We all love a good haunted house story. Sadly, this episode seems to relish in the gory details of childhood trauma more than anything else. Sophie the child protagonist has everything that she has grown attached to or been gifted eventually brutalized and destroyed right in front of her. It is truly one emotional trauma after another, replete with blood, murdered pets, dolls' broken limbs, stuffed white rabbits and other - by today's standards - clichés. It gets sickening and predictable and very hard to enjoy for some presumed suspense alone. The ending, too, takes a back seat to the disturbing theme of "good girl gone bad" as little Sophie starts to take an obvious interest and a degree of pleasure in the relentless violence that surrounds her.

The House that Bled to Death is episode five from the 'Hammer House of Horror' TV series. This is one of the more famous instalments as its name seemed familiar to me before even having seen it. It's set in a house where an elderly man gruesomely murdered his wife some time earlier, a young couple and their daughter move in and supernatural events immediately follow. As you can probably assume from this synopsis, this is the entry from the series that took influence from the then very recent blockbuster horror hit The Amityville Horror.Like the others in this series it has on location photography, this was for budget-based reasons but it definitely adds something given the mundane nature of the house makes it more believable. But of course in keeping with others in the series, the events are far from normal. The old rusty machetes used in the historical murder mysteriously show up time after time, the family cat is violently killed and, most memorably of all, a children's birthday party is interrupted when a pipe breaks and sprays all the kids with gallons of blood. All of this is directed pretty well by Francis Megahy, who helmed the previous entry Growing Pains, which was a much inferior episode to this one. And to top things off it has a very effective twist ending which even has a twist of its own. Some people aren't so keen on this ending but I thought it was genuinely good and unexpected. Not only that it can be read as a comment on the real Lutz family whose spurious claims founded the Amityville book and movies. A good episode overall.

Hammer House of Horror: The House That Bled to Death starts as young married couple William (Nicholas Ball) & Emma Peters (Rachel Davis) & their young daughter Sophie (Emma Ridley) move into a house where a brutal murder took place several years prior. At first they feel it's their dream home but soon the dream turn into a living nightmare as horrendous events begin to happen, the cat dies, blood is seen leaking from holes in the wall, Sophie finds severed hands in the fridge & two rusty old machetes keep turning up. Is the house haunted? If so is it trying to kill the Peters & what can be done about it...The House That Bled to Death was episode 5 from the one & only season of this short lived British horror anthology series made for TV by Hammer studios, originally airing here in the UK during October 1980 & directed by Francis Megahy one has to say that The House That Bled to Death was excellent for it's first forty five minutes but then everything is ruined in the last five with a truly awful twist ending which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The script by David Lloyd starts off really well as a great fast paced & genuinely spooky haunted house horror with plenty of incident but then that twist ending ruins everything. It makes no sense to me, what was the purpose of William's actions again? To write a book? To make a film? For the publicity? It's never explained to any satisfactory degree & where did Sophie get that machete from? Who was that estate agent guy & what did he have to do with it all? What was that book Sophie was reading? It wasn't a factual account of what happened because William admits to staging all the supernatural events, why? No matter how much I think about it I just can't square the circle, it just doesn't make any sense & if you work out one aspect of it then something else doesn't make sense which buggers your theory up. Nothing makes any logical sense & it's incredibly disappointing & frustrating after such an excellent first three quarters of an hour. The House That Bled to Death could have been the finest episode of Hammer House of Horror, as it is it's one of the worst.Director Megahy does a good job here, the early 80's contemporary British setting is nice & makes the events fairly real, there are some great sequences as the horrible events inside the house continue to escalate including the infamous scene where the guests at Sophie's birthday party are showered in blood & there's a graphic shot of a dead cat with it's throat cut as well if & if your an animal lover you should probably look away during that moment. There's a really oppressive & gloomy atmosphere, it's actually pretty creepy & unsettling at times like the pre-credits sequence at the start when the old man kills his wife & then reach for one of the huge machetes on the wall & then we fade into the opening credits. Shot on 35mm film rather than videotape as was the norm for most British TV this looks very theatrical & you could imagine it on the big screen. The acting is good except during the twist ending when the whole programme sadly falls to pieces really.The House That Bled to Death could have been one of the greatest Hammer House of Horror episodes if not for a disastrous & incomprehensible twist ending that ruins everything that has gone before.

Perhaps not the absolute greatest entry in the Hammer House of Horror series, but it surely wins the award for most inventively titled episode! "The House that Bled to Death"… I could yell out this title all day without ever getting tired of it! And besides the wondrous title, this short movie also benefices from a solidly written screenplay and a handful of genuinely suspenseful moments. It might require an extra viewing before you fully understand the peculiar end-twist, but it's definitely an original idea for a horror short. The story opens with images of an elderly couple drinking tea in their middle-class house. The husband sadistically kills his wife and several years later the "cursed" house is still for sale. A young couple and their cherubic daughter move in and start to restore it, but mysterious events occur and affect especially the young Sophie. Her beloved cat is killed an even her birthday party gets ruined when one of the house's pipes suddenly sprays blood all over the guests (a particularly chilling sequence, this one!). Is the old house really haunted? Or maybe the seemly helpful neighbors cause all the horror? The answers to these questions are provided in the original and fairly unpredictable climax and there's even room for a real shock at the very end. The tension is masterfully built up and the titular house is filled with eerie scenery, like the pair of rusty machetes used by the husband to slay his wife. Little warning though, the sequence with the cat is hard to watch when you're an animal lover. In conclusion, another winner for Hammer's short-running TV series!