DAY 24. Slashers!

Now, if you’re like me, you spent the better part of the 80s and 90s digging through the bottom shelves of mom-and-pop video stores, looking for big, chunky VHS big-boxes with insane cover art. Back in ’84, you might have rented this one from Embassy Pictures under the name Delusion, or maybe you grabbed the UK import from Sultan Video called The House Where Death Lives. Either way, you were in for a trip.

Our story kicks off with Meredith Stone (Squirm herself, Patricia Pearcy), a nurse who takes a gig at the massive, spooky Fairlawn estate. Her patient? Ivar Langrock, a wealthy, elderly gentleman played by none other than classic Hollywood royalty Joseph Cotten! Seriously, seeing the guy from Citizen Kane and Shadow of a Doubt navigating a sleazy, early-80s regional psycho-slasher is worth the price of admission alone.

Meredith is barely through the door before she notices a locked room on the second floor. Naturally, she snoops and finds Wilfred, Ivar’s mentally challenged son, who is kept hidden away. But that’s just the tip of the dysfunctional family iceberg. Soon, Gabriel (John Dukakis), Ivar’s grandson who has been living on a hippie commune in Arizona, shows up, and that’s when the bodies start dropping.

First, the family dog is found hanging from a tree. Then Wilfred takes a fatal dive out of a window. Next, Phillip the butler gets absolutely pulverized in the wine cellar under a fallen wine rack and a sturdy table leg. When the estate gardener and a detective get brutally bludgeoned to death, too, attorney Jeffrey Fraser (David Hayward) starts pointing fingers.

Is it the creepy commune grandson? Is it a disgruntled employee? Or is Meredith’s own dark past—involving an institutionalized mother and a predatory father—bleeding into reality?

Back in 1981, critics like Arthur Cabasos of the Abilene Reporter-News absolutely hated this flick, calling it “one of those boring horror movies” where the killer couldn’t even find a cool weapon, opting instead for “a sturdy coffee table leg to the temple.“

Man, critics just didn’t get it, did they?

Delusion isn’t trying to be Friday the 13th or The Burning. It’s not an effects-heavy gore-fest. It’s an old-school, gothic whodunit wrapped in a sleazy slasher coat of paint. I mean, the poster art emulates the classic Charles Allan Gilbert All Is Vanity optical illusion! Cinematographer Stephen Posey fills the screen with dread, and composer Don Peake supplies a score that keeps you perpetually uneasy. Sure, it’s low-key. Sure, it’s a bit slow-moving. But the atmosphere is thick enough to cut with a knife (or, well, a table leg).

Look, if you need a body count every five minutes and teenagers getting decapitated in sleeping bags, Delusion might test your patience. But if you have a soft spot for regional Americana horror, gothic melodrama, and a psychological twist ending that completely flips the script on everything you just watched, this is for you.

Patricia Pearcy gives a wonderfully unhinged performance, Joseph Cotten brings that effortless class, and Alice Nunn (Large Marge from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure!) even shows up as Duffy! What more do you want?

You can watch this on Tubi.