Joseph Ellison's 1979 low-budget slasher became controversial almost immediately because of its unusually explicit depiction of violence, especially the sequence in which Dan Grimaldi's disturbed protagonist, Donny Kohler, chains a woman to the ceiling of a metal-lined room, douses her with gasoline, and burns her alive with a flamethrower. The film's grim subject matter—child abuse, inherited violence, pyromania, and the protagonist's macabre arrangement of corpses in his home—made it harsher than many contemporaneous drive-in slashers. Although some later critics regarded it as an effective and unusually bleak portrait of the consequences of abuse, early reviewers condemned it as sick, grotesque, boring, and needlessly violent. Its regional American release began in Honolulu on April 9, 1980, but its more notorious afterlife came in Britain.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1980s
The Flamethrower Scene That Turned Don't Go in the House into a British 'Video Nasty'
Don't Go in the House / 1980s
Joseph Ellison's 1979 low-budget slasher became controversial almost immediately because of its unusually explicit depiction of violence, especially the sequence in which Dan Grimaldi's disturbed protagonist, Donny Kohler, chains a woman to the ceiling of a metal-lined room, douses her with gasoline, and burns her alive with a flamethrower. The film's grim subject matter—child abuse, inherited violence, pyromania, and the protagonist's macabre arrangement of corpses in his home—made it harsher than many contemporaneous drive-in slashers. Although some later critics regarded it as an effective and unusually bleak portrait of the consequences of abuse, early reviewers condemned it as sick, grotesque, boring, and needlessly violent. Its regional American release began in Honolulu on April 9, 1980, but its more notorious afterlife came in Britain.
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