The House That Dripped Blood was a 1971 British horror anthology film, one of many such releases from Amicus during the period. It’s big selling points were the fact its various segments were adaptations of Robert Bloch tales and its cast included an all-star lineup featuring not only Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, but also the always-welcome Nyree Dawn Porter, Denholm Elliott and Jon Pertwee (pushing maximum swankiness, even relative to his turn as the Third Doctor).
But the reason I remember it was its use as a plot point in one of the multitude of educational “critical discussion” series cranked out by PBS during the first half of the 1970s. Sporting names such as Thinkabout and Inside Out and Self Incorporated, they were fifteen-minute little morality plays about the “challenges facing the youth of today” and typically ended on an ambiguous note or outright cliffhanger engineered to foster discussion.
Which I’m sure made sense in a classroom environment, but folks in my age bracket tended to encounter these shows years after the fact as filler squeezed into the “TV in the classroom” blocks some PBS stations would run during school hours, but were mostly stumbled across when you were flipping channels while home sick and bored shitless.
So where does The House That Dripped Blood figure into all this?
As a forbidden movie playing at the local dollar theater which — along with a heavy dose of peer pressure — induced some wavering young soul to — GASP — LIE TO HIS PARENTS in order to sneak in a see it.
Yeah.
Y’see, the problem with these instructional reels, as well meaning as they were, tended to either glorify the various transgressions depicted or failed to understand how the target audience viewed their world. Swapping out the laughably hardcore moralizing of older mental hygiene productions for a more contemporary “no judgments here, maaaaaan” approach could not change the fact that the Kids are gonna get up to shit because that’s what the Kids do.
Lie to your parents to sneak into a horror movie with your best buds? Sounds like a grand plan, especially if you’re 12.
There was an episode of Self Incorporated where a prim teen from the country goes to spend a few weeks with her slick city cousin, who initiates her into the world of smoking, drinking and running from the cops when their kegger in the woods gets raided. The points it was trying to make were about setting what would become known as “boundaries” and resisting peer pressure, but my takeaway even at the tender age of 11 was that by the end of the vacation, Miss Prim would be functionally identical to her cousin and bring the gospel of Boone’s Farm and Benson & Hedges back to the fellow members of the East Overshoe Junior High show choir.
It’s a cynical take but it was one borne out by witnessing the evolution of my slightly older relatives, my friends, and even myself…and then revisited upon me as the father of an adolescent four decades later.
(In high school, I joked that the French exchange program was sponsored by Big Tobacco and Big Booze, because they’d send a dozen lace-collared Francophile princesses to Paris for two weeks and get back a cosmopolitan crew of wine-loving party girls with a half-pack-a-day habit and the annoying tendency to prefix everything with “Well, in France they….”)
This probably wasn’t the line of thought the folks at Amicus were anticipating when they made The House That Dripped Blood, but such is the magic of cinema.
Recommended listening: No longer Human (League)
