Burnt Offerings and the Horror of Homemaking

Burnt Offerings is a film that does not create horror but reveals it. It takes a mundane reality, a possibility, as its premise, then pushes that premise to the farthest possible conclusion, and thereby reveals the horror and the tragedy. The premise it carries forward is that the home and the homemaking be privileged above the family itself. The conclusion is a sterile, vampiric force.

The house at the center of the story is owned, ostensibly, by three people: An eccentric brother-sister pair and their unseen mother, who never leaves her locked bedroom. Like the brother and sister Femm in James Whale's Old Dark House, they form a naturally sterile family arrangement. There are no offspring to take the household, which they are convinced is immortal. The denizens are mortal and unproductive, but the household is immortal. The home is thus elevated above those to dwell in it. Most central to the household is the mother, for whom they profess love; the matriarch is unseen, but her presence is felt, the presence of homemaking for its own sake.

The protagonists, forming a standard example of the modern, Anglo-American family, consisting of a father (Oliver Reed), a mother (Karen Black), a child, and an elderly aunt of the father's (Bette Davis), are the antithesis. They are clearly reproductive and productive. They have the notion of spending the summer out of the city. They want a brief home to be at the service of their family--the most important thing in their lives--until they go back to another home.

Upon arrival at the manor, it is shown to be in a delapidated state. We later learn that it is in this state because its upkeep demands the energies and lifeforce of families in order to sustain itself. It is this that gives the sterile household its sinister implications. Not able to maintain itself by propagation, this household supports itself by the destruction of other beings. The home must devour the family that will be attempting to make their homes in it, leaving it again an empty barren place until the next family arrives.

The manner in which the house proceeds to achieve this goal is significant. It acts primarily upon Karen Black. When she first sees the delapidated manor, she betrays her obsessive personality, declaring, "I just hate waste!" She repeats the sentiment upon finding the greenhouse full of dead plants. The brother-sister couple left only two injunctions prior to giving up the house, that the family love the house and care for the old mother who refuses to leave the house. Coupled with Black's obessive personality, her desire to build the house to a glorious home, these injunctions drive Black to subordinate her family, for whom she is ostensibly making the home, to the home itself.

Black begins to withdraw from activities with her husband and son in order to lounge in the sitting room of the old mother. This specter of matriarchy, it is revealed, is gradually taking possession of Black. She dresses in antiquated clothing. She begins sleeping in the sitting room, listening to a music box. She only comes downstairs to engage in homemaking, endless homemaking, unrolling rugs, polishing mirrors, setting table, scrubbing the concrete (!) around the pool. Any accident to disrupt this is treated as a criminal offense. The house flourishes under this treatment, whereas the family languishes, to the point that Oliver Reed asks Black to choose the family or the house. Tellingly, she does not answer.

Oliver Reed's father character is frustratingly impotent. While the audience can see the direction things are tending, and while he also seems suspicious, Black's weak but stubborn protestations always dominate. The more foolishly and strangely she behaves, the more he gives in to her demands. It is symptomatic of the feminization of males in Western society. Feminism is not a purely positive force, but also a negative one, insofar as it involves the reduction of masculinity, the feminization of men. The one thing that would save the family is for the father to take control, end the homemaking, and get them away from the house. However, Reed consistently bows to matriarchal authority: Black's authority, and by extension the authority of the unseen woman in the attic. The presence of Bette Davis as his aunt adds to this: he is a mama's boy of sorts. His one, haunting obsessing is a mysterious chauffeur who grinned broadly at his mother's funeral--his horror is over a chauffeur who does not regard the passing of his mother with sufficient solemnity. He has been feminized; he's a pussy. At a certain point, Reed is rendered completely immobile and watches powerlessly as his son is nearly drowned, encapsulating his complete impotence as his wife's domination and obsession increases. In the last moments, his fault is to let his wife return to the house against his protests; he had the power to force her to stay, but he chose not to use it, and his family is destroyed.

The somewhat predictable ending is that the old woman upstairs does not seem to exist; rather, Black becomes her, having been absorbed into the role. After she kills her husband and the chimney collapses on her son, the brother and sister return, pleased to find the house in perfect condition, as if new, and their 'glorious' (their word) mother returned to her throne in the attic. The house has renewed itself as the perfect home, but at the expense of a family, of souls to dwell within and enjoy the home. All that remains is the sterile, vampiric couple who are, it seems, entirely at the service of the house.

Thus is the horror of the film a revelation, deriving from this disruption of the regular order that privileges families over homes. The revelation is that infinite homemaking is the destruction of the family itself. And the endless homemaking derives from the domination of the regular homemaking member of the family, the female; a perverse, matriarchal authority preys upon productive family forms.