Watch The House of Seven Corpses For Free

Instant Favorite.

Expected more

Beautiful, moving film.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

If you're looking for an old-fashioned horror film set in a spooky-looking mansion, then you might want to have a look at THE HOUSE OF SEVEN CORPSES, an interesting one-of-a-kind film with a nice spooky atmosphere to sustain interest despite the fact that little actually happens during the film. All of the action and murder takes place in the opening and closing scenes, with the middle parts giving us time to get to know the characters before they get gruesomely dispatched.The main problem with this film is the muddled conclusion. One character turns out to be a reincarnation of the original murderer and promptly jumps back into the grave to turn into a mouldering zombie! What?!?! Excuse me but I didn't really have a clue as to what was going on with the two zombies at the end of the film. Things are also a bit dark but these help to work some atmosphere into some nicely spooky shots of zombies stumbling through the woods and up ancient staircases, quietly shuddery scenes which will send chills down your spine.Some gore wouldn't have gone amiss but sadly the only blood in the film is of the fake variety. Thankfully a good cast help to make up for these failures. Firstly there's a great turn from John Ireland as the hard, ruthless director of the film who doesn't bat an eyelid when he finds the cameraman murdered, only to have a fit when he finds his beloved film destroyed! A spooky John Carradine lurks around as a wizened caretaker, this was in the days when Carradine was still able to act. I loved the bickering and squabbling between the two ageing movie stars, which comes across as very believable.There's a nice spooky score to get your pulse going too. I enjoyed this slow-moving yet gripping film, which stays interesting due to the use of the film-within-a-film, a plot device I never tire of. It's really interesting to watch how the director manages his crew and stars, and you can't help but wonder how close to the truth the portrayal really is. Come to think of it, without the horror aspects this might have worked better...

I have to say, I'm surprised The House of the Seven Corpses is considered such a rotten apple. I found much to my personal liking. I like how it has a foot in the modern (as of '73, that is) and the Gothic (the Old Dark House films; those "sinister houses with a dark history). I also liked the "film within a film" storyline. John Ireland is a force to be reckoned with. I wonder if his demanding, impatient, fiery low budget film director was based on someone (or a number of) he had worked with in the past. He is really one of the major reasons I thought House was so much fun to watch. But, man alive, does Ireland's Eric Hartman abuse his fading star, Gayle Dorian (Faith Domergue of This Island Earth and It Came from Beneath the Sea). Sure, Gayle can be a bit of a diva, using her diminishing clout (once a star, now reduced to B-pictures) with expectations of star treatment that no longer exists. Hartman can be harsh to everyone on set. Especially his actors. He wants them ready and on set, make-up in place, the slate ready, and the camera in position. Time is important to him. He wants the film done as soon as possible. So Gayle's concerns, or anyone else's for that matter, mean little to him. It is all about his finished product, how he sees each scene, and that his cast come prepared and ready to perform with little wasted film, effort, or time. His rigorous approach to handling actors is certainly well established throughout the production of the cheap B-movie Eric wishes to see in the can without much delay. Gayle isn't really the kind of actress who fits in the mold of Eric's style of rushed direction. She would prefer that Eric made sure she looked good on camera and that her performance/character was superior to all else. I kind of look at her as a sort of Joan Crawford, but Eric is not William Castle…no sir, far from it. The setting of Eric's picture is an authentic house of horrors where members who lived there died under various ugly circumstances. The opening credits (I thought were a grabber) show each family member dying in disturbing fashion, inside the house. So the house itself has bad mojo. It is the perfect place to exploit for an old fashioned chiller in the Gothic vein. However, when a "Tibetan Book of the Dead" is found, the perfect prop to also exploit in his film (even read from by a member of the cast), it calls forth an undead member who once lived at the house of their shoot, rising from his grave (oh, and he won't be the only one…), and crashing the "set" after the film is about over (this is their very last night in the house), the cast and crew not anticipating a murderous zombie (why would they?). John Carradine pops up as a caretaker with plenty of knowledge in the history of the house, balking at Eric's handling of the subject matter as it pertains to their current location. John's Edgar Price even disrupts the shooting of a certain scene and is a bit of a nuisance to Eric (intrusive where he should stay out of the way, but Edgar simply doesn't like that Eric takes the house's history so lightly). I think perhaps the problem is that the horror doesn't come until late in the film, with a good breadth of the running time devoted to the machinations behind low budget filmmaking in regards to a tyrant director and the cast/crew who must endure this harsh, taxing, exhausting taskmaster. The house has that old atmospheric charm almost a necessity and requirement in films such as this. We spend a lot of time with members of the cast and crew behind and in front of the camera. That might be considered tedious and unexciting. I liked this all, though. The zombie might be considered similar to those you'd see in Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972), but director Harrison doesn't dwell on his features that much. You do get the hand bursting from its grave, with Carradine getting strangled in the process. The title of this film might seem to describe those who died in the house previous to the shoot, but this could also be seen as foreshadowing as well.

***SPOILERS*** Making a low budget horror movie at the haunted Beal House director Eric Hartman,John Ireland,is having trouble with the script until one of his assistants David, Jerry Strickland, find a book in the Beal family library "The Tibetan book of the Dead". Inspired by the "Book of the Dead's" contents Hartman starts filming feeling it will give him the inspiration to make his somewhat B or third string like horror movie into an all time cinematic classic. What in fact the new script did was bring back the ghost from the past, the Beal family, to recreate the terrible situations that lead to the deaths that they suffered in the house to Hartman and his cast and crew!We already see what happened to the Beals at the very beginning of the movie and it wasn't pretty! It's as Hartman starts to direct his classic strange things begin to happen that's not exactly in the script. Like the star of the film former Hollywood glamor queen now washed up second rate actress Gayle Dorla's, Faith Domergue, pet cat Cleon disappearing.Cleon was later found in pieces on the lawn as Gayle was being filmed in a scene of hers in the movie. It's the creepy house caretaker Edger Price, a word play with the names Edger Allan Poe & Vincent Price, played by John Carradine who's on to what's really going on in the house. But in fear for his life Price keeps it secret. That in the fear that he may well end up becoming one of the house's future victims!****SPOILERS**** Watching the film you don't exactly know what's happening on the screen. Are the events real or make believe or acting on the film crews part. That's until the very end when it becomes very apparent that the past horrors of the real Beal House and family were being duplicated and are the real McCoy not just part of Hartman's movie. Careaker Price who did everything to prevent the carnage from happening became the house first victim! After that everything that we've seen at the beginning of the movie,the Bael family murders, happens to director Hartman and his crew of actors and stage hands. What rattled Hartman more then anything else, even the deaths of his cast and crew, was that he found the film of his masterpiece movie had been exposed and now completely worthless! With his life work now slated for the trash can all Hartman could do is wait for the inevitable to happen. That's with a heavy some 100 pound movie camera unit dropped from the balcony of the Bael House on his head by this Ghoul Man, Wills Boad, who was conjured up by the "Book of the Dead". And with that finally putting the by now emotionally and mentally destroyed Eric Hartman out of his misery!

John Carradine, John Ireland, and Faith Domergue who as players all saw better days in better films got together for this Grade G horror film about life imitating art in a mysterious mansion.For Carradine it was in those last two decades of his career that he appeared in anything on the theory it was better to keep working no matter what you did and get those paychecks coming in. With that magnificent sonorous voice of his, Carradine was always in great demand for horror pictures and the man did not discriminate in the least in what he appeared in.He plays the caretaker of an old Gothic mansion who movie director John Ireland has rented for his latest low budget slasher film. It's even got a graveyard, but with a missing occupant. Faith Domergue is Ireland's aging star and Carole Wells is the young ingenue.In the last twenty minutes or so most of the cast winds up dead that aren't dead already. The script is so incoherent I'm still trying to figure out the point. I won't waste any more gray matter on it.