‘Burnt Offerings’ at 50 - Revisiting the Haunted House Story That Inspired The Shining
50 years ago today, Dan Curtis – the television titan behind the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows (1966-1971) and the cult classic horror anthology Trilogy of Terror (1975) – released Burnt Offerings, adapted from Robert Marasco’s 1973 novel by Curtis and screenwriter William F. Nolan. The film assembled a cast of genuine cinema royalty: Karen Black, fresh off her tour-de-force anthology work in Trilogy of Terror; Oliver Reed, an actor of ferocious and occasionally difficult talent; Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart as the unsettling caretakers who rent the family their doomed summer home; and Bette Davis, bringing genuine star power to the role of Ben’s elderly Aunt Elizabeth. Yet, on a budget of two million dollars, the film opened on August 25, 1976 to a box office return that failed to recoup even that modest investment.
However, despite the film’s commercial failure, it did not take long for the reappraisal to begin. Burnt Offerings went on to win the Saturn Awards for Best Horror Film and Best Director, along with a Best Supporting Actress Saturn Award for Davis, and it has spent the decades since then being rediscovered as one of the finest and most unusual haunted house films of its era – a movie that, as modern critics have observed, might have found greater immediate success had it arrived two or three years later, amid the supernatural horror boom of The Amityville Horror (1979), Phantasm (1979), and The Brood (1979) rather than in the more uncertain years just after The Exorcist (1973).
What distinguishes Burnt Offerings from its haunted house contemporaries – and from The Innocents (1961) and The Haunting (1963), the gothic tradition it clearly descends from – is the decision to make the house itself the monster, rather than any ghost or spirit residing within it. The Rolfs arrive at their rented mansion, represented by the Dunsmuir estate in Oakland (a Neoclassical-Revival property that would serve, three years later, as the funeral home in Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm), with the ordinary hopes of any middle-class family seeking a restorative summer away from the city. The arrangement seems almost too good: a sprawling estate for a fraction of its worth, with the sole stipulation that the owners’ elderly, reclusive mother remain undisturbed in her upstairs suite, fed but never seen. It is the kind of bargain that horror movies have always warned us against, and the Rolfs accept it anyway, because the alternative – an ordinary, affordable summer – holds no appeal against the promise of something grander.
That promise is the film’s real subject. As Marian, played by Karen Black with a performance that finds the perfect register between devotion and derangement, becomes increasingly obsessed with restoring the house to its former glory – cleaning obsessively, dressing in garments discovered in the forbidden suite, discovering portrait after portrait of the home’s previous residents – the film builds one of the most cutting critiques of American consumerism that horror cinema had yet produced. Marian’s slow disappearance into the house’s demands is not merely supernatural possession. It is a portrait of a woman who has confused caring for her possessions with caring for her family, who skips her husband’s aunt’s funeral because the house’s needs have superseded every other obligation in her life.
Oliver Reed’s Ben, meanwhile, is haunted by recurring visions of a smiling, black-clad chauffeur he remembers from his mother’s funeral as a boy – visions that push him toward violence, most disturbingly in a pool scene where his aggression toward his own son edges into something deeply unnerving. Reed’s performance finds an unsettling subtlety in even the film’s nastiest moments, a controlled menace that makes Ben’s worst impulses feel more dangerous than any conventional jump scare the film could offer. The horror behind Marian and Ben’s unraveling is ultimately inseparable from the film’s social observation: What happens to a family when the acquisition and maintenance of a beautiful home becomes more important than the people living inside it?
Bob Cobert’s relentlessly foreboding score and Jacques R. Marquette’s dreamlike cinematography – Marquette having previously shot Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood (1959) – give the film a hazy, nightmarish quality that serves its slow-burn structure well, even as some contemporary critics found that same patience to be a liability, accusing the film of dragging where others might have called it atmospheric.
Perhaps Burnt Offerings’ most significant legacy is the one many casual horror fans do not know: Stephen King has cited it as a major inspiration for The Shining, published the year after the film and later adapted by Stanley Kubrick into one of the defining horror films of the following decade. The lineage is visible in retrospect – the family isolated in a vast, possibly sentient structure, the father’s slow psychological unraveling, and the sense that the building itself carries the accumulated malevolence of everyone who has ever lived and died within its walls. Without Burnt Offerings, it is entirely possible that The Shining, in the form we know it, would not exist.
Dan Curtis would largely leave feature filmmaking behind after Burnt Offerings’ commercial disappointment, finding greater and more lasting success in television, most notably with the sprawling World War II epics The Winds of War (1983) and War and Remembrance (1988), which finally brought him the Emmy Award recognition his career had long deserved. He died in 2006 at the age of 78, leaving behind a significantly impressive body of work.
But for as much as Dan Curtis was celebrated for his television achievements, Burnt Offerings deserves, even 50 years after it premiered, to be remembered on its own considerable merits: as one of the finest horror films of the 1970s, as one of the greatest haunted house movies ever made, and as proof that the scariest thing in any home might not be what haunts it, but what we are willing to sacrifice to keep it.