The House That Dripped Blood

• Robert Bloch adapted his own short stories for the screenplay, with segment-specific dialogue contributions from Russ Jones on "Waxworks" and Richard Matheson on "Sweets to the Sweet."
• Jon Pertwee, who plays washed-up horror star Paul Henderson, said he modeled the character on his real-life friend and castmate Christopher Lee.
• Pertwee later wrote that his segment was shot as broad comedy on set until Amicus's producer stepped in mid-production and demanded a straight-horror tone -- leaving the finished cut with a noticeably uneven mix of styles.
• Principal photography ran a tight four weeks, June 29 to July 28, 1970, based mainly at Shepperton Studios, with exterior street scenes shot nearby in Weybridge, Surrey.
• The fourth segment, "The Cloak," adapts Bloch's short story of the same name, first published in the pulp magazine Unknown in 1939 and later collected in his 1945 anthology 'The Opener of the Way.'
• The film's US distributor was Cinerama Releasing Corporation, which gave it a theatrical release on April 2, 1972 -- more than a year after its UK debut in February 1971.

The house doesn't cause supernatural events -- it strips away the rationalizations its tenants use to deny what they already want. The novelist wants to be destroyed by his own creation, the widower already knows exactly what his daughter is capable of and isolates her out of fear rather than protection, and the actor wants permission to become a monster. The property is a confession booth, not a curse.

The four segments map to four stages of cinematic horror's self-awareness: the writer fears his own fiction, the waxwork collector fears art that breathes, the widower fears the monster in his family, and the actor fears the costume that wears him. The whole film is about horror consuming its own creators.

Detective Holloway's investigation is itself a fifth segment he doesn't recognize. His rational policeman's certainty mirrors the denial of every previous tenant, and his final walk into the house suggests the property always saves a room for someone who believes they're immune.

A cursed cottage in the fictional village of Bray, near Berkshire, claims four successive tenants across four Amicus anthology segments. A horror novelist's fictional strangler seems to walk off the page and into his living room. A lonely retired man grows obsessed with a wax museum's Salome figure — and learns its keeper has been beheading people to keep the sculpture's likeness fresh. A brooding widower keeps his young daughter in near-total isolation, insisting to her governess that the girl is a witch like her late mother — and his fear turns out to be justified when her magic kills him instead. Finally, a fading horror-film star buys a vampire's cloak and discovers the garment has an agenda of its own. Scotland Yard's Inspector Holloway investigates the star's disappearance, hears the house's history from a wary estate agent — and walks in anyway.