Herb Freed's Haunts (1977) begins with a fizzle with a masked intruder's off-screen act of murder. It continues as a tepid psycho killer film without enough gore to justify itself as exploitation, incorporating scenes of rape that may delight a few unpleasant souls. And yet forbearance almost pays off as the film becomes more psychological in nature, & the central character of Ingrid develops, however slowly, into something odder & less tiresome than just another pretty victim.

May Britt as Inga gets first billing in the credits & she dominates the story. Inga is a blonde bombshell getting a bit long in the tooth & lonely, & a Jesus freak who has apparently become the target of the unwanted affections from a violent local stud (William Gray Espy) as well as from her own horny uncle (Cameron Mitchell), one or the other of whom she suspects is the sexual psychopath burdening this rural community.

The sheriff (Aldo Ray) is slow to take Inga seriously, but eventually realizes there's certainly something amiss down on the farm, & has his own reasons to mistrust the above-mentioned local stud.

Though there's not a whole lot that praiseworthy in this film, it does have its merits. Britt is subtly creepy well before the "surprise" revelations about her character, who begins to resemble the fearful paranoic in Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) though of course not on the same level of art. Yet even an hallucinating paranoid can be assaulted & raped, & whether Inga is threatened or a threat becomes increasingly the puzzle to be worked out.

A long epilog muddies the film's meaning & intent, but provides Cameron Mitchell with a little something for his character. This second ending provides the films with two strange & lowkey climaxes that in retrospect give a stronger gothic tone & intent that seems the purpose while the murder & rapes are happening.

The main players do well considering how the flawed script waits so long to get interesting. If a viewer is patient enough to make it through the tedious bits & cliches to the end, it does drum up some authentic dread & mystery.


The film Haunts superficially imitates is Polanski's extraordinary Repulsion, right down to the physical appearance of the protagonist. Catherine Deneuve is Carole, a sexually suppressed virgin whose great beauty gains her unwanted attentions that drive her first into paranoia & finally into psychosis.

Claustrophic when she hides away in her apartment watching the cracks of the ceiling & walls widen, agoraphobic if she goes outside, Carole has no path that does not result in terror.

Replusion was long the favorite film of a friend of mine who upon noting a revival at the local art cinema called up her dad & assured him he'd love to see it because he was also a fan of thrillers. She picked him up & off they went to the cinema. Afterward he was exceedingly quiet & disturbed by what he'd seen, & finally asked, "Why did you want me to see this?" He had responded to the film as an accusation.

She was quite surprised her dad didn't like it let alone thought it was intended as some kind of criticism of his own inner being. It was her first inkling that Repulsion despite having curdled out of Roman Polanski's twisted imagination was perhaps more a film for women than for men.

On some level Replusion does seem to be a "reverse slasher" & changes the nature & meaning of the terrified/victimized female in, say, the films of Dario Argento, but common to far too high a percentage of horror films. As Carole walks through the city streets & lascivious men try to catch her attention at every turn, this is not paranoic; this is what women really do live with every day.

Men's threatening use of sexual attention is not restricted to tongue-lolling come-here-baby & whistles at women as beautiful as Deneuve. Even cross-eyed chubsters & wrinkled old grannies end up on the rosters of rape victims. The world that drives Carole to insanity is not a world restricted to her mind; it is, rather, the actual world for which she is less capable than are most women at coping & adjusting.

On one level the central character's madness is almost revolutionary, though on the main level Carole surely needed to be on medication. Having long been one of my own favorite films, the margins between insanity & justified fear in a world that really does assault women in a myriad overt & subtle ways makes it seem almost a feminist story, even if brutal & unsettling. It is the equivalent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" with its dishevelled madwoman crawling about the edges of her room, having come to this position due in large part to her cultural environment.

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