Burnt Offerings (1976) on Netflix
Ben and Marian Rolf rent a remote old mansion for the summer with their son Davey and Ben's Aunt Elizabeth. The bargain comes with the owners' aged mother, locked upstairs.
- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb6.4/1015,335 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes50%
Trailer
Plot summary
Writer Ben Rolf and his wife Marian take their son Davey and Ben's Aunt Elizabeth to a shabby 19th-century mansion in the countryside, rented for the summer at a bargain price from the eccentric Allardyce siblings, Arnold and Rosalyn. In exchange, the Rolfs must keep up the house themselves and leave three meals a day outside the locked suite of the Allardyces' aged mother, who wants no contact with them. The family arrives to find a note: the owners have gone away on an emergency, leaving keys but no address or telephone number. Marian throws herself into restoring the house. Odd occurrences around the house unsettle the family as the summer goes on.
Cast
- Joseph Rileyas Ben's Father
- Todd Turquandas Young Ben
- Orin Cannonas Minister
- Jim Myersas Dr. Ross
Show all 13 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Burnt Offerings (1976)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Oliver Reed needled Bette Davis on set by riding her dinner trolley down a hotel hallway and knocking plates off it, which she took as an insult to her wine, and he later made peace by giving her a dove and a bundle of red roses.
- When he was offered the project Dan Curtis found the novel uninteresting, in particular what he called its “nothing” ending, and joked to himself: “I bet some idiot who doesn't know what he's doing will come along and make this.”
- The film's cinematographer was fired during the shoot because the rushes came back so dark that nothing could be seen on the screen, and the re-takes that followed cost the production two weeks.
- The Dunsmuir House mansion used for filming had never hosted a movie shoot before this production, and it later became the setting for the horror film Phantasm.
- In his 2019 book The Haunted House on Film: An Historical Analysis, writer Paul Meehan calls Burnt Offerings the first film to depict the psychological destruction of a family facilitated by supernatural forces in their home.
