Burnt Offerings

Burnt Offerings is a 1976 American supernatural horror film co-written and directed by Dan Curtis and starring Karen Black, Oliver Reed, Bette Davis, and Lee H. Montgomery, with Eileen Heckart, Burgess Meredith and Anthony James in supporting roles. It is based on the 1973 novel of the same name by Robert Marasco. The plot follows a family who begins to interpersonally dissolve under supernatural forces in a large estate they have rented for the summer. Produced by Alberto Grimaldi's Produzioni Europee Associati (PEA), Burnt Offerings was filmed on location at the historic Dunsmuir House in Oakland, California. It was given a domestic limited theatrical release through United Artists in August 1976, which expanded later that fall. While the film received mixed reviews from critics, it won several awards in 1977. In the years since its release, the film has been analyzed by film scholars as a commentary on materialism and the dissolution of the American family. Plot Writer Ben Rolf, his wife Marian, and their 12-year-old son Davey tour a large, shabby, remote neo-classical 19th-century mansion to rent for the summer. The home's eccentric owners, elderly siblings Arnold and Rosalyn Allardyce, offer them a bargain price of $900 for the entire summer, with one odd request: Their elderly mother will continue to live in her upstairs suite, and the Rolfs are to provide her with meals during their stay. The old woman is obsessed with privacy and will not interact with them, so meals are to be left in her sitting room outside her locked bedroom. The family arrives at the house with Ben's elderly Aunt Elizabeth. Marian becomes obsessed with caring for the home, and wears the Victorian-era garments she finds in Mrs. Allardyce's suite, while distancing herself from her family. Of particular interest to her is Mrs. Allardyce's sitting room, which contains a massive collection of framed portraits of people from different eras, apparently former occupants of the house. Mrs. Allardyce's meals go mostly untouched, according to Marian. Various unusual circumstances occur during the summer; after Davey hurts himself playing, a dead plant starts to grow again; Ben cuts his hand on a champagne bottle, and a dead light bulb is mysteriously repaired; Ben is haunted by a vision of an eerie, malevolently-grinning hearse driver whom Ben first saw at his mother's funeral years earlier.