Horror House (1969)/The Crimson Cult (1968) in the PNW

Details: Written by: Mortado; Category: The 1970s in Northwest Cinemas

This is a collection of media from the initial runs of "Horror House" (1969) and "The Crimson Cult" (1968) in the Pacific Northwest.

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Horror House (1969)

"Horror House" plays like a cautionary tale about swinging London’s empty promises, dressed up as a murder mystery but really functioning as a slow, sour unmasking of a generation that thought it could outrun its own rot. The film follows a group of young pleasure seekers who treat danger like a party favor, drifting through abandoned estates and fog soaked backroads as if the world owes them a thrill. What they actually find is the bill coming due. The movie never pretends these characters are innocent; it treats them as disposable ornaments of a culture already past its expiration date, and the cynicism baked into that viewpoint gives the whole thing a faintly rancid charge.

The atmosphere is the real engine here. Every location feels like it’s been left to mildew, every party scene has the emotional temperature of a morgue, and every attempt at youthful rebellion comes off as a half hearted performance for an audience that stopped caring years ago. The film leans into that decay, letting the supposed glamour of the era curdle into something brittle and vaguely pathetic. Even the violence feels less like shock and more like inevitability, as if the characters are simply being claimed by the environment they’ve been too self absorbed to notice.

What makes "Horror House" interesting is how it weaponizes its own simplicity. The plot is straightforward, but the tone is quietly merciless. It’s a story about people who think they’re living in a carefree fantasy only to discover they’ve wandered into a moral dead zone. The film doesn’t moralize, but it doesn’t sympathize either. It just watches, coldly, as the façade cracks and the night closes in.

Directors: Michael Armstrong, Gerry Levy
Writers: Michael Armstrong, Gerry Levy
Stars: Frankie Avalon, Jill Haworth, Dennis Price
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The Crimson Cult (1968)

"The Crimson Cult" is one of those late sixties British occult curiosities that pretends to be inviting you into a stately country mystery while quietly smirking at how threadbare the whole setup really is. The film drapes itself in velvet cloaks, arcane symbols, and aristocratic eccentricity, but beneath all that pageantry is a story about a decaying social order trying to convince itself it still has power. It’s a world where old money clings to ritual because it has nothing else left, and the film knows it. That’s why everything feels slightly off, slightly cheap, slightly desperate. The grandeur is cosmetic; the rot is structural.

The plot moves with the sluggish confidence of a production that assumes atmosphere will do the heavy lifting. Characters wander through fog soaked estates and labyrinthine hallways as though they’re sleepwalking through someone else’s nightmare, and the film treats their confusion as part of the entertainment. But there’s a cynicism humming underneath the surface, a sense that the occult trappings aren’t meant to frighten so much as expose how hollow these people have become. The rituals feel like pantomime, the menace feels inherited rather than earned, and the entire setting seems to be collapsing under the weight of its own pretensions.

What keeps "The Crimson Cult" interesting is its refusal to fully commit to either campy spectacle or genuine dread. Instead, it hovers in a strange limbo where the decadence is too gaudy to take seriously and too bleak to dismiss. The film becomes a portrait of a dying aristocracy dressing up its irrelevance in robes and candles, hoping no one notices the dust gathering in the corners. It’s a gothic masquerade where the masks are slipping, and the faces underneath aren’t monstrous so much as tired.

Director: Vernon Sewell
Writers: Mervyn Haisman, Henry Lincoln, Jerry Sohl
Stars: Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele
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May 13, 1970 ad (Seattle)