Michael J. Murphy’s low budget direct-to-video horror classic Invitation To Hell (1982) follows a young woman named Jacky (Becky Simpson) as she contends with demonic possessions, cursed estates, and treacherous friends over the course of a Halloween weekend. Murphy mines British Gothic horror and folklore to create a spectacle with a pulpy condensed narrative. All of Murphy’s artistic ingenuity is on display as he fashions a stylized work from extremely limited resources.
Invitation To Hell feels like an adaptation of an old EC horror comic in terms of its narrative expediency. The economics of plot rely completely on the audience’s familiarity with different traditions of English horror in order to work. There are no real characters in Invitation To Hell, only archetypal representations culled from popular culture. Likewise the mechanics of the supernatural in the film follow an incoherent kind of dream logic derived from comics, movie serials, and paperback novels. In short, Invitation To Hell is British horror distilled to its fundamental elements and executed with Murphy’s unique brand of grimy grittiness.
There is an art to Murphy’s ability to reduce complex genre traditions to their basic tropes and from there string them together into a kind of mood-piece or meditation on the pleasures offered by such spectacles. Invitation To Hell is as concerned with genre reduction as much as it is with the escapism offered by nudity and gore. In this way Invitation To Hell could be seen as a more commercially viable iteration of Pere Portabella’s post-modernist horror deconstruction Cuadecuc, vampir (1970). Invitation To Hell is more commercial because it prioritizes escapism rather than intellectual reflection, though it is not devoid of the latter.
Murphy’s gift as an artist working in genre cinema is his ability to create an effective film that goes beyond superficial pleasures. But this ability is as much about the critical intelligence of the filmmaker as it is his craftsmanship. Murphy’s analogue effects and lighting exploit the limits of the make up and props in the film to their fullest. Time and again Murphy manages to make something that objectively looks corny or simply doesn’t work and turn it into an utterly macabre figure or object.
Of course films that are as rough around the edges as those of Michael J. Murphy aren’t for everyone. But cinephiles with an adventurous spirit or an open mind will find Invitation To Hell a rather rewarding little horror film. Invitation To Hell is a great film to kick off the spooky season that gets my highest recommendation.
