1976’s Burnt Offerings can’t really bear the analysis often heaped on it. Regularly described as either a weighty commentary on materialism or as a metaphorical analysis of the dissolution of the American family, it’s much better seen as a mood piece with not that much to say but an awful lot to give if you give yourself up to it.
There is an American family in it, though, and it does get put through its paces after Ben Rolf (Oliver Reed), wife Marian (Karen Black), son David (Lee Montgomery) and Ben’s aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis) take on a vast, palatial house for the summer at a rent that is at the low end of nothing at all. The house’s owners, a slightly weird couple called Roz (Eileen Heckart) and her invalid brother Arnold (Burgess Meredith), seem overly keen that this family should have it. A red flag none of them picks up on.
One wrinkle. Though Roz and Arnold will not be on the premises over the summer, their aged and entirely solitary mother will be. All someone has to do is make sure old Mrs Allardyce is fed and watered. No contact will be required or desired – a tray left daily in the old lady’s ante-room will suffice.
Over the summer, after fixing up the house a bit and clearing debris from the pool and refilling it, the family settles down to have fun. The idea was that Ben would write, Elizabeth would paint, David would play and Marian would keep house. Instead Ben becomes rage-filled and troubled by dreams featuring a creepy chauffeur, Elizabeth gets sick, David is spooked, though Marian does indeed keep house, in an increasingly obsessive way, as if the house were somehow instructing her. Old Mrs Allardyce remains unseen and unheard upstairs, but Marian becomes obsessed with tending to her needs. Something is afoot.
If you shook together elements of The Exorcist, The Omen, The Shining and The Amityville Horror you probably wouldn’t end up with Burnt Offerings, that is way too much of a claim. But there is a touch of all those films in it, and not in an obviously derivative way. It’s written and directed by Dan Curtis, best known for the TV show Dark Shadows, and that’s really the most obvious comparator, since this is an exercise in moody gothic and things going bump, plus there the fact of a superannuated Hollywood star – Bette Davis here, Joan Bennett in Dark Shadows – to lend a bit of glam.
You would not guess from Davis’s all-in performance that she did not get along with Black and loathed Reed. Davis – head up, regal, voice projected, clear diction – is fantastic in the scenes she shares with the other stars, though her character isn’t really the focus of the weirdness that ensues. Karen Black (four months pregnant and you can tell, particularly in the later scenes) and Oliver Reed are great casting too – Reed’s beefy masculinity is particularly useful, especially as Ben is tested by events. And so is Black’s ability to suggest that Marian is a febrile character built from alternating layers of steel and tissue paper.
The film got a theatrical release but it has the looks of the TV movie, big opening credits as if the screen it’s to be watched on will be small, and lighting that starts out firmly in the “everything on” style of production-line TV before things get more shadowy and gothic later on. The intermittent use of soft filtration on the lens is mystifying.
The usual explanations about what the film is about – materialism or the American family – don’t quite cut it. It appears to be saying more about male and female roles, emasculation and monstrous femininity. But that’s possibly to overthink it. This is a film that’s “about” what we see on screen. A very effective, moody and periodically magnificent slice of gothic horror.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
