Don't Go In The House

 Don’t Go In The House (1979)

Dir. Joseph Ellison

Written by Joseph Ellison, Ellen Hammill, Joseph Masefield

Starring Dan Grimaldi, Colin McInness, Robert Osth

DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE is a specimen of horror film from a peculiar sub-subgenre: slasher films which take place from the perspective of the killer, rather than the victims. Such films are rare, but not unheard of; a few examples would be PEEPING TOM, HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON,  ANGST, AMERICAN PSYCHO, MANIAC (1980) and its remake MANIAC (2012), the latter of which goes so far as to not just exlusively adopt the killer’s perspective, but his point-of-view. This distinct narrative arrangement slightly alters the usual stalk-and-chase dynamic of the slasher movie, substituting a strange and queasy mix of anxiety at watching the killer stalk unsuspecting victims (almost always women) and, paradoxically, simmering suspense that he’ll be caught. Because after all, no matter how repellent, standard cinema rules apply: if you give us an interesting protagonist, we agree to forgo our usual sense of morality and emotionally invest in their well-being, at least on some level.

 We can comfortably trace this conceit back at least back to to 1931’s M, in which significant portions of the film (though by no means all) place Peter Lorre’s depraved child killer at the narrative center, and dare the audience to feel sympathy for him. But for my money, the most remarkable example is the famous sequence in Hitchcock’s boundary-pushing FRENZY where the execrable killer must try to recover some damning evidence from the corpse of a victim he has stashed on the back of a potato truck. This killer has absolutely zero redeeming qualities, even by the standards of movie serial killers, and yet Hitchcock sadistically places the onus of the suspense on whether or not he’ll be able to beat the odds and escape (just to leave no doubt whatsoever that this was his intent, the fiendish Hitch places that sequence in context with the the framed main character’s attempt to do basically the same thing).

Turning our sympathies (or at least our conditional sympathies) towards the villain’s perspective can be accomplished even with openly despicable, unrelatable monsters like the one in FRENZY or HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON. But the strength of DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE goes a little beyond the amoral manipulation of audience expectation. In fact, it employs --indeed, rests the focus of its suspense on-- a surprising sensitivity to its... shall we say protagonist?, Donald “Donny” Kohler (Dan Grimaldi, the long-running minor character Patsy Parisi on The Sopranos). As is traditional for cinematic slashers going back to Norman Bates, Donny’s problems originate with his mother. Unlike most cinematic slashers, it’s not that he saw her have sex with a sailor, it’s that she was an ultra-religious fruitcake who reacted to the departure of Donny’s father by exerting total control over her son, dictating every aspect of his life and horrifically abusing him for the slightest infraction by forcing him to hold his arms over a hot stove (see also: ED GEIN and DERANGED). So we have a certain sympathy for his eccentricities as an adult, which we first notice in the opening scene at his job at the fire factory, when he unhelpfully stands by and watches with a worrisome psychotic expression as a co-worker explode into flames.

Already not exactly a picture of robust mental health, Donny really goes off the rails when his mother, to whom he’s devoted apparently every waking moment of his entire life, up and dies one day. His reaction, predictably, is to go on a killing spree. Less predictably, the details of that killing spree entail him constructing a steel-plated fireproof torture room in his dilapidated family mansion, luring innocent women there, stripping them naked, tying them up, suiting up in a custom-made heat-resistant murder ensemble, and torching them with a flamethrower. And then, more predictably, recovering their heat-mummified charred corpses and dressing them up in his mother’s old clothes and seating them in an increasingly crowded upstairs sewing room.

            OK, so maybe not the best possible method of working through psychological trauma (although it’s better than the one other method he tries, which is going to his childhood priest and confessing the whole thing, only to have the amiable clergyman tell him to chill out and stop living in the past so much. Yeah, real helpful there, padre). I do not approve of burning women alive (currently more mixed on men, but still overall bearish) or retaining mummified corpses, but it’s still pretty difficult to completely hate Donny, simply because Grimaldi performs these actions with such a sense of miserable hopelessness that you get the sense he might actually be having a worse night than his victims. Much like the title characters in 2012’s MANIAC, poor Donny knows this is not a sustainable or productive lifestyle, and makes a real honest, good-faith effort to try and stick to sanity. But like most people attempting to make a serious change in their behavior, there is some, ah, backsliding.

            Still, it’s Grimaldi’s tortured, hangdog performance which anchors the movie and makes it feel unique and even somewhat affecting. Part of that is his simple appearance; traditionally, this sort of psycho killer tends to be frail, perhaps somewhat effete (again, we likely have Norman Bates to thank for that), a recluse, an outsider. But Grimaldi is the very picture of blue-collar schlubbiness, with a simple, unaffected sort of beaten-down masculinity to him (he looks more like Dustin Hoffman than Anthony Perkins). He has no apparent trouble holding down his physically taxing industrial job, he’s not dirty or disheveled or incoherent; his co-workers think he’s a little weird, but certainly not abnormally so. He’s no one anyone would suspect of being a homicidal lunatic, which puts the theoretical prospect of some kind of normal life tantalizingly within sight, but cruelly out of reach. He can fool the world into thinking he’s relatively normal, but he can never escape from himself. He’s lived an absolutely dismal life through no real fault of his own, and now that he’s finally free of his tormentor, he’s still not really free. He hears voices (not his mother) urging him to purify with fire, for one thing, which is extremely unhelpful given the circumstances. But more than that, everything about his bearing and manner suggests how completely hopeless he is about his life. He’s in the horrifying position of being functional enough to be completely aware of how utterly broken he is, but powerless to do anything about it.

That’s the real horror of being stuck with Donny; he’s just as horrified by his behavior as we are. But he can’t help himself. While most of us don’t have his particular vice, I think his situation is one that almost everyone can relate to. There’s things we all hate about ourselves, weaknesses we always seem to be fighting a losing battle with. Everyone knows the horror of watching ourselves careen towards disaster and somehow being unable to stop. Mostly it’s little things: god damn it, why am I smoking this cigarette, I’m trying to quit; why am I still scrolling through facebook when it’s 2 AM and I have work tomorrow? But it can be big things too: Why am I going through with this this marriage, I know I’m not really in love?; Why do I keep showing up every day at this soul-sucking job I swore I quit?; why am I having this last drink when I know it’s just going to lead to me hooking up with that guy at the office and creating a huge mess? These problems are all predictable, the consequences inevitable, and you know it even as you’re in the middle of making the mistake. A part of you is screaming for you to stop, but some other part of the brain is sitting at the steering wheel, some part that doesn’t respond to rationality, doesn’t respond to threats or shame or begging. And so you watch yourself in horror as you go through with it, watch as your own body and mind betray you and refuse to heed your pleading for sanity. It’s that kind of slow-moving, inevitable train wreck which provides the most potent horror here, though the corpse-collecting and flamethrowing help considerably to find focus for that horror.

Still, for my money the best sequence in the film isn’t about murder at all, it’s about Donny’s desperate, doomed struggle to not murder. A work buddy (Robert Carnegie, credited here as Robert Osth, roles on Knight Rider and Street Hawk) invites him out to the disco for a double-date, and he knows this can only end badly, but it’s clear he also sees it as his one last shot at being a functional human. If he can just maintain, if he can pull this off and be normal for just one night, maybe there’s hope for him. With that much riding on the outcome of his big disco debut, the movie pauses a little to consider the details. This leads to an odd, awkwardly sweet scene where he goes to buy a proper suit for the occasion from a very fashion-conscious clerk (who has some overtly homosexual characteristics which the movie presents in a impressively non-judgmental way). The clerk first seems annoyed by his complete ignorance about what he's looking for, but then suddenly seems to take pity on him, and commits himself to the task of making Donny look sharp with something resembling real kindness.

On the surface, this is a completely extraneous scene; we don’t need to know how he got his suit, no one would ever wonder about that. But both actors do such top-tier character work that they make it seem like the crux of the whole movie. David McComb (no other credits) effortlessly takes his nothing salesman role through a complete character arc in a single scene, and really, how could he not when Grimaldi is so good? Without speaking a single line of dialogue of any real import, he creates a complex, tangled portrait of confused acquiescence, simmering excitement, and abject terror, all buried deep under his mask of pliant schlubbiness, but never entirely hidden. It’s a remarkable bit of acting, and it perfectly establishes the stakes for this transitional moment for the character in a barely perceptible, but enormously effective, way.

Needless to say, this is not going to end well, but the cruelest irony is that this would be the perfect setup to humiliate Donny by sending him to his big date with some kind of ridiculous getup, or having his date spitefully reject him. But that doesn’t happen; his fashion consultant steers him true, and his date turns out to be really nice, makes an earnest effort to help him come out of his shell and relax. It’s all going so well, until it suddenly it’s not. Just as he allows himself a glimmer of hope, it’s ripped away.

The finale, which is far too good to spoil, has plenty of excellent horror beats of a somewhat more conventional variety. But lots of movies have good horror beats; it’s a somewhat rarer movie that has a clothes-shopping scene that really sticks with you. Sensitive performances and a genuine investment in drama are rarely things which meaningfully improve a horror movie; mostly, I suppose, because most horror films are centered on outside dangers, rather than the more intimate horrors which bubble up from human drama. DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE is a fine example of a film which successfully plumbs both. And remarkably, these two strengths work not in parallel with each other, but in tandem. Nowadays, you see something of a trend towards horror movies which place a high priority on believable acting and human drama, but often those aspects of the film are only tangentially (at best) related to the real horror (see, for example, the lamentable DARK WAS THE NIGHT, a gloomy tale of loss and grief… until at the end they fight a killer lizard-man). But not so here; our understanding of Donny’s psychological state is absolutely crucial to the impact of the more traditional horror elements, and, conversely, the more visceral horror elements help put a palpable sense of fear into the nebulous anxiety of the psychological horror.

This role should have brought Grimaldi a lengthy and robust career, but instead it seems like he mostly ended up in smaller supporting roles (“Con Man Ed” in CROOKLYN, “Hot Dog Vendor” in NORTH). His wikipedia page says he’s now a professor in the department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, though obviously he still acts, having a role in a short film on IMDB as recently as 2017. Director Joseph Ellison would direct only one other movie, 1986’s little-seen rock-and-roll drama JOEY (likewise his co-writer Ellen Hammill, though third co-writer Joe Masefiled would go on to be a sound editor on EVIL DEAD [!] and a handful of other films). It’s a shame we didn’t get to see more from this team, but at least they can claim one really genuinely unique, thoughtful and sensitive genre movie which can also hold its own on the whammy. That’s more than some directors with dozens of finished films can boast.

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TAGLINE	If you do, then don’t say we didn’t warn you! True, but unfortunately I don’t think the poor ladies who get torched in there were privy to the movie’s title, so this seems a little victim-blaming.
TITLE ACCURACY	Yeah, definitely shouldn’t go in there.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None, which is weird, since the ending even sets up a possible next installment.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	Yes, but not in a context you’re going to enjoy
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Obviously there’s some kind of sexual angle here, and the freudian implications are quite staggering. But as far as the text of the movie goes, he just strips ‘em and burns ‘em.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None… or is there? We assume that the voices Donny hears are just in his head, but the ending possibly suggests otherwise.
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	Most certainly
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None.
VOYEURISM?	Not really.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Hey, it’s right there in the title!