The House of the Damned

• Gonzalo Suárez was a published novelist before he ever directed — his first book, De cuerpo presente, came out in 1963, three years before he made his first film.
• The production was British exploitation producer Harry Alan Towers' last Spanish horror picture, and one of the rare ones he didn't hand to his usual go-to director, Jess Franco — Towers and Franco had made nine films together in Spain just a few years earlier.
• It was shot on real locations around Suárez's home region of Asturias — Gijón, Celorio, Niembro, and Villaviciosa — not on a studio backlot.
• Cinematography was shot by Carlos Suárez, the director's own brother.
• Despite the horror-movie title, critics and catalogers consistently note the film is really a crime drama about a hunt for stolen gold, not a supernatural haunting.
• The English title is a coincidence shared with an unrelated 1963 American haunted-house programmer directed by Maury Dexter — a completely different film that still gets mixed up with this one in databases.

The daughter's silence can be read two ways — real catatonic trauma from watching her father die, or a defense she's keeping up on purpose, since the second she talks, the relatives circling her have no more use for her.

Pleasence framing his return as guilt or debt-paying reads as cover — his real drive is the same greed for the gold that got him locked up for murder in the first place.

The title's mismatch with the actual plot doubles as the film's own point: nobody in this house is haunted by a ghost, they're haunted by what the promise of gold does to family loyalty.

An ex-convict walks straight back into the house of the man he murdered. Gonzalo Suárez's 1974 Spanish thriller sends Donald Pleasence's newly-released prisoner back to the family he wronged eight years earlier — hunting a gold statuette he and his victim once dug up together. The dead man's daughter knows where it's hidden, but she hasn't spoken a word since the night she watched her father die. Pleasence gets her sprung from the asylum, and the relatives circling the house treat her like a lock they just need the right combination for. Shot on location in Suárez's home region of Asturias, the film wears a haunted-house title but plays as a slow-burn crime drama — the real damnation here isn't a ghost, it's a family picking apart a broken woman for gold.