors for this film series, but I seem to remember if it was an Entertainment in Video title, it had a bunch of cool trailers.

I’m not sure if we rented this film because we’d seen the trailer, or if we liked the cover. Maybe, something more primal appealed to us. Hey, this film’s called House. We live in a house! That’s totally relatable.

As far as I remember, we only saw House and House 2: The Second Story. This is the sum total of what I remember of the House films.

A man moves into a house. Weird things happen. There’s a jump scare with a cat and a dustbin. There man be a ghostly/skeletal marine. His name might be Ben. Ben is also my name so it’s quite possible my brother called the marine Ben because he looked like me. I grew up being told that lots of hideous things looked like me.

The second film, I remember even less of. I believe it has an Indigenous American character, who may or may not be a ghost.

Right, let’s watch the trailer to the first film:

Okay, the house itself looks familiar, but it’s a pretty archetypal American spooky house 101, isn’t it?

I recognise him though. Not him as an actor, but him, the guy from House.

We probably referred to him as House whenever we spoke about him as if it was his name.

Lots of monsters. I’m looking forward to checking out the effects. I don’t remember being scared by House, but I remember enjoying it.

The old lady with the noose around her neck seemed to bring back a memory, but only of that exact thing.

I think I caught a glimpse of the marine. I may not entirely be confusing this film with Stan Ridgway’s 1986 hit, Camouflage. It was about an awfully big marine.

Check out my thoughts on House here.

And here’s what I thought of House 2: The Second Story.

House 3 – The Horror Show didn’t fit in at all. Find out why you don’t cast Lance Henriksen if you want a wacky horror comedy.

And finally, my thoughts on the film that brought all this to a close, House 4: The Repossession.