The plot seems to be a hot mess, which one Armstrong website attributes to studio meddling that cut out key scenes and characters and replaced them with others, thus destroying whatever unity there was. It looks like Armstrong intended to make a slasher-style "Blow-Up," in which Mod London was revealed to be a lot less fun than its image, but throwing in US surfer-singer Avalon and a bunch of middle-aged characters just distracts from that theme. It is, however, an awesome time-capsule of Swingin' Sixties clothes, hairstyles, makeup, and sets. The girls have miniskirts, false eyelashes, teased hair (or hair pieces) in the requisite flip-with-fringe; the guys have Technicolor ruffled shirts and Beatle bowl-cuts. They act out their angst in living rooms full of Pop Art. Enjoy it for the era's eye candy.

I'll be totally honest and admit straight away that I hoped for this flick to be A LOT better… I'm a sucker for British horror movies from the late '60s/early '70s period, especially if they have such juicy sounding titles like "The Haunted House of Horror" and if they are produced by the underrated Tigon Company that also made the fabulous genre masterpieces "Witchfinder General" and "Blood on Satan's Claw". In terms of plot synopsis and setting, this one differs a lot from the usual type of contemporary Brit-horror, considering it's not a Gothic period piece or a re-imagining of a classic monster movie, but in fact a sort of pioneer slasher movie in a haunted house setting! That's quite unique already, and then "The Haunted House of Horror" also gets a couple of extra points for originality because the lead characters are a mixture of hippie teenagers and old-fashioned stern police investigators. More than enough reason for this film to be a criminally neglected horror gem – I thought – and thus I didn't pay too much attention to the overall low rating and negative reviews around here. Well I still stand behind the points I raised for originality, but sadly I do have to acknowledge that it is a boring film with a very illogical plot! First of all let me state that the brief plot description mentioned on the film's IMDb page isn't accurate at all… "Teenagers gathered in an old mansion are being murdered one by one. The survivors must discover who among them the killer is before he finishes off everybody". Yeah, right… Whoever wrote that two-line summary clearly didn't watch the movie! Quite a lot of relevant things happen long before the teenagers gather in the old mansion, they certainly aren't murdered one by one and they do not actively attempt to unmask the killer. Are these unimportant little details? Perhaps, but I don't think so… The film starts very 'hippie-sixties' like, with some guy going on a lunch break date with a blond girl, but during a private house party later that day he is much more interested in a brunette girl. One of the other hipsters at the party is the famous '50s crooner Frankie Avalon and he is somewhat the leader of the pack. They all get bored at the party and then one of them has the luminous idea to go and spend the rest of the night in an abandoned and allegedly haunted mansion. The double-dating guy then viciously gets stabbed to death, but instead of warning the police, Frankie Avalon convinces all the others to cover up the murder instead. I seriously fail to understand why they keep this murder secret!?! One of these dumb hippies should have stood up and said: "No, Frankie Avalon, not informing the police is a very dumb and pointless idea!" The further guessing along for the culprit's identity is reasonably compelling, with a couple of clichéd prime suspects (like a pervert stalker) and other intrigues, but the whole cover-up sub plot makes everything implausible. The body count is frustratingly low, but the on screen bloodshed is definitely sick and brutal for sixties' standards. Overall, I certainly don't regret watching "The Haunted House of Horror" but surely it could have been a lot better. This was the first long-feature film of the promising director Michael Armstrong. One year later he delivered the magnificent exploitation classic "Mark of the Devil", but after that he strangely stopped making films.

i really enjoyed this movie.why?because it is FUN to watch. movies don't have to be deeply meaningful or classy or poetic..more important than all that is that it is fun to watch.i don't mean comedy-funny, i mean a flow, a structure and a story that doesn't make you snooze. (maybe some actors that actually can act, but thats a dying breed)this movie is entertaining and fun, sure the story is thin and the middle drags a little, but it really doesn't matter..you got frankie avalon, a dark old house and some outrageous 6oties hairdos, what more can you want?

This little masterpiece from 1969 proves that when it comes to teen exploitation movies, the sixties were really the extension of the puritanical fifties.This oddball film has much to recommend it, however. It is an early over-the-top slasher film starring Frankie Avalon and taking place in Swinging London, which allows the art director to go crazy with all the latest Mary Quant mini-fashions, the form-fitting jumpsuits, the triple-layered eyelashes, the monumental hair-dos and wigs, the garish colours, a glimpse of the Beatles' Apple store, the latest mod accessories, all literally "tacked on" the dingiest apartment interiors imaginable this side of "Dame Edna's Neighbourhood Watch". The colours are jarring and the boys' Carnaby Street clothes are almost as ridiculous as the girls'. What struck me as particularly horrible was the absolute "tackiness" (that word will come up often) of the sets, where the cheap dayglo-colour carpets were literally slashed (!) and tacked (!!) on at the last minute over well-worn antique wooden floors.Everywhere in this film, the old meets the new and the result is pure kitsch! The kids are liberated, "with it" and good-looking but they are bored, boring and vacuous. To make matters worse, they have nothing to do with all their coolness except smoke a lot, drink a lot, retouch their mascara, tousle their hair, impersonate Jean Shrimpton or Mick Jagger, go out to improbable restaurants where a rock group provides salon music and exchange partners often. They leave their shiny, new chrome-plated disco to spend a night in a tawdry old haunted house for kicks. Horror ensues. They are also variously involved with representatives of the old order, grey-coloured cops and detectives who either hunt them down, offer them more cigarettes or have affairs with them. The characters' lives are directionless and their speech is stultified. They only talk in horror movie clichés with clipped BBC accents while brushing the hair from their eyes and mouth or emitting mucous. All genuine human emotion, however, is taboo. Even the screams of the hunted girl (Miss What's-her-name) in the final massacre scene are dubbed on.The very puritanical moral of this film - as in every teen exploitation slasher film before or since on both sides of the Atlantic - is that promiscuous, trendy, vapid, modern young people who have fun are really deeply troubled and deserve to die the most horrible death imaginable, as do quite a few of their elders for having anything to do with them. As to why this sold tickets, the reason escapes me and adds a genuine element of mystery to a rather shopworn horror premise.In conclusion, this film offers a lot of shockingly spilled blood and a poor man's Hitchcock experience but the real thrills and chills come from the surreptitious meeting of pink and orange on the same couch (rhymes with "ouch!").