It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

It may sound like a round of toast gone wrong but it's actually a religious term: a "burnt offering" occurs when an animal is incinerated on an altar as a sacrifice. The consumption is absolute – soul and all – which may give a clue as to where this 1976 gem, written and directed by horror veteran Dan Curtis, will ultimately go. Marian (Karen Black) and Ben (Oliver Reed), along with their son Davey (Lee H. Montgomery) and Aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis) move to a rundown California mansion for the summer. The landlords are creepy siblings whose reclusive mother, Mrs Allardyce, is locked in an upstairs room. For a knock-down rent, the incoming family need only take care of the building and leave a tray of food each day for the mad woman in the attic.The tenants move in and initially enjoy the peace and majesty of the great old house. But tempers quickly flare. Ben becomes uncommonly angry; Marian increasingly obsesses about the unseen Mrs Allardyce; and Elizabeth falls prey to a terrible manic illness. Is Mrs Allardyce the cause of all these tensions? Or could it be the house itself, which seems to bloom into life as its inhabitants succumb to mutually assured destruction?For fans of The Haunting (the Robert Wise version, obviously) and The Shining, this is a must-see psychological horror which has been relatively "overlooked" (Shining joke). In a way, Burnt Offerings is a relic from a time where scares were more understated whilst, paradoxically, performances were more melodramatic. It doesn't parody these genre aspects in the way that Kubrick's monolithic milestone would do four years later, but instead plays everything straight. Which is why it seems such an oddity, coming at a mid-70s moment after the dawn of the new allegorical horror of Romero, Hooper, and Craven and before the seedy/gory horror heyday of the 1980s. It's more like The Exorcist, pagan style. The film relies principally on atmosphere and gradually growing sense of menace and madness. For the first two thirds it's impossible to tell where the insanity lies. Is it in Marian, with her discomforting interest in Mrs Allardyce? Or Ben, whose visions of his mother's hearse are pushing him to hysteria, manifesting as rage? The dynamics work not only thanks to strong lead performances, but because Curtis takes time and care to portray a functioning family, comfortable with each other's foibles; so when the fractures appear, it's genuinely disturbing. When the playful, protective Ben starts wrestling his son in the pool to the point of drowning, it's not only intense but feels terribly wrong. Moreover, the dialogue throughout is well written, so when the silliness kicks in we take it seriously. Support-wise, Anthony James – a know-his-face actor who played many a memorable creep – rocks up occasionally to smile sinisterly, and there's a supremely creepy cameo from Burgess "Penguin" Meredith, playing Mrs Allardyce's son, who watches Davey playing from the window whilst practically dribbling.The framing, lighting, and production design is top-notch, and the editing is meaningful. This is a work of poise and control; and these qualities are consistent all the way to the final Hitchcockian scene, which is scary in spite of being, by that point, predictable. Burnt Offerings is a slow, stately, dense psychological horror, low on gore and obvious shocks – and all the more impactful for it.

To judge this book by its' cover, one would assume that it is the stuff of a 70s horror fan's dreams. Here is a movie directed by Dan Curtis, known for such fare of DARK SHADOWS and TRILOGY OF TERROR, about a haunted house that feeds on the pain and emotions of its' inhabitants. The cast is extraordinary and reads like a wish list. A couple played by Oliver Reed (CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF) and Karen Black, who had starred in Curtis' TRILOGY OF TERROR, along with their aunt played by the legendary Bette Davis. We, also, get Burgess Meredith, who seems to pop up continually in horror films from this time era. It seems like it couldn't possibly miss, but miss it certainly does.I am not a giant fan of the "haunted house" film. Of all the little sub-genres of horror it tends to be one of my least favorite, but when done well, some of those are among my favorite horror films as well. The fans of this movie will want to use words like "understated", "brooding" and "atmospheric" to describe the sort of ominous tone that this movie wants so badly to achieve. The words they should really be looking for are "dreadfully boring" as it is hard to find anything worthwhile in this snoozer. The biggest issue I have with it would come from Curtis' background in television. That's exactly the way this movie feels is a waste of budget and cast, as Curtis really does nothing more than perfectly re-create the look and feel of 70s TV horror. Supposedly, this movie had a fairly large budget for its' time, but I couldn't tell you what they spent it on for the life of me (beyond the aforementioned acting talent). There are absolutely no effects. This is almost the anti- haunted house" movie as we start to wonder if our characters are going crazy out of sheer boredom more than being driven there by ghosts and spirits. The 70s were full of great, effective haunted house flicks like THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE, THE SENTINEL and THE AMITYVILLE HORROR. You could create a Top 25 list just from this decade of great horror films. The viewer cannot help but place this against the competition and it comes up sorely lacking. I would challenge any great fan of this movie to honestly come up with one element or characteristic that makes this movie worth the watch? Even the great cast are just not given anything to work with here. The dialog wants so much to be meaningful, but feels empty. The scenes where each character have their own brushes with madness could have been rife with tension and paranoia, but fail to elicit any real pathos from the viewer.It has been said that Stephen King was a big fan of this movie. If that is in fact true, then it's an interesting coincidence. This would have been released one year before King wrote THE SHINING. Those works have a lot in common, a family with skeletons in the closet moves into a house with its' own skeletons, a house that slowly feeds on their emotions until it has destroyed them. It's just that King took the kernel of story that is present here and actually made it worthwhile.

Stanley Kubrick writes a letter to Dan Curtis after watching Burnt Offerings: Dear Dan,I caught Burnt Offerings at a screening recently. It is such an impressive film, so unlike some of the loud, unremarkable and tasteless horror movies that are released every week. As you might know, I am about to start work on The Shining which is based on the Stephen King novel. King has admitted to borrowing some of the plot ideas from the novel on which Burnt Offerings was based.You were fortunate to assemble the cast you had. Oliver Reed was intensely brilliant and Karen Black was the perfect foil as his bimboish wife. Some of the exchanges between them, although meant to be serious were quite amusing. I have quite a few ideas for the exchanges between my lead pair in The Shining that I have come up with after watching your movie. If I may say so, I have a superior cast in Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall.Alas, Betty Davis was almost unrecognizable.The swimming pool scene was genuinely scary. Did you use a wave machine to create the waves? You could have done a lot more with it. I wish I had a swimming pool scene for The Shining.I also liked the way you shot the Victorian house. That table with those symmetrically arranged photographs was a fine show piece. A few more scenes in the city would have helped establish the isolation of the house occupied by the family. There was also not much of a background to the husband-wife relationship.Oliver Reed's dream sequences deserve special mention.I fear that the plots of our movies are extremely similar and my film might be compared to yours. I intend to work harder on my film.Best Regards,Stanley.

Does your house need a face-lift? Then, take a little tip from brother and sister Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart. Rent it out for the summer to a nice married couple with a small child and just let the house take over. That's exactly what happens here, and boy, no plastic surgeon has the ability to do what this house does. Karen Black and Oliver Reed, two cult favorites of the 1970's, have done some weird films in their time, but other than a T.V. movie where Black is chased by a little African doll with a knife, they don't rank anywhere near as frightening as this. Sure, Reed scared the bajeebers out of kids being mean to Oliver Twist and Black had us frantic when she announced that there was nobody flying the plane, but now, she's got something serious to want to desperately fly out of.Literally, the house comes alive, as do several ghosts, with one of the most frightening swimming pools ever in the movies. Bette Davis adds a touch of class, not camp here, as Black's kindly aunt who comes for a visit and finds more than she bargained for on a holiday. The spirit of a deadly chauffeur haunts both her and her great grand-nephew (Lee Montgomery) while Reed and Black slowly go batty on their own as the evil spirits surrounding the house literally take over. This is severe horror at its scariest, a "Poltergeist" way before that horror classic came out and one that will tingle your spine in ways its never been tingled before. Anthony James may not be a household name, but the chauffeur he plays is as spooky a character to ever appear in a horror film and may haunt your dreams if you watch this right before going to bed. This is a great horror follow-up to the original "Dark Shadows" and its movies for director Dan Curtis.