The Winchester Mystery House is a vast, sprawling Victorian in San Jose, California, built by Winchester Rifle heiress Sarah Winchester over thirty-eight years, with construction ending in 1922. She was personally convinced that the spirits—she was a medium—had instructed her to keep building the house until her death as penance for all the people killed by her husband’s famous firearm.
The place was partially destroyed by an earthquake but still stands today, offering eager tourists a glimpse of one woman’s monument to madness. ...
House of the Damned, directed by Maury Dexter and written by Harry Spaulding, gives us a similar California manse built by an equally eccentric old heiress, Priscilla Rochester (Georgia Schmidt)—albeit one confined to a mental institution after murdering her husband, if I remember correctly. (I like writing these without the unimpeachable wonders of Wikipedia or IMDb, although for correctly identifying actors they are indispensable.)
Shot in Cinemascope for maximum screenage, this lovely black-and-white thriller unfolds the short and sweet story of Scott Campbell (Ron Foster), an architect tasked with assessing the house of the crazy old Rochester dame, who is safely ensconced in a padded cell. The house, of course, is rumored to be haunted, and the caretaker who hands Campbell his set of thirteen keys to the fifty rooms (or was it the other way around?) duly comments on the fact. Campbell and his wife (Merry Anders), for strange reasons, are tasked with living in the old place, and that very night a bizarre hobbling figure—seen only as a silhouette—emerges and steals the cryptic keys. And what was that all about?
Everything proceeds swimmingly until the lawyer friend shows up, shortly after his ex-wife puts in an appearance and lounges by the pool a lot. I'm not sure what the hell these two were doing in the picture, but she doesn’t fare very well. Only a short while later, an expressionistic pair of eyes (belonging to actor Richard Kiel, of James Bond fame) with a hairstyle that might have made Conrad Veidt in Caligari envious comes lurking out of the darkness, in traditional Cat and the Canary fashion, to claim the screaming woman and shuffle back off into the dark as if this were the Rue Morgue. (Although nobody, as far as I could tell, got stuffed up a chimney.)
Later, we get an interesting vision of a headless woman seated in a chair. Now, when I was a wee tyke, round about the good year 1996 or thereabouts, I went to the Lollapalooza festival—this big alternative rock event that also featured bands that were mega-corporate arena-rock pop idols (not that there’s anything wrong with that, as pop music is a pleasurable seller of bourgeois fantasies that make capitalism, America, Chevrolet, and apple pie run counter to the aspirations of the international communards).
At that festival, I was gratified to catch a glimpse of a LIVING HEADLESS WOMAN, ensconced in a little booth. You walked up a few steps, looked through a small glass, and there she sat in a white robe, with limp, doughy arms placed by her sides. Unmoving, she could just as easily have been a wax dummy or mannequin—a Madame Tussauds figure that had been ritualistically decapitated by the Jack the Ripper statue next to her.
(Of course, all true fans of his work know that Jack was much more into the act of ritualistically and gleefully, presumably, disemboweling his streetwalking victims.)
The Headless Woman exhibit is a cheap carnival gag, an illusion—a blow-off for the marks and rubes shuffling through the dusty midway, hoping for a little escape from the doldrums of their depressing lives. A little “wow.”
It doesn’t belong in this picture. But then, this picture is a little like the month of March: it comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. ...
Or, put it another way, you remember that old poem by T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”? The one that ends, as regards the end of the world, “Not with a bang, but a whimper?”
You could say the same thing about this movie.
It starts off great, gets progressively more tedious, hackneyed, and slow-moving, offers a scene or two and an image that jumps out at you, and ends with a piffling fart of a conclusion—a total Scooby-Doo reveal that is a disappointing letdown. I won’t reveal the reveal but suffice it to say it’s an increasingly slow crawl toward the realization that in the House of the Damned, ain’t nobody home.
Excelsior!
HOUSE OF THE DAMNED (1963) | Psychological Retro Horror Movie | Full Classic Chiller [HD]
My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1 (Paperback)
My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1 (Ebook)
My book: Theater of the Worm: Essays on Poe, Lovecraft, Bierce, and the Machinery of Dread by Tom Baker
About the Creator
Tom Baker
Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com
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