The House on Sorority Row (1983) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 24

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Pi Theta Sorority? More like Die Theta Sorority!

A week of film anniversaries continues with the 40th Anniversary of The House on Sorority Row. It capitalizes on the immense popularity of the slasher film while attempting to create something unique. We’ll give the girls of Pi Theta a letter grade based on their efforts.

Before Viewing

This is a weird horror film trailer. It starts with the standard deep-voiced narrator talking about the merits of a particular sorority and the girls that join it. But then has an extended 45 second scene with a live band at a dance, looking like a music video. It then returns to the ominous narrator and the killings of women by someone with what appears to be a cane with a sharp object on the top. The 40th Anniversary of the collegiate creeper The House on Sorority Row begins right now.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

In a large house on June 19, 1961, a pregnant Mrs. Slater (Lois Kelso Hunt) is preparing to give birth. Her physician Dr. Beck (Christopher Lawrence) prepares for a C-section. After she awakens she asks about her baby, and the doctor apologizes to her. In the present day, seven young women pose for graduation photos in front of the same house, which is now the Pi Theta sorority. Katherine (Kate McNeil) tells her mom she’s not coming home right away, while Vicki (Eileen Davidson) practices shooting a gun provided by her boyfriend, Rick (Michael Sergio), at an abandoned barn.

Mrs Slater, now the house mother for the sorority, comes back shocked that the girls are still in the residence after term. She tells them in no uncertain terms to leave and not to have a party since she always closes the house for the summer on June 19. Vicki is adamant that the girls will have a party and invites Rick in for some lovemaking. Mrs. Slater hears the noise and slashes Vicki’s waterbed with her bird-handled cane. Vicki vows revenge.

Vicki suggests a prank to get even with Slater, and they hide her cane on an inner tube floating on the unkempt swimming pool. When Slater goes to get it, Vicki threatens her with a gun, making her climb in the water. She shoots the gun several times, but Slater is fine, revealing they were blanks. Slater smacks Vicki with her cane and the gun goes off again, actually shooting the woman, who falls into the pool and drowns. Katherine panics believing they should call the police, but Vicki convinces all of them they need to cover this up.

The girls wrap the body in a blanket and sink it to the bottom of the pool, and then continue to have their graduation party as planned. None of the women appear to have a good time at the party, obviously thinking about their actions. A male partygoer (Kenny Myers) is stabbed in the throat by an unseen assailant. Stevie (Ellen Dorsher) is killed in the basement trying to shut off the breaker to the pool lights. Next, Morgan (Jodi Draigie) is killed after discovering Slater’s body in the attic, which falls through a trapdoor in the closet.

Not questioning the body’s random movements, the remaining girls try to re-dispose of the body by taking it to the cemetery. Diane (Harley Jane Kozak) and Jeanie (Robin Meloy) are killed at the house, while Liz (Janis Ward) and Vicki are murdered at the cemetery. Meanwhile, Katherine finds a secret room in the attic that contains lots of old toys, and a birthday card made out to ‘Eric.’ She also finds a medic alert bracelet that belonged to Mrs. Slater near where Jeanie was attacked.

Calling the number on the medallion she is connected to Dr. Beck. After they find dead sorority girls’ bodies in the pool, he reveals that Slater was part of an illegal fertility program he was running, who gave birth to a boy with “certain abnormalities.” He drugs Katherine, using her as bait to lure Eric out so he can sedate him and return him to the hospital. Unfortunately Beck misjudges and Eric kills him. The killer chases the final girl around the property. Katherine finds Vicki’s gun and tries to shoot Eric, but it’s still loaded with blanks. She manages to lure him to the attic and stab him, apparently killing him as he falls down the stairs. The final image is Eric dressed in a harlequin outfit, opening his eyes.

“Well how about if we give her a good old fashioned sorority prank?” – Vicki

The House on Sorority Row was an early attempt to replicate the slasher formula through a collegiate atmosphere. It was a little bit late to the party on a number of fronts. Slasher films entered the public consciousness in the early 70s with films like  The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Black Christmas (1974), but the genre didn’t take off until the release of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980). There were at least a dozen other films that varied the location and murderer between 1980 and 1983, with titles like My Bloody Valentine (coal mine), Happy Birthday to Me (small town) and Visiting Hours (a hospital). The longer the trend went on, the less original or creative the films tended to be. So where does The House on Sorority Row stack up as a collegiate horror film?

There had been at least three films centered around schools in the previous three years, with more to come. Prom Night (1980), Graduation Day (1981) and The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1982) all featured students, co-ed’s, and school related elements for their horror. The House on Sorority Row borrowed elements from other films, which audiences may or may not have been familiar with to create a slightly more unique brand of film. The film’s main conceit is a prank gone awry and the consequences of the same. This is probably best known as the central theme in the film Carrie, in which a prank on a shy and unpopular girl results in her taking revenge on a number of the students that pranked her. Films like Hell Night and Final Exam (both 1981) all centered around pranks gone wrong, with April Fool’s Day (1986) maybe being one of the best in the horror genre.

Another film that The House on Sorority Row borrows from is the 1955 French film Les Diaboliques, which was remade in 1990 in America as Diabolique with Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani. It concerns two teachers at a school that both hate the headmaster, one of whom is his wife. They devise a plan to kill him and then dump his body in the swimming pool only to have it disappear later. Sound familiar? While Les Diaboliques provide a switcheroo, where the headmaster is not actually dead, this film is very clear that Slater was really killed by the girls. Instead of her coming back to get even with the sorority girls, it’s her “abnormal” son that does the deeds, an element most likely poached from Friday the 13th Part 2.

This brings up the question of how well were the murders committed on film. For the most part, the killings were clever enough. Nothing is overtly outrageous or comical as audiences would see in Friday the 13th Part III, with most of the killings taking place using Slater’s bird cane–which has multiple parts that could be used for killing. However, the first killing has little to no merit, as a random party guest (with no name) is killed for no apparent reason. If Eric is killing the people he saw as responsible for his mom’s murder, then this one makes no sense. And since there was a whole party of students, he only kills the sorority girls, and none of the other guests. Probably the thing that suffers the most is the poor level of the special effects, which is most evident in Jeanie’s death in the bathroom. The production used blood that appeared very magenta on screen, making for a much more comical element than was intended.

The one element that makes no sense is the use of the gun. Maybe this is a modern perspective from the point of view of knowing a little more about firearms, but the weapon switches from having real bullets, to blanks, and back to real bullets. Vicki is shown practicing with the gun (which only appears to introduce the weapon, and for no other reason), which fires real bullets (in the film at least). In the scene with the prank on Mrs. Slater, Vicki shoots a lamp post (which proves that the gun is loaded with live rounds), then appears to shoot Liz in the leg (which was a blank with Liz faking the blood in some way), before firing three to four shots at Mrs. Slater, which never connect, indicating they’re blanks. After a moment of struggle, the gun goes off again and actually shoots the house mother. And then later when Katherine grabs the gun to defend herself against Eric, it is fully loaded with blanks. This is something that would never happen, and makes for the use of the prop as incredibly contrived.

The House on Sorority Row is a mid-level horror film. It has some clever ideas, but the execution (pardon the pun) is just not on par with many other films of the era. It’s clever and misdirecting for the first half of the film, but the telegraphing of the adult son as the killer seems overly obvious, and superficial at best. At least in many other lower grade slasher films, there’s at least one actress that provides a great scream. Here, audiences get silence. For their effort the girls of Pi Theta get a B minus.

Assorted Musings

• One great shot is a smash zoom (or Vertigo zoom) on Katherine as she runs into the hall after being drugged. It’s a clever use of a shot that gets a lot of usage in the 80s.
• Diane is played by Harley Jane Kozak, in her first role. She would later appear in When Harry Met Sally…, Parenthood and Arachnophobia.
• What sort of home owner rips open a waterbed inside their house, regardless of how mad they are with someone living within their house? Mrs. Slater’s destruction of Vicki’s waterbed would have caused more damage to Slater’s building than her anger was worth.