Sorority House Massacre (1986) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 13

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The hazing rituals at this college are a tad extreme!

Far from the first, Sorority House Massacre invokes a psycho killer who targets the girls that are living in his childhood home. It’s an interesting riff on the slasher genre while creating a stronger feminist take on this overused horror model.

Before Viewing

At a college sorority house, women are screaming and knives are flying. There are many shots of different female characters running, falling, and screaming as a hand with a knife draws blood. One girl questions if the house may actually be haunted. Cut to a misty flashback shot of a little girl opening the door to the house. The narrator repeats the title of the film reminding audiences that this is a “slash course in terror.” Welcome to the Sorority House Massacre.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

The film opens with Beth (Angela O’Neill) in a hospital recounting her tale. She arrives at the Theta Omega Theta Sorority just as most of the girls and their boyfriends are leaving for Memorial Day weekend. She has a dream of arriving at the house and seeing three young girls in the front yard warning her to be careful. Inside at the dining table mannequins are arranged at the places, a large buck knife at another. Blood leaks from the ceiling and when she goes upstairs she finds a broken jar of marbles and a bloody pool in a bed. Beth’s dream is intercut with an agitated patient in a mental hospital being restrained by orderlies. She is awakened by Sara (Pamela Ross) the next morning, who asks about Beth’s cool scar on her upper arm.

Sara introduces Beth to the other girls staying over the weekend, Linda (Wendy Martel) and Tracy (Nicole Rio). They all attend classes and Sara’s boyfriend Andy (Marcus Vaughter) recounts a tale about psychic brain waves between a mother cat and her kittens. Beth has a dreamlike flashback of dead parents in the Sorority’s front room and seeing a man with a knife standing over her. With the majority of people out of the house, the three girls–minus Beth who doesn’t want to get naked on camera–strip and try on clothes for five minutes. Beth recounts her dream to them to which Sara grabs her book of dream imagery and they figure out what everything means.

The crazy dude who keeps getting screen time finally escapes, having gotten more and more agitated. He kills an orderly on his way out, hops the fence, enters a local hardware store, steals a knife–using it to kill the shop owner (Ray Spinka), and then steals a car. Four guys show up at the Sorority house, Andy, Linda’s boyfriend Steve (Thomas R. Mustin) who is leaving to go rafting without her, Tracey’s boy toy Craig (Joe Nassi), and John (Vinnie Bilancio) who heard that there may be another girl to hook up with. Halfway through the film, we finally get the name of this psycho guy, Robert “Bobby” Henkel. John tells the girls that Bobby murdered his entire family, including his little sisters, about 13 or 14 years ago in this very house!

Beth has another dream that Bobby’s murder weapon–a buck knife–is hidden under a brick in the fireplace. The kids find it and Linda suggests hypnotizing Beth–she’s done it before. Outside the house, Andy is on his way to work when he is killed by Bobby. The hypnosis reveals (to the audience at least) that Beth was a young girl in the house at the time of the killings who somehow survived. In the backyard, Tracy and Craig are making out in a teepee when Bobby attacks, killing Tracey and injuring Craig. Naked Craig runs into the house past Sara and Linda and tries to call the police, but the phone line has been cut.

Beth and John are sleeping (honestly) on the couch, but in her dream, a killer comes for her and she awakens just as Bobby stabs John. She runs into the upstairs room and barricades the door with Craig, Sara, and Linda. Sara remembers they have a fire ladder and Craig goes out first to hold the ladder steady. He is killed by Bobby who begins to climb towards the women. They manage to unhook the ladder knocking him unconscious below. They make a break for it into the backyard, but Sara trips over Tracey’s body and is then killed too. Linda and Beth hide in the basement because they’re not thinking straight.

Beth finally realizes that she must be a fourth sister of the Henkel family because Bobby called her “Laura” outside. This makes no sense to Linda until Beth reveals her middle name is Beth, but her first name is Laura. They make their way out of the basement and Beth sees the other knife by the fireplace. Bobby attacks her and she drops it. Linda is ineffectively smacking Bobby with a shovel before finally knocking him out. Nope, whoops! He rises and kills Linda. Beth crawls towards a dropped knife while Bobby stabs her in the legs with his. She finally grabs the blade and stabs Bobby through the neck. The police arrive and take her to a hospital. In the present day, she is surprised to see a bloody Bobby from behind the privacy curtain and awakens, screaming! No one is there.

“I just can’t get this dream out of my head.” – Beth

Tonight’s entry, Sorority House Massacre is the first movie in a theme week made up of collegiate slasher films inspired by Randy’s quote from Scream 2. In that film, he asks the killer what his favorite scary film is. “Wait. Let me guess. The House On Sorority Row? Dorm That Dripped Blood? Splatter University? Graduation Day? Final Exam?” And with that, I have the majority of films to review in a theme week. Since by sheer coincidence, I reviewed The House on Sorority Row last year, I have made a substitution with this alternate Sorority film, which is not too dissimilar. On first appearance, this 1986 film appears to be a rip-off from the much more successful 1978 film Halloween. A sister (for this film, multiple sisters) was murdered by a brother in a house where different people now live. The killer was committed to an institution where he stayed for some time until breaking out in the present day. He returns to the scene of the original crime and continues killing people, attacking his sister–who doesn’t realize she is related at the time. Both killers also use knives of one kind or another. It’s pretty blatantly a rip-off. However, there’s more to Sorority House Massacre than just the similar plotting. What sets this film apart from the majority of its brethren is the writer and director is a woman. This was Carol Frank’s only film that she wrote and directed after working as the assistant for Amy Holden Jones, the director and co-writer of another massacre, The Slumber Party Massacre from 1982. Sorority House Massacre doesn’t have quite the same feminist punch or tongue-in-cheek scenes as its predecessor but does contain elements that are not common to horror and slasher films.

One of the first things that stands out is the agency that the women all have in the film. They’re not exactly helpless females and do take some effort to kill. The first three deaths in the film are men; an orderly, the hardware store owner, and Andy. Tracy is the first woman to be killed over halfway through the film which seems like an initial deviation from the formula; even though she dies because she’s having sex with her boyfriend in the teepee. In a scene about ten minutes before that, the ominous music starts with a POV camera stalking Tracy into the dark backyard. Just as someone comes up behind her, she turns and knees them in the groin. Of course, it’s Craig, her boyfriend. He apologizes, twice, “Boy am I sorry.” And then Tracy admits that of course, she wouldn’t have done it if she knew it was him. Beth is not a formula lead in the film either. She has a short haircut, giving her an early Courtney Cox look. And she’s a survivor. She survived Bobby’s original attack a decade or more before, and she survives him again this time too. However, there are still some natural slasher tropes that exist. Sara walks backward in the dark and trips over Tracy’s dead body leading to her demise. Linda thinking that the killer was suitably out cold when she turned away from him led to her death. In fact, Andy probably gets the worst death, aggressively confronting Bobby and getting immediately stabbed for it. There is also a difference in the nudity in the film. It’s not graphic or voyeuristic. It’s just three girls playing around in a montage as they try on clothes. In fact, it feels very unsexy in comparison to the normal overt nudity that horror films contain.

With over 100 slasher films released between 1980 and the October 1986 release of Sorority House Massacre, there are many other films to compare it to. Yet the film has some things that it does which make it more interesting than many others in the genre. A lot is made about Beth’s dream. Linda knows a lot about dreams being a student of whatever type of major analyzes dreams. Sara has a book on dream imagery, and the characters take a look at the elements of Beth’s dream, something that wasn’t even done in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street. The imagery of the dolls is about things belonging to her childhood, the table and place setting have to do with family, and the knife of the killer is a phallic symbol. These Sorority girls get into way more pop psychology than any other slasher film I’ve seen. Usually, it’s the critics who have to point out the phallic imagery. However, the film also fails on a number of points as well, falling into various tropes and just some poorly shot and edited sequences.

For starters the pacing of the film, especially at the beginning of the film, is atrocious. Beth’s entrance to the Sorority House is intercut not only with flashbacks of an empty sorority house and a little girl but also with scenes of Bobby tossing and turning in his cell. Nothing makes sense, and there’s no context for any of it. The only way the dreams stand out is the soft focus and bright daylight when compared to the other shots. It’s understandable that the goal of these types of films is to throw the audience off a little, making them wonder what is real and what is imaginary, but this is too much. The remaining dreams along with the dozen other clues in the film create so much foreshadowing that audiences figure out the “secrets” in plenty of time before the other characters. It’s crazy that the various classes the students attend, the day before Memorial Day weekend, deal with concepts of deja vu, clairvoyance, psychoanalysis, and behavior modifications, while Sara talks about a psychic beacon leading a pig to travel from Ohio to Florida to find its family, and Andy recounting a mother cat knowing psychically that her kittens were being killed. It’s okay to put one or two of these types of teases into a film, but this is just overkill.

As with The House on Sorority Row, mentioned above, this film also takes place in a house full of trauma. In that Sorority film, a woman gives birth to a baby sometime in the past that is deformed in some way. He is hidden away without the woman’s knowledge. In the present day, the woman serves as a house mother for a college Sorority and is a cantankerous person. She is accidentally killed when a prank the Sorority sisters play backfires. Suddenly the girls begin getting killed one by one by, what turns out to be, the woman’s deformed son who returns and finds his mother dead. That killer is out for revenge, whereas Bobby–the killer here–feels like he hasn’t been able to finish the job. The psychic impulses that he receives from, or shares with, Beth draw him back to the scene of the original crime. Who’s idea is it to turn these houses into Sororities? Certainly, there should be some kind of disclosure documentation.

As a copy of a copy of a clone of a slasher film, Sorority House Massacre is not as bad as it could be. It has non-standard elements that set it apart from the majority of films with characters that are not stupid. But the special effects could have been done better. The killings are mostly uninspired and the way that a real person would commit the acts, not some homicidal screen killer. Who comes to a horror film to watch an accurate depiction of a stabbing? Stay tuned for the rest of this week as 31 Days of Horror looks at a whole cohort of other collegiate horror films.

Report Card

• Arithmetic: Nine deaths including the killer, apparently. Meets expectations.
• Science: Proficient in the use of a knife, but lacking in the variety of killings that genre fans look forward to. Below expectations.
• Phys Ed: Little to no running involved. Students are clumsy and lack basic survival skills. Below expectations.
• Fine Arts: Fluent in the art of suspense, point-of-view shots from the killer’s perspective, and fake-out scares. Meets expectations.
• Foreshadowing: Sorority House Massacre excels in this arena. Exceeds expectations.
• Final Grade: C+
• Teacher comments: As an homage to her mentor, Carol Frank included The Slumber Party Massacre on a television screen as the movie the students were watching.