Herb Freed, the former theology student turned filmmaker, had made his film debut in 1972 with the political crime drama AWOL before going on to make this interesting misfire three years later. Haunts is by no stretch of the imagination a good film – at times it’s simply awful – but it has an attractive mournful atmosphere and an intriguing, if flawed, final act that hints at a much better film buried beneath the glacial pacing and variable performances.

There are shades of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) running all through Haunts, both films revolving around a disturbed young woman through whose eyes we take in almost the entire film, but who emerges as a terribly unreliable narrator. A small California town is being stalked by a masked killer who we first see massacring a family (though not in any way graphic enough to earn the film more than a ‘PG’ rating) with a pair of scissors. Nearby, the deeply religious Ingrid (May Britt) lives on an isolated farm with her uncle Carl (Cameron Mitchell). Ingrid is deeply disturbed, haunted by memories of childhood abuse and of catching her mother in bed with someone other than her father. Bill Spry (Robert Hippard), a new recruit to her church choir, is attracted to her but she rebuffs him. She narrowly escapes an attack by the scissor-wielding maniac who soon has several other victims to his name and the local cops, led by Sheriff Peterson (Aldo Ray) are baffled. A body turns up at Ingrid’s farm but suspicion focusses on the town’s brutish butcher, Frankie (William Gray Espy) who breaks into her home and rapes her. But all is not as it seems – how much of what Ingrid is experiencing is really happening, and how much of it is the product of her traumatised mind?

Individual scenes and images work well enough and there are plenty of interesting ideas kicking around, but none of it really gels. Freed wasn’t a good enough director to pull it off (he co-wrote the script with his wife Anne Marisse) and on the evidence of the subsequent Beyond Evil (1980) and Graduation Day (1981) he never really became one. The film plods, stretching its meagre ideas too thin and while Freed and his director of photography Larry Secrist occasionally make atmospheric use of their foggy Mendocino locations, but there’s a technical crudity to the film that frequently trips it up.

Freed was fortunate enough to secure the services of composer Pino Donnagio for his first American film and he contributes a classy, diverse score that runs the gamut of sweeping strings, distorted guitars and ambient sounds. But like everything else in the film, it’s often deployed clumsily. But it gives the film a sheen of elegance that it would have sorely missed otherwise. It helps to underline the fact that Haunts is a surprisingly chaste film, low on gore and nudity.

But the script takes too many detours that distract away from the more interesting main thrust of the plot – a scene in a bar feels a little improvised adds nothing to the story and could easily have been cut with little detriment to the film. It all comes to an end with too many plot strands still dangling – not even a lengthy epilogue can clear up all the unanswered questions.

Performances range from the amateurish and barely tolerable to May Britt who is rather good as the tormented Ingrid. Swedish-born Britt had enjoyed a modest career in European and American films but had retired from acting in 1960 following her marriage to Sammy Davis Jr to concentrate on raising her family. Haunts marked a one-off return to film after which she made a few appearances on television before retiring again. Elsewhere, Cameron Mitchell wanders in and out of the narrative looking confused by it all (he later told Tom Weaver that he didn’t really understand what Freed was trying to do with the film) and Aldo Ray simply looks out of sorts – he was still a few years from being diagnosed with the throat cancer that would eventually take his life in 1991 but he’s already looking and sounding unwell.


Haunts is worth sticking with for the final revelations and twists and for a literally last second intrusion of the supernatural. Some have found the final scenes a bit too much and in fairness, the extended epilogue does tend to unbalance the film but it does surprise with its out-of-left-field reveals. It’s also strangely quite moving though it really needed a director more proficient than Freed and an actor more expressive than Mitchell to really do it justice.