On the Big Screen: The Haunted

We watch a lot of movies in our house. My husband and fellow author, Nate, has a collection of over 5,000 DVDs. While he enjoys a healthy variety of films, it's classic and contemporary horror, and obscure and low budget productions that are among his favorites.

One such movie that fulfills both requisites is a made-for-TV movie The Haunted (1991), based on the book The Haunted: One Family's Nightmare (1988) by Robert Curran. Nate remembered watching this haunted house movie on TV as a kid because it scared him. It's about a family who experience demonic happenings after moving into a new home, eventually contacting Ed and Lorraine Warren, notable paranormal researchers involved in the Amityville Horror, the Conjuring, and Annabelle fame.

As a made-for-TV movie, it was never available on home video, Recently, Nate found a bootleg DVD. As we settled in to watch it one Saturday evening, I was pleased to see that most of it was set in the 1970s and care was taken to dress the actors and sets quite accurately.

Still, it was surprising to glimpse two Merry Mushrooms canisters on the kitchen counter as the dad worked under the sink. Excited, I stepped through this and many other scenes looking for more mushrooms. There was a pot that looked like it might be the All Purpose Cooker but, due to the low quality of the transfer, was inconclusive.

When the movie jumped ahead to the mid-1980s, the Merry Mushrooms were replaced with blue and white county-look canisters. Kudos to the set director for such attention to detail!