The Hearse, a 1980 horror film, harkens back to an earlier time, when a haunted house and a creepy mystery were all that was required to give an audience a good scare. Unfortunately, director George Bowers and his crew forgot that one basic element that even a classically-styled horror movie can’t do without: imagination. From start to finish, The Hearse is a routine fright flick, and never once does it bring anything new to the table.
In need of a change, recently divorced schoolteacher Jane Hardy (Trish Van Devere) decides to spend the summer at an old country house that belonged to her late Aunt, who died 30 years earlier under bizarre circumstances. The house has been abandoned for decades, and Pritchard (Joseph Cotton), the local lawyer who handled the aunt’s will, was hoping to buy it from Jane’s family. Needless to say, he’s none too happy that Jane is suddenly interested in the old place, and does what he can to discourage her from staying.
As it turns out, Pritchard isn’t the only one…show more content… Even by 1980 standards, the scares are as generic as they come (banging doors, quick glimpses of a ghost in a mirror, etc), and while Jane is, indeed, a determined, strongminded woman, she also isn’t very bright (she doesn’t go to the police when someone breaks into her house one evening). Yet the film’s most disappointing aspect is its central mystery, which is anything but mysterious. In fact, it’s as predictable as they come, making the “big reveal” at the end a major disappointment.
Even in 1980, when slasher films were all the rage, it was still possible to make a decent haunted house movie; The Changeling (which also co-starred Van Devere, playing opposite her real-life husband George C. Scott) was released that year, and is a damn scary motion picture. But then, The Changeling wasn’t afraid to try something new, whereas The Hearse gives us nothing we haven’t seen
