Dear all,
This has been driving me crazy for no real reason other than its just driving me crazy …. hope you can help. I am after the title of a horror film. I think US early 1980’s. It features a bunch of people stuck in a big evil house. The defining scene I remember is one of the victims suddenly finds a window or door open and escapes the house into the night and its pouring with rain. They run across a courtyard past a circle of grass with a terrible looking tree in the middle. As they pass the tree it comes alive and its leaf-free branches ensnare the victim and drag them underground to their death. Any ideas? many thanks in advance.
However Nevena your suggestion of using the keywords search in IMDB has come up trumps. The only key word appropriate was Haunted House and it brought up several thousand. But by restricting my search to start in the 1970s this looked strangely familiar …. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077524/ The Evil. IMDB describes a scene of meeting the devil in a completely white room which suddenly rang a bell. When I checked out the corresponding entry on Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evil_(1978_film) ) it describes the following scene which I had slightly misremembered … “The electricity causes the bars in one of the windows to melt, and Raymond leaps through the window. As he runs away from the house, however, the ground beneath him turns to quicksand, and he sinks into the mud, drowning.” So no tree, but that’s what I was thinking of – its definitely that one. Thanks again for your help it was instrumental in getting the right answer.
Cool!
I’m so glad I helped
And its on Youtube too to boot. Just watched the scene I remembered and it is as terrible as I remember … the house suddenly opening a window for no reason and the character needlessly wandering into the quicksand/mud continuing into it when they could have just walked around it! They even had to take two steps into it!!