Being Film #6 for Hooptober 2023
It’s not fair to classify Amicus as the poor man’s Hammer, but watching The House That Dripped Blood – a misleading title as there is nary a drop of blood to be found in this anthology film – but despite some game performances from Hammer regulars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (as well as Denholm Elliot and Ingrid Pitt) the film suffers from some unevenness in the stories, and a somewhat garish style that tries and fails to evoke the lush, gothic horror of its larger, more formidable movie house.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: A Scotland Yard detective is investigating the disappearance of a movie star, last known to have rented a shambling old house near the production of his latest horror film. His investigation leads him to learn the stories of the house’s previous tenants, all who came to grisly ends. It’s a nice frame for a quartet of creepy stories, where sinister murders abound and the supernatural rears its spooky head to claim its next victim…
I really wish I liked this more, rather than just feeling “meh” about the individual stories. Director Peter Duffell is capable, and he has a great collaborator in writer Robert Bloch, here adapting a number of stories from Weird Tales and other publications, but there’s a tonal problem here, where the stories waver between the pulp they should be and the more maudlin twist plots that plague the film as a whole. Supposedly the pair were working this to be more comedic, but the studio came down hard to make it more horrific and serious, and that definitely plagues the film – you can see in its final segment “The Cloak” how this could have been had Duffell and Bloch leaned into the humor.
If you’re looking for a ranking, just go backwards. “The Cloak” with Jon Pertwee as an aging horror actor who looking for inspiration for his latest vampire incarnation finds a cloak that actually gives him vampiric powers (and the appetite to match) is the clear winner, its hokey humor and effects really working to make its twists a fun illumination. Christopher Lee gets his just desserts in “Sweets to the Sweet” about a man looking for a tutor for his young daughter who exhibits certain evil tendencies. It’s not played for laughs, but it has moments of camp that work, and Lee leans on his history to give his stone-faced father a twinkle of fun even as his story comes to a fiery end.
From there it gets a little less impressive. “Waxwork” should work, particularly with Peter Cushing leading the story of a retired man who sees in a wax museum a woman whose face reminds him of a lost love, with dire consequences. Cushing is great, but he can’t hold a tired story that runs on fumes. Likewise “Method for Murder” which features Denholm Eliot as a man who needs to get away to the country with his wife to write his next horror story, about a man who laughs as he strangles women. Soon he starts to see his latest creation all around him, and when the murders start he can’t tell if he’s going insane or something more nefarious is going on. I know it sounds good, but as the longest story it drags, and Eliot doesn’t work like the other leads do, making the story more drab than anything else.
The House That Dripped Blood isn’t terrible by any stretch of the imagination. But it doesn’t hold a place for me when there’s so many other creepy fun stories to watch in the dark. But I can’t NOT recommend it, either – there are moments of fun and just seeing another Cushing/Lee performance might be worth it for a watch.
Cinema Dual 
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