In short: This House Possessed (1981)

After having some kind of breakdown on stage, singer (he has a spiel about not being a rock singer, but no pop singer either that is nearly as painful as his music going on) Gary Straihorn (Parker Stevenson) has a longer guest spot in a hospital. He’s hitting it off, to put it mildly, with intensely cute nurse Sheila Moore (Lisa Eilbacher). So much so that he hires her as is live-in nurse for further convalescence and romance (his infatuation is reciprocated, don’t you worry). Because they both like one of the houses he is looking to rent, he just buys the place right off. It’s an interesting house, to say the least, tricked out with all the proto smart home devices the early 80s can provide.

It also turns out to be haunted; as a matter of fact, long before Sheila and Gary move in, it has already watched them on its security monitors, clearly looking forward to their stay.

The couple’s medical ethics breaking romance does run a bit roughly: he’s about as sensitive as a rock, and she is clearly haunted by something in her past she is not sharing. The appearance of some model who really wants to return into Gary’s pants doesn’t help there, nor does the increasingly temperamental haunting that uses much lesser technology to much better (and more murderous) effect than today’s AI assistants. Why, does it all have something to do with Sheila’s past?

William Wiard’s This House Possessed is another fine entry into the history of US TV horror movies. It brings a comparatively original premise – there’s still really little done with modern haunted houses on screen today – to which it applies quite a bit of, often slightly goofy, imagination, and hits on a couple of really fine horror sequences.

The climax is a fantastic example of how to do something that feels big on a modest budget, and the way David Levinson integrates the characters with the haunting is very effective even if you see some of what’s going on between Sheila and the house coming a mile away. Plus, how many films do you know about a love triangle between man, woman, and house?

Much of this is of course also cheesy as heck. The state of the art fantasy version of 80s technology, Straihorn’s horrifying music and some choice timely fashion do really turn this into a bit of a time capsule that can ever so slightly distract from this actually being a horror film. Until we get to the next surprisingly imaginative moment of technological haunting, that is. Wiard doesn’t consciously play things camp, instead taking the romance, the haunting, and (Cthulhu help us) even the music very seriously indeed, which is one of the main reasons any of this works as well as it actually does.