Burnt Offerings

A family take a cheap summer let on an enormous California mansion, on the condition that they leave meals outside the door of an elderly woman upstairs who is never seen. The house is falling apart. As the family declines, it repairs itself.

Dan Curtis, who created Dark Shadows, directed it as a slow, sunlit dread rather than a gothic, and the horror is domestic: a marriage curdling, a father becoming violent in the pool, a mother drawn to the room upstairs.

Karen Black is excellent, Oliver Reed is frightening as the father, and Bette Davis plays the aunt who withers as the house thrives.

The chauffeur, a smiling man in sunglasses from the father's childhood nightmares, is the image that stays, and it is one of the most quietly terrifying reveals in 1970s horror.

It is an obvious ancestor of The Shining.