Can see why some dislike this, but for me it works

I think I get why some wouldn't like this flick. It looks very cheap, the acting is very wooden and awkward, and the script doesn't seem to make sense sometimes.

This is not a movie that teases and holds your attention in the way that most people are used to. the cinematography is not particularly compelling, and the only real technical virtuosity is in its gore effects. Even that has a competent yet cheap Grand Guignol look to it. There is a dry and tedious quality to House By the Cemetery, like cleaning your grandparent's attic.

Still, and this is something that I think is lost on moviegoers now, HBTC works because it is like a dream. I think you were kind of meant to just experience it rather than have it totally walk you through everything.

This isn't a cop-out for poor filmmaking either because I think this actually WAS a well-made film. The acting is wooden but not really bad. The pacing is strange but still somehow effective.

Whatever the director's intentions were, I got a very strange feeling that I got to know Dr. Freudstein a little, and he was a very disciplined German man who was once obsessed with immortality, and he has since out-lived his humanity. Now he's a self-made medical aberration that kills people. He's not a monster, it's just a part of his personality. Okay he is a monster, but monsters are human beings.

See this is why I find it worth wading through the cheapness and boredom of some of these more obscure movies, because they kind of hit on strange and subtle things that big, more exciting studio flicks couldn't touch with a ten foot pole.

It's like reading some random philosophy book at the library by some vanishingly obscure Italian author, and then being surprised by how germaine and interesting some of it is, even though it is so strange and out-there.