Eric Hartman (John Ireland) is a director of low budget horror movies. For his latest project he is doing a movie on the Beal House and is using the actual mansion for his location. The mansion is notorious for being the site where seven separate horrible deaths occurred. Some were murders and some are believed to be suicides. As Hartman is rehearsing a scene, with leading lady Gayle Dorian (Faith Domergue), he is interrupted by the caretaker of the house, Edgar Price (John Carradine).
Price tells him that his script is inaccurate. He takes everyone on a tour of the home and explains six of the deaths experienced by various members of the Beal family over the years. One fell off a balcony, one drowned in the bath, one was shot, one was hung, one was stabbed and one bludgeoned with a candle holder.
Anne (Carole Wells) and David (Jerry Strickler) find several occult books. One of them is The Tibetan Book of the Dead. David thinks it would be a good idea to use some of the lines in the book for the movie. Hartman agrees. During the final scene of the movie within a movie Gayle ends up reading a section of the Book of the Dead that actually reanimates a corpse in the estate’s graveyard. The grave is of an eighth person and has no headstone. As the film crew begins packing up their gear, the reanimated corpse begins killing.
“The House of Seven Corpses” was released in 1973 and was directed by Paul Harrison. It is an American horror movie.
After the opening credits things don’t get going again until the last twenty minutes or so of the movie. In between is a lot of boring whining by entitled people. When we do get murders there are a lot of them but this whole section of the movie is very confusing.
There may be some spoilers here but that can’t be helped since the entire last part of the movie is ambiguous. Price explains the murders based on the portraits of the ancestors on the walls. There are only six murders explained. There are two frames that are empty. One is for Mrs. Beal. We never learn what happened to her. The 8th frame was for someone Mrs. Beal was supposed to have put in but never did. We never learn who that person was supposed to be. The Caretaker tells everyone that there are 8 graves in the family cemetery instead of 7. We never really learn who is in the 8th grave, but Hartman finds a stone that says David Beal on it. Is David a long-lost Beal?
There seem to be two zombies shuffling around instead of one. One of them came out of the 8th grave. The other one ended up being David somehow. He fell into the grave. When he came out, he was a zombie. Was he always a zombie? And by the way, who actually killed Gayle’s pet cat? I can only assume that it was David. And who was the other zombie? Was it just David and the editing was choppy so it looked like two zombies?
The movie ended up being a little frustrating. Sure, there were a lot of deaths and if you add in the original ones from the credits they are varied. The acting was competent, and the film was done well. It should have been a fun horror movie. it’s just that the ending had more questions than answers.
The best part of the movie was the house itself. The house used in the film was the Governor’s Mansion in Salt Lake City, Utah.