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Don't Go in the House AKA The Burning (Blu-ray)
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Arrow Films Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (24th February 2022). |
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The Film
  Don’t Go in the House (Joseph Ellison, 1980)
After passively witnessing an accident involving an industrial incinerator, Donny (Dan Grimaldi) is criticised by his colleagues for his failure to take action to help his workmate. Returning home, his ego bruised, Donny finds his elderly mother (Ruth Dardick) dead. Liberated from his mother’s domineering influence, Donny remembers the abuse she inflicted on him as a child: flashbacks show Donny’s mother holding young Donny’s arms over the open flames of a stove as punishment for a minor misdemeanour. Fascinated with fire, Donny purchases a Second World War-era firefighter’s suit from a local vintage weapons store, and lines one of the rooms in the house with steel. This done, he begins to plot a series of murders. His first victim is Kathy Jordan (Johanna Brushay), who Donny picks after seeing her working alone in a florist late one evening. His second victim is a woman (Darcy Shean) who seeks Donny’s help after her car breaks down. Donny suspends these women in chains from a steel bar in his killing room, before setting them alight with a can of kerosene and an industrial flamethrower. Following each murder, he dresses the charred corpse in one of his mother’s dresses, keeping the dead women seated in armchairs in one of the upstairs rooms of the house. Donny’s work buddy Bobby (Robert Carnegie) reaches out to Donny, arranging a double date (with Bobby’s mistress) and offering to take Donny on a night out to a disco. However, this ends in disaster, and Donny is pursued back to the house, and is forced to come face to face with the consequences of his murderous actions.  Don’t Go in the House is one of only two feature films directed by Joseph Ellison. The other film Ellison directed was Joey in 1986. A teen drama about a boy and his relationship with his father, Joey stands in stark contrast to the bleak, disturbing Don’t Go in the House – though both films are arguably linked by their focus on dysfunctional families and absent, neglectful, or abusive parents.
Released amid a wave of post-Halloween (Carpenter, 1978) US ‘slasher’ films, Don’t Go in the House stood apart from that cycle. Though there is a ‘slasher’ element to the film, in terms of the film’s depiction of violence and its somewhat adherence to a ‘bodycount’ formula, Ellison’s film avoids the visceral ‘electrocardiogram’ thrills of most US slasher pictures, instead focusing on the psychological turmoil of its protagonist. Ellison has said that ‘When the film opened, you had Friday the 13th in the multiplexes on one screen and Don’t Go in the House on another. You had the kids screaming and hugging each other when watching Friday the 13th, but they weren’t screaming and hugging each another when watching Don’t Go in the House. They were sitting there in absolute horror. They were disturbed and upset. This was not a good date movie!’ (Ellison, in Edwards, 2017: 70-1). Don’t Go in the House was inspired by a treatment that Ellison read by a film editor, Joe Masefield. The treatment was titled The Burning Man and, inspired by this, Ellison collaborated with his future wife, Ellen Hammill, in writing the script. The film was budgeted at around $250,000, and Ellison and Hammill found a rundown Victorian mansion in the Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, that served as the location for Donny’s house. Dan Grimaldi was cast as Donny after Ellison saw the actor perform in an off-Broadway play, and was convinced to give Grimaldi the part by the manner in which the actor fitted the ‘blue collar’ milieu in which Donny is employed.  Along with the likes of William Lustig’s Maniac (1980), Don’t Go in the House was one of a number of horror films of the late-1970s and early-1980s that were heavily criticised for their presumed ‘anti-feminist’ slant. It’s absolutely undeniable that many of these films featured exploitative depictions of women in positions of terror, pain, and subjugation – along with such ‘ripped from the headlines’ pictures as Robert Hammer’s Don’t Answer the Phone (also 1980), with its narrative that riffed on the crimes of the Hillside Strangler(s). These films often drew criticism for their focus on the male perpetrators of such violence; these criticisms generally assumed, naively, that because audiences are encouraged to identify with a film’s protagonist on a narrative level, they must also accept or sympathise with the lead character’s prejudices and areas of ideological bias – as if the concept of dramatic irony is not applicable to cinema, and/or the depiction of protagonists whose behaviour is deeply problematic doesn’t have a long dramatic lineage. More directly, in terms of its content, Don’t Go in the House’s mixture of full-frontal female nudity and violence in the scene depicting Donny’s first murder, of Kathy Jordan (Johanna Brushay), is a cocktail that is intentionally difficult to swallow.
Nevertheless, it’s fair to say, to quote an old aphorism, that even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day, and many of these films offered searing, uncomfortable psychological portraits of their (invariably male) protagonists, hypothesising on the factors that lead men to commit such vicious acts of violence against women. (This is of course not to buy into the oft-repeated, equally harmful, myth that women are always ‘victims’ and are precluded from committing equally cruel acts of physical/psychological violence against their own sex, and sometimes against men too.) Here, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that Don’t Go in the House was co-written by Ellison’s wife, Ellen Hammill. Ellison has attempted to distance his film from its slasher contemporaries by highlighting how many slasher films feature female characters who are ‘punished’ for taking drugs or having casual sex, etc, whereas Donny’s female victims in Don’t Go in the House haven’t performed any such infractions: ‘they were nice people who would help you’, Ellison has reminded us, ‘Still they are burned alive’ (Ellison, in Edwards, op cit.: 72).  Like a number of other American horror movies (and a few European horror pictures, besides) of the 1970s and 1980s, Don’t Go in the House draws inspiration in particular from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and its depiction of how the male psyche can be damaged by toxic motherhood: in the diegetic present of Ellison’s film, the misogynistic fury of Donny is unleashed by memories of his mother’s cruel, spiteful treatment of him as a child. (‘Your all bitches! Selfish and vain!’, he rants at the corpses of his victims.) The film is peppered with flashbacks to Donny’s mother treating him viciously, both verbally and physically – including holding his forearms over the open burners of the stove as a punishment. (‘You’re a bad boy’, she rants, ‘You’re evil and must be punished. Your father let you do things like that but he’s gone now! I’ll burn the evil out of you’.) The final scene of Don’t Go in the House depicts a different young boy, Michael, being verbally abused by his mother, before she beats him furiously for not tidying his room. The ‘voices’ that have guided Donny’s acts of violence appear, telling the boy, ‘We’re here, Michael’. The implication is that the cycle of violence will continue, at least for as long as there are mothers (and/or fathers) who treat their children cruelly: spiteful treatment of children creates maladjusted adults. Donny’s father, we are told, turned to drink as a response to the mental cruelty of his wife (Donny’s mother), and he eventually left the family; this left Donny alone with his spiteful mother, who subsequently enacted her cruelty on the young Donny. ‘He used to protect me’, Donny tells the corpses of his victims, ‘When he left, I had no-one. She made every day of my life a nightmare’. As an interjection, I have to say that as someone who has worked in education for over 20 years, and whose wife has worked with primary school children for around 15 years, the pattern of abuse depicted in this film – with a child being left with an abusive parent, often (though not always) a mother figure, and the abuse of a child being facilitated by parental alienation, etc, is depressingly all too recognisable. Dismissing this trope within these films as a fantasy of malicious misogyny, as some critics have done, is extraordinarily naïve and disconnected from the reality of ‘toxic’ parenthood – which knows no gender. (Happily, Stephen Thrower deconstructs this all-too-prevalent idea in his commentary track for the extended cut of the film, on disc two of this release: Thrower says ‘it’s a weakness of some otherwise intelligent people that they find it hard to face the phenomenon of “bad” motherhood. Bearing in mind legitimate feminist concerns about the repression of women […] we still shouldn’t hesitate to look honestly at the phenomenon of the destructive mother’.)
The suggestion that the ‘voices’ which Donny hears, and which urge him to kill, may have a supernatural element, latching on to children who are vulnerable to their influence, is equally intriguing. By depicting the young Donny’s abuse at the hands of his mother, Don’t Go in the House invites us to sympathise with the killer, even though we may abhor his actions. The film’s real ‘monster’ is, arguably, Donny’s mother – though Ellison certainly doesn’t depict the adult Donny as blameless; Donny’s cruelty stands in stark contrast to the innocence of his victims. (To be fair, however, despite the manner in which Don’t Go in the House stands in many ways apart from the US slasher trend of the 1970s and 1980s, a significant number of contemporaneous slasher pictures invite their audience to sympathise with killers who have suffered abuse and other indignities.)  When Donny returns home from work and finds his mother dead, this causes him to remember the abuse he suffered at her hands. It’s clear that Donny’s mother acted as an agent of repression, and following his discovery of her death, Donny rampages through the house. He turns his record player up to full volume, uses one of the armchairs as a makeshift trampoline, and smokes a cigarette in the living room. However, he soon hears his mother’s voice telling him to stop: it’s apparent that Donny has internalised the controlling influence that, in life, she apparently held over him. Nevertheless, shortly after this Donny purchases the Second World War firefighter’s suit, and begins to plot his murders – though his mother’s controlling influence, against which it is clear that he is rebelling, continues to assert itself in the form of her disembodied voice or, in a couple of instances, her appearance as a ghoul that stalks the hallways of the house.
In contemporary discourse, Donny would perhaps be quickly labelled by the media as a product of ‘incel’ culture – his crimes bearing the hallmark of the misogynistic violence associated with that label. This would of course be to look through a populist 21st Century lens, which has a growing tendency to ascribe acts of violence to ideology rather than psychology. (The latter is perhaps too challenging for contemporary society to contemplate, hence the current emphasis, within the media at least, on violence as an outgrowth of its perpetrator’s presumed ideological leanings and online – or offline – ‘radicalisation’.) Labelling Donny as an ‘incel’ or similarly ideologically-motivated killer would all-too-conveniently sidestep the role mental illness plays in such violence, and the manner in which violence is often enacted because of deep-rooted psychological trauma. That said, being an exploitation film, Don’t Go in the House doesn’t offer a particularly complex engagement with this issue – though unlike contemporary media coverage of acts of violence, the film at least wears its reductive understanding of human motivations on its sleeve and does not pretend to offer either full explanations or answers.  Kathy, Donny’s first victim, is depicted in a memorably rounded manner by both the script and the actress, Johanna Brushay. (Remarkably, this seems to be Brushay’s only screen credit. The actress was a Playboy Bunny, the roommate of Ellen Hammill, and Hammill has said that Brushay was keen to be naked onscreen.) Donny accosts Kathy after waiting in his van outside the flower shop where she works. Leaving work late (because Donny has been in the shop after house, with the excuse of enquiring about a bouquet of flowers for his mother, who he tells Kathy is ill), Kathy heads to the bus stop but, seeing a gang of youths there, looks reticent. The outwardly quiet, mild-mannered Donny offers her a lift; Kathy hesitates, but accepts. Whilst Kathy is in his van, Donny suggests heading to his house to drop off the flowers, before driving Kathy to the bus depot. During the stop-off at Donny’s house, Donny accosts Kathy, knocking her unconscious. When she comes to, she discovers that she is naked and suspended by chains from a pivot point in the ceiling of the steel-lined room that Donny has purposely built for his ‘hobby’. Donny enters, wearing his flame-retardant suit and helmet with visor, and wielding an industrial flamethrower.
Ellison spends as much time encouraging the viewer to empathise with Kathy and her torment at the hands of Donny, as exploitatively depicting the character’s final agonies. The actress is fully nude, the nudity emphasising the character’s absolute sense of vulnerability; a bold decision, the nudity is sometimes claimed to have been an idea of the actress rather than the director. (The open matte video versions showcased even more nudity in this scene, something that has been the subject of much discussion regarding the film in online forums; the third disc in Arrow’s set contains an open-matte presentation of the film along with a description in the menu that obliquely highlights the ‘extra’ nudity in this presentation of the film.) The remarkably effective scene, showing Kathy’s body being consumed by fire, was achieved via the use of a 45-degree glass and two stages – one containing the actress, and the other a mannequin that was set alight; the camera captured both images, the overlapping of one with another resulting in a convincing depiction of Kathy’s demise at the hot end of Donny’s flamethrower. It’s a challenging sequence, inarguably the film’s most memorable, and the one that bore the brunt of the BBFC’s cutting – both for the film’s original UK cinema release, and for its later home video incarnations. (The other murders within the narrative are depicted elliptically, Ellison cutting from the moment Donny captures his victims to the aftermath of the killings.) The fact that it’s still worth talking about today, in the post-‘torture porn’ era, is unquestionably a testament to the effectiveness of Ellison’s approach in making Don’t Go in the House.  Donny’s manner of staging the corpses of his victims, dressing them in his mother’s clothes and seating them in armchairs in a room in which he berates them – using the sharp tones Donny learnt from his mother during his childhood to chastise them – is something which despite Ellison’s suggestions otherwise, would seem to allude to Psycho (and the case of Ed Gein that inspired Bloch to write his novel on which the film is based). It also invites comparison with Joe D’Amato’s Buio omega (Blue Holocaust/Beyond the Darkness), which like Don’t Go in the House was released in 1979 and is very much a European sibling to Ellison’s picture. D’Amato’s film focuses on a young, wealthy taxidermist (Kieran Canter) who is driven off the rails when his girlfriend (Cinzia Monreale) dies; using his skills in taxidermy to preserve his girlfriend, the young man embarks on a spree of murder. Both Buio omega and Don’t Go in the House offer a predominantly naturalistic approach to the depiction of their protagonists’ murderous activities; in the case of Don’t Go in the House, this culminates in a climactic sequence which abandons the film’s predominantly naturalistic style, and contains elements of the supernatural – the corpses of Donny’s victims coming back to life for their vengeance. This is captured in highly ambiguous terms: is this moment ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’? When the corpses come to life, their approach towards Donny is emphasised by the use of a low-angle and a fish-eye lens that distorts the image.
Fire has a long cultural association with the concept of purification, and this symbolism bubbles away within Don’t Go in the House – whether it is in the form of Donny’s mother’s promise to ‘burn the evil’ out of her young son, or Donny’s burning of his female victims (which seems to be a form of sublimation for sexual desire). As the film nears its final moments, Donny visits a Catholic priest and talks about the abuse he experienced at the hands of his mother. Donny tells the priest that his mother said ‘we are born evil. That evil must be burned away with the flame’. The priest tries to remind Donny that this concept of burning away evil is generally meant to be interpreted symbolically – but Donny shows the priest his forearms, which act as testament to Donny’s mother’s use of fire to torture her son. The priest asks why Donny’s mother acted this way. ‘Because I was evil’, Donny replies, ‘I was born from an evil deed’. This scene anchors the film’s association between Donny’s conditioned association of sex and desire with sin (‘born from an evil deed’), and the burning away of ‘evil’.  At the distributor’s request, the film’s title was changed from The Burning to Don’t Go in the House. The finished picture was also subjected to some judicious editing, in order to reach a running time that the film’s theatrical distributors considered commercial. Ellison has commented that he regrets having to trim some of Donny’s interactions with the women who would become his victims, both before and after their deaths. Fortunately, some of this material (including a scene in which Donny kisses one of the corpses) found its way into a television edit – which itself lost some of the more explicit footage, included some alternate takes, and featured overdubbing for some of the more taboo language in the film. A composite version of both the original theatrical cut and the television edit was assembled and released on Blu-ray by Code Red in the US; however, this release inadvertently included the redubbed audio of the television version and omitted some of the more ‘vigorous’ adjectives used in the dialogue of the original theatrical cut.
Don’t Go in the House was released to UK cinemas with a number of cuts to the film’s most gruesome scenes – notably trimming the violence and nudity in the scene depicting the killing of Donny’s first victim, Kathy Jordan. The cover of the pre-cert VHS from Arcade Video seemed intended to court controversy, depicting Donny in his fire retardant suit with a charred corpse of one of his female victims. This videocassette release replicated the cuts made to the UK cinema release. In 1983, Don’t Go in the House was included on the DPP’s list of prosecutable ‘video nasties’, but after prosecution for obscenity, the film was acquitted and removed from the list in 1984. Subsequently, the film was granted a video certificate in 1987, with 3:07 mins of BBFC-imposed cuts, again to that first murder scene. The BBFC cuts were finally waived in 2012, for Arrow Video’s DVD release. Spread across three Blu-ray discs, Arrow Video’s Blu-ray release contains a plethora of edits of the film: the original theatrical cut; the television edit; the extended composite version, but this time with the audio from the original theatrical cut; an alternate open-matte presentation; a ‘UK cinema’ presentation taken from an internegative used by the UK distributor; and a videocassette-sourced presentation, both in an uncut form and in a form that replicates the original BBFC cuts.
Video
 All of the presentations on Discs One, Two, and Three are presented in 1080p using the AVC codec. All of the presentations on Discs One and Two are in the film’s intended theatrical aspect ratio of 1.78:1.
Disc One contains two cuts of the film: i) the original theatrical version (82:33 mins/20.7Gb); and ii) the television version (89:37 mins/14.6Gb). See the main body of the review, above, for an overview of the differences between these two edits of the film. Disc Two contains a composite, extended cut of the film. Running 92:10 mins, this version of the film fills approximately 27Gb of a dual-layered Blu-ray disc. This version uses the theatrical cut as its based and composites into this the unique footage from the television edit. This extended cut also features the film’s production title, The Burning. These three presentations are from a 2k restoration of the film, based on a 4k scan of the original 35mm negative. Some footage was missing from this negative, and this was patched in from a 4k scan of an internegative. The presentation is excellent. Don’t Go in the House was photographed by Oliver Wood, who would go on to photograph Hollywood pictures such as Renny Harlin’s Die Hard 2: Die Harder, John Woo’s Face/Off, and the Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity and its two sequels. Wood had worked on a thematically similar film previously, Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers, though that film had been photographed in verité-style monochrome. Here, Wood and Ellison use expressionistic canted angle shots to suggest that Donny’s worldview is off-balance. In this HD presentation, the careful attention to lighting shines through; this is something that was difficult to appreciate on the film’s VHS incarnations. The level of fine detail throughout is very pleasing. There are a few shots that seem very slightly softer, but whether this is a result of sloppy focus pulling during production (these moments are predominantly in low light scenes shot with fairly shallow depth of field) or whether these are the shots that were patched in from the internegative source is unclear. There is some minor print damage here and there – a few white flecks and specks, and some thin vertical scratches. There is also a noticeable instance of gate weave (when Donny visits the church). That said, all of this damage is film-sourced: the encode to disc is impressive, and retains the structure of 35mm film. Colours are consistent and predominantly naturalistic, whilst contrast levels are very pleasing – with deep blacks and gradation into the toe of the exposure, whilst the shoulder is equally balanced. In terms of contrast, the presentation replicates the dynamic range of 35mm film excellently. In sum, this is a superb presentation of Don’t Go in the House.  The film was shot with spherical lenses, with the intention of it being matted to the desired aspect ratio in projection. Videocassette versions featured an open-matte presentation; by virtue of not being matted to the film’s theatrical ratio, this presentation noticeably includes more nudity in the scene in which the naked Kathy Jordan is murdered. When Don’t Go in the House was released on DVD, this caused consternation amongst some fans who believed that the nudity was intended to be included in the final presentation; these fans were very vocal in their criticism of the widescreen, anamorphic DVD presentations. When Code Red released their Blu-ray release of Don’t Go in the House, they reframed the shots in question to incorporate this ‘extra’ nudity.
In this special edition release, Arrow have included on Disc Three a number of alternate presentations of the film. Included here are: - A full-frame, open-matte presentation of the theatrical cut of the film which features the ‘extra’ nudity mentioned above. Based on the same restoration that forms the basis for the presentations on Discs One and Two, this full-aperture presentation features some noticeable vignetting. It runs for 82:45 mins. It fills approximately 11Gb of space on the disc. - A ‘VHS mode’. This is a presentation that is sourced from a videocassette, and is available both in an uncut version (83:42 mins/10.1Gb) and a version that replicates the original BBFC cuts to the film (82:53 mins/9.7Gb). Both of these presentations are in the 4:3 ratio. - A ‘cinema mode’ which features a different presentation of the film to those on Discs One and Two (82:45/20.1Gb). When selected, this mode plays the film with an animated sequence simulating the outside of an old ABC cinema, and then the foyer. (Note the ash tray filled with smouldering tab ends, and the concession stand with the sign for Lyon’s Maid ice cream: this hits the nostalgic sweet spot for those of us of a certain age. One can almost feel the sticky carpet underneath one’s feet.) This segues into an animation depicting the POV of someone entering the auditorium, before the viewer is presented with retro adverts and trailers for Garry Sherman’s Dead and Buried, Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm, James Glickenhaus’ The Exterminator, and Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead. The presentation of the film in this ‘cinema mode’ is based on a 2k scan of an uncut internegative used by the film’s British distributors, GTO Films, from before the BBFC cuts were made. Presented in 1.78:1, this presentation displayed a little more film damage than the main presentations of Don’t Go in the House that are included on Discs One and Two, but it’s equally filmlike and impressive in all other respects. NB. Full-sized screengrabs from the variant presentations of Don’t Go in the House are included at the bottom of this review.
Audio
All of the presentations, barring the ‘VHS mode’ presentations, feature a LPCM 1.0 mono track. This is rich and deep, with satisfying range and clarity. Optional English subtitles for the Hard of Hearing are included. These are easy to read and free from errors.
Extras
 Disc contents are as follows.
Disc One: - Theatrical Cut (82:33) - Television Cut (89:37) - Commentary by Joseph Ellison & Ellen Hammill. Ellison and Hammill offer a commentary that is moderated by David Gregory. They discuss the production of the film and its retitling, revealing that most of the film’s audio is post-synched owing to the fact that an ‘unblimped’, and therefore noisy, Arri 35 was used to shoot the picture. Hammill says the film was only completed owing to ‘a series of very luck breaks’. The pair discuss the mansion in which much of the film was shot, and share some anecdotes of the production – and their sometimes bizarre encounters with the owner. - Commentary by Dan Grimaldi. Grimaldi discusses his work on the film, reflecting on how he came to be case after the film’s producers saw him in a stage production. Grimaldi talks about the character, and offers a reactive commentary, discussing key moments as they appear onscreen. It’s an interesting commentary, filled with some excellent anecdotes and detail about the making of the film; but at times, it feels like it could have benefitted from someone sitting with Grimaldi and offering prompts for further discussion in the form of questions. - ‘“House” Keeping’ (20:45). In this new featurette (made for Severin Films), the film’s associate producer (Mallinson) and co-writer/producer (Masefield) are interviewed separately. Masefield talks about the film’s origin in the spec script he wrote, titled ‘The Burning Man’, whilst working as an editor. Masefield and Mallinson were working with August Films at the time, which Mallinson describes as ‘the East Coast version of New World Pictures’. Masefield showed the script to Ellison, and Mallinson says that the change in the film’s title (to Don’t Go in the House) was motivated by the popularity of exploitation film titles with ‘Don’t’ in the wording. Mallinson says that comparisons with Psycho didn’t worry the producers, because they considered Ellison’s film to be paying simple homage to Hitchcock’s film – and ‘the burning element’ helped to differentiate the two films’ narratives. Mallinson talks about how the ‘burning’ of Kathy Jordan was achieved via a split prism which allowed the fire to be superimposed over the body of the actress in-camera. Mallinson also says that the house which was used as Donny’s house was advantageous, because it proved big enough to both film in and provide a base for the production. However, the house was very cold – so cold, in fact, that a member of the production contracted pneumonia. After production was completed, Ellen Hammill wanted Mallinson to cut the film. Mallinson, having already foregone his producer’s salary and also committed to other paying projects, refused. Hammill was displeased with this, according to Mallinson. In the finished film, Mallinson discovered that another man was credited alongside him as associate producer – and after doing some digging, Mallinson discovered that this man had simply paid Hammill to be credited as one of the film’s associate producers. This made Mallinson deeply unhappy, given that Mallinson had worked on the film without any financial recompense. 
- ‘We Went in the House’ (19:23). In another new featurette (also made for Severin Films), Michael Gingold gives the viewer a tour of the locations used in the film, including a glimpse of the interior of the house in which most of the narrative takes place – the Straus Mansion in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. Gingold reveals that one of the then-residents of the house was a teacher, and some of her young students were used as extras in a flashback that was cut from the final edit of Don’t Go in the House. - ‘Playing with Fire’ (9:44). This interview with Dan Grimaldi was shot for Media Blasters and included in their 2005 DVD release of the film. Grimaldi discusses how he got the part of Donny after the producers saw him in a play. Realising that the film was ‘a study of an abused child’, Grimaldi conducted research into abuse and its effects, talking to victims of childhood abuse and visiting various organisations in order to be able to play the role convincingly. Not being a fan of horror films, Grimaldi found some of the content difficult, but nevertheless praises the effects in the film – particularly the pivotal burning of Kathy Jordan. - Trailers and TV Spots: UK Theatrical Teaser (0:41); UK Theatrical Trailer (1:34); US Theatrical Trailer (1:56); US TV Spots (1:46); German Theatrical Trailer (1:53) - Image Gallery (69 images). This gallery includes production stills, lobby cards (with the title ‘The Burning’ displayed), video artwork, and more.  Disc Two:
- Extended Cut (92:10) - Commentary by Stephen Thrower. Thrower, who wrote an exhaustive chapter about Don’t Go in the House, in his book Nightmare USA, offers a characteristically thorough commentary track. Thrower discusses the production history of the film, drawing on interviews he conducted with the participants, and contextualises the picture by examining it through the lens of 1970s/1980s American exploitation films. He also offers a defense against the accusations of misogyny that were levelled against the picture in the 1980s. He suggests the film fell found of ‘a trend in our culture where any attempt to critique the mother figure in family dynamics, is suspected of or often accused of misogynistic motives’. - ‘Minds on Fire: The Dying Embers of 1970s Psychological Horror’ (14:57). This new video essay by David Flint looks at Don’t Go in the House within the context of 1970s psychological horror films, arguing that many of these films were misunderstood at the time of their original release. Flint sets these in counterpoint with the ‘slasher’ films that dominated in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, and framing 1970s psychological horror films as a reaction against the Gothicism of 1960s horror. Awareness of the actions of serial killers during the 1970s ‘created a climate of fear’ that was addressed in these films. Slasher films, by contrast, usually offered killers that had a ‘very narrow target range’ identified by the films’ titles (Halloween, Graduation Day, Prom Night, and so on). By contrast, Flint argues, there were some films ‘lumped in’ with the slasher movies that had little to do with the slasher movies’ formulaic nature – including William Lustig’s Maniac, which Flint suggests is ‘closer in tone’ to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver or the contemporaneous ‘roughies’ that explored a similar urban milieu, including Shaun Costello’s Forced Entry and Waterpower. - Director Interviews: - ‘Burn Baby Burn’ (28:31). This interview with Ellison was recorded in 2017. In it, Ellison talks about the origins of the film and his approach to making it. He suggests that he originally wanted the film to have a sense of humour, but ‘it’s so fucking heavy’ that this aspect of the film was buried in the final version of the picture. Ellison discusses the editing of Don’t Go in the House, and suggests that horror film audiences (at least in America, at that period) ‘didn’t want to go and get creeped out’ but wanted something that had an equivalence to a rollercoaster ride. - ‘The Burning Man’ (13:40). This is another interview with Ellison, which was recorded in 2015 for Subkultur Entertainment’s release of the film. In this interview, Ellison discusses how he came to become involved in filmmaking after developing a love of cinema during a viewing of Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits. He reflects on the production of Don’t Go in the House, including moments of doubt that set in whilst filming some of the effects scenes – particularly the murder of Kathy Jordan, which Ellison claims troubled him when he saw it being shot. Ellison doesn’t hold back in his criticism of the title (Don’t Go in the House) imposed on the film by the distributor. - ‘Grindhouse All-Stars: Notes from the Sleaze Cinema Underground’ (34:25). This 2017 documentary looks at 1970s US-made exploitation films, and features comments from US exploitation film directors like Jeff Lieberman, Joseph Ellison, Roy Frumkes, Matt Cimber. The participants reflect on the era of 1970s exploitation films, discussing the making of some of their own pictures. Disc Three: - Full-frame open-matte version (82:45) - Textless title sequence (1:05) - ‘VHS mode’: uncut (83:42); or with the original BBFC cuts (81:53) - ‘Cinema mode’ with trailers and adverts (16:09) that precede the main presentation (82:45) - An ‘easter egg’ can be accessed by going to the ‘Extras’ menu and pressing ‘Up’ on the remote control. This will play a full-aperture version of the film’s original trailer (2:24)
Overall
 Wow! Arrow Video’s Blu-ray release of Don’t Go in the House is inarguably, for horror/exploitation cinema fans, going to be one of the key home video releases of 2022. This writer has long been a huge fan of this film, having encountered it for the first time with a group of friends after renting the UK Apex VHS release (with its bizarre cover). Little could have prepared us for a film that left us reeling and dumbstruck with its bleak, oppressive atmosphere and unnerving tone – so much so, in fact, that one of my friends was absolutely appalled. (A similar response met a viewing of Joe D’Amato’s Buio omega, this film’s European cousin, which is mentioned in the main body of this review.) Don’t Go in the House is a memorable film: at the time of its release, it was deeply divisive, being cited as one of a number of US exploitation films which were claimed by some to be driven by misogyny. However, in retrospect that criticism of Don’t Go in the House (and some of its contemporaries) seems deeply reductive and short-sighted. Though the film is undeniably exploitative, at its core it has something quite impactful to say about the effects of child abuse and what would today be labelled ‘toxic’ parenting. (Given the comments of all involved, including Ellison and Hammill, and the research Grimaldi conducted for his role, this denouncement of child abuse was always an intentional aspect of the production.)
Ellison’s film is a stone cold disco-era horror/exploitation classic. (After watching the film, try to get the track ‘Struck by Boogie Lightning’ out of your head. I’m playing it, cranked to full volume, on my stereo at the moment, whilst jumping on an armchair in the living room. This makes it difficult to type.) Arrow Video’s Blu-ray release contains a definitive array of presentations of the film, including all the variant edits one could wish for and more besides. The ‘cinema mode’ on disc three, with its animated intro depicting the viewer’s entry into an old ABC cinema, is bound to hit the nostalgia pockets in the brains of anyone old enough to remember that era of sticky foyer carpets, pungent cigarette smoke and overflowing ashtrays, and Lyon’s Maid ice creams for sale in the snack kiosk. These many, many versions of the film are accompanied by some superb contextual material. The comments from the film’s participants – including the interviews with, and commentaries by, the likes of Ellison, Grimaldi, and Hammill – are complemented by some insightful critical pieces from Stephen Thrower and David Flint. In particular, Thrower’s commentary on the extended presentation is well worth a listen for any fan of the film, and contains a thoughtful analysis of the film that also defends it from the accusations of misogyny that were levelled against Don’t Go in the House on its first release. What more can be said? Go and buy it! Bibliography Edwards, Matthew, 2017: Twisted Visions: Interviews with Cult Horror Filmmakers. McFarland & Company Main Presentation (Theatrical Cut/Extended Cut – Discs One & Two) 
UK Internegative (Disc Three) 
Full Aperture Presentation (Disc Three) 
VHS Presentation (Disc Three) 
Main Presentation (Theatrical Cut/Extended Cut – Discs One & Two) 
UK Internegative (Disc Three) 
Full Aperture Presentation (Disc Three) 
VHS Presentation (Disc Three) 
Main Presentation (Theatrical Cut/Extended Cut – Discs One & Two) 
UK Internegative (Disc Three) 
Full Aperture Presentation (Disc Three) 
VHS Presentation (Disc Three) 
Main Presentation (Theatrical Cut/Extended Cut – Discs One & Two) 
UK Internegative (Disc Three) 
Full Aperture Presentation (Disc Three) 
VHS Presentation (Disc Three) 
Main Presentation (Theatrical Cut/Extended Cut – Discs One & Two) 
UK Internegative (Disc Three) 
Full Aperture Presentation (Disc Three) 
VHS Presentation (Disc Three) 
The following are taken from the main presentation (Discs One and Two): 
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