I mirror the comments of the plethora of those before me. Saw this as a 9-year-old on the telly and it stayed with me for a long time. The suffocatingly Gothic overtones, lovingly twisted POV camera-work, evocative jazz score and wonderfully creepy, dilapidated locations still spiral through my brain from time to time. Perhaps most memorable are Oliver Reed's warped, leering eyes staring at a helpless Carol Lynley through the dollhouse window, which has to be one of the more simultaneously terrifying and arty shots from any horror movie of the past 30 years.
This is a flick where the sum of the parts may not quite match the individual moments, but what a bunch of moments they are. The extended cat and mouse stalking of Lynley, the bizarre and frightening secret in the basement, Gig Young and Oliver Reed's spot-on hammy genre acting, the moody cinematography; it all adds up to a movie any fan of Gothic or horror will definitely want to check out. Surprisingly tense and graphic given the era; easily one of the more suggestively violent movies I ever saw on local channels during daylight hours in the 1970s, and considerably more graphic than PSYCHO but clearly owing a debt to it. Quintessential movie for Oliver Reed and Carol Lynley fans; among their best, most interesting work on celluloid.
