La residencia [The House that Screamed] (1969)

(On TV, October 2020) It does happen that films that could have been considered mildly innovative for their time end up completely left behind by later variations on the same theme. Which is the sad case with La residencia, a film that could have been distinctive in 1969, but now feels overfamiliar—or perhaps it’s just me and the many boarding school horror movies I’ve seen over the past few months. Suffice to say that La residencia is, at first glance, a very familiar film—one about students in an all-girl school where creepy and terrifying things are afoot, where there’s rampant abuse and mysteriously disappearing students. Fortunately, the ending goes beyond that, into a semi-inverted Psycho scenario that puts a horror stamp on the result. It’s somewhat surprising for a 1969 film—and the treatment decidedly owes more to the slow-burn aesthetics of The Haunting rather than the wilder giallo movies of the following decade—but we have seen other movies do much more with the same premise, and unfortunately, this does reflect on La residencia despite its overall success.