Remember 80’s B-grade heartthrob William Katt? He was in everything for a minute. Here he plays Roger Cobb, a Hollywood writer who takes over his dead aunt’s house to wrap up her affairs, and finds himself overtaken with mourning and nostalgia and decides to stay there and work on his next screenplay, a gritty Vietnam War memoir. As you would expect from a haunted house film, things soon start getting spooky. But in this case it’s less the spirits of the deceased that are haunting him, but more the house itself.

Thinking he is going crazy, Roger tries to keep it together in front of his nosey neighbor Harold (George Wendt), his ex-wife Sandy (Kay Lenz) and others. But soon the hauntings start using his own memories against him, forcing him to relive the loss of his child and offering him bleak hope of finding him again.

Doors open on alternate worlds, windows open on the past, and the darkness behind the bathroom mirror is an impenetrable black void. Somewhere in all this house’s universe is the dead soldier Roger left behind in Vietnam — and Roger’s lost son. Avoiding one and searching for the other, Roger reluctantly enlists the help of Harold and dives right in, prepared for a lengthy war against the house itself.

House is one dark, silly ride into a closet that leads not to Narnia, but to the sweaty jungles of the Vietnam war. As a kid, I used to have dreams that sometimes the rooms in my house would rearrange, or doors and windows would open onto other worlds. I guess stories that do this have always appealed to me, from The Dark Tower to The House with the Clock in its Walls to Dr. Strange.

This is the first movie of a franchise, but it can be hard to track them all down, as there was some weirdness in their release. House 2: The Second Story (arguably an even better film, and not really a sequel) was also released as La Casa Di Helen or informally as La Casa 6, part of the Italian La Casa series of unrelated film rebrands. Then House IV the Repossession, which brings back Roger Cobb. Where’s 3? Well, that’s The Horror Show, which started as a sequel, was changed into its own thing, but is internationally still known as House 3. For some reason. And I guess the next one was numbered as the fourth to avoid confusion?

And there’s a comic.

This is definitely worth a watch, a fun, 80s romp and possibly one of the inspirations for a great many haunted house movies that have come since. It’s a shame that it’s become so obscure, in part because of a one-word title shared with a popular TV series, and in part because the franchise is so scrambled. But do yourself a favor and watch at least this one and House II.