mark.waltz
There are some genuinely frightening visuals in this "movie of the week" where a seemingly rotting but still living woman calls for help from deep down in the dirt. Olivia de Havilland is a wealthy lady, recently released from a mental institution, happens to come across a dog digging, and upon further discovery happens to see the mud covered woman, and runs screaming into her mansion where her greedy son (Charles Robinson) and dipsomaniac wife (Laraine Stephens) don't seem to believe her. Joseph Cotten as de Havilland's attorney and Walter Pidgeon as her doctor, become involved, revealing the truth and bringing on more shocks. Pretty decent for a "hag horror", and de Havilland gets to do a lot of running around and huffing and puffing, giving motivation for de Havilland's breathy line delivery. At times a bit over the top, at least here she's got a motivation for her melodramatic behavior. Ed Nelson also appears as a character seemingly unrelated to the main plot, second billed, but having less to do than Robinson, whose character is despicable from the moment he comes in. It's all cleverly tied together in an intelligent manner, with the twists and turns deeper than the poor unfortunate lady in the ground.
casaw
The location of the areas attributed to the estate of Olvia DeHavilland's character and surrounding homes is unknown to me (possibly Pasadena, California), but her mansion, inside and out, is located on the Bliss Estate in Monetcito, Califoirnia, which is directly south of Santa Barbara. It sits on 35 acres purchased by the Blisses after their marriage at the beginning of the 20th Century. The mansion has 100 rooms, half of which devoted to servants' quarters. (The exteriors of DeHavilland running from the woman for the first time, passing walls, pillars and a fountain, is not part of the estate.) During WWII Mrs. Edward G. Robinson used the mansion as headquarters for her "Desert Battalion" of 500 women who entertained GIs around the world. For a while after the war it was a girl's school and today it's a retirement village. The main house is still intact.
FriedAlive
Someone hit it on the head when they talked about the dirt caked on the woman's face. It made her look like a monster herself! When the side views of her were on screen I was so scared, I would hide my face against the couch and it was like somehow I could magically still see the horror of it. She looked 500 years old with the dirt! And the moaning, "Helllllp Meeeeeeee" over and over. Id love to see it again now, Im sure like many movies that used to scare me it would seem much tamer now, but anyway, it was so good to find any reference to this movie from my long ago, that I've never met anyone who has seen it. I guess this will be my last post on here. I'm not sure that I can always write ten lines about everything I've seen, and I hate taking the time to apostrophe words when I am typing on the internet. This was an incredibly scary movie to me when I was 7-8 years old but I didn't have 10 lines of material prepared for it, so I guess I will just be enjoying everyone else's posts about obscure movies that I thought I was the only one who had seen it. Anyway, Thanks for listening, and hopefully I have 10 lines and no apostrophe errors, goodnight.
ggcook
Like many others, this is the one horror movie that really affected me when I saw it as a child. I used to have nightmares and get chills thinking about it. I remember really being frightened of the sounds coming out of the ground. Probably shouldn't have watched this type of movie at such a young age. As an adult, I have talked about this movie to friends who had never heard of it and told them that it would be great to find a copy so that they could see it. I'm sure it would still scare the heck out of me now. I would love to get it and invite a bunch of friends over and watch it in our theater room. The impact of this movie would be so much greater on a large screen versus the small television that we had in the 70's. It would be interesting to see how my teenagers would react to it and how they would compare it to the scary movies of today. Obviously, for me, this horror movie did what it intended to do! SCARE ME!!!
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