A 200-Year-Old Sea Captain's House Will Show a Film About a House That Eats Its Guests

The ticket listing puts it in five letters: "Seating is BYOLC (bring-your-own lawn chair)." A few lines down, the same page adds: "Prepare for copious amounts of extremely fake blood on-screen."

That is the plan for Sunday, Oct. 25, from 6 PM to 7:45 PM, on the grounds of the Edward Gorey House at 8 Strawberry Lane in Yarmouth Port. The museum calls it the third annual Halloween Film Festival. This year's single feature is House (1977), which the listing calls "the camp-horror classic."

The address has had three lives. They make the most sense told out of order.

Start with the middle life. In 1979 Edward Gorey bought what the museum describes as a "two-hundred year old sea captain's home on the Yarmouth Port Common," and he owned it until his death in 2000. The museum's biography says he kept cats "during his New York and Cape Cod years." By Wikipedia's account, he left most of his estate to a charitable trust for animals. In 2002 the house opened as a museum.

Gorey was also a serious moviegoer. In a 1998 interview quoted in Mark Dery's biography, he said, "There was a period in New York where I would see a thousand movies a year." We found nothing saying whether House was ever one of them, and this piece won't guess.

Now the first life. The Historical Society of Old Yarmouth traces the front section to Captain Hawes, who built it "probably about 1820." The society says little is known about him beyond his death in 1831.

According to the society, Nathaniel Stone Simpkins bought the house on April 5, 1830, remodeled it and added the middle section. His son George added the back. Simpkins women lived there into the 1970s, until Ethel Simpkins McRee died in 1976. Her heirs sold the house, and in the summer of 1979, the society writes, "Edward Gorey drove by."

That works out to about 146 years in one family before Gorey bought it.

Before the third life, the logistics. The Ticket Tailor page lists Thursday, Oct. 29, as the rain date. It says parking is "available at the House and around the Common" and recommends "a jacket and possibly a blanket." There will be popcorn, snacks and event-only merchandise.

Tickets are sold through Ticket Tailor. Admission is $18, as the Ticket Tailor ticket selector listed it on Oct. 21. House members get a special rate by entering a discount code at checkout. Under the posted policy, cancellations got a full refund through Oct. 10 and a half refund through 11:59 PM on Tuesday, Oct. 20. The policy offers no refund if you cancel after that.

As of Wednesday morning, the National Weather Service forecast called for heavy storms Wednesday night, clearing Thursday morning. After that it showed a sunny Sunday with a high near 57 and a clear night around 48. Forecasts change, so check the listing before you leave. If the forecast holds, it will be jacket weather, as the listing said.

Now the third life, the strangest one. House, or Hausu, was directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi and released by Toho in Japan in July 1977. Film references sum up the plot: a schoolgirl and six classmates visit her aunt's country home, and the house eats them one by one. The aunt's white cat, Blanche, is not on the girls' side. Obayashi reportedly took some ideas from his young daughter, including a house that eats girls.

The film went largely unseen in the United States until Janus Films took it on. It played the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival, toured theaters in 2010, and came out on Criterion on Oct. 26, 2010.

So on Sunday evening, the house a sea captain built about 1820, the one Gorey bought in 1979 and kept until 2000, will show a film about a hungry country house and its cat. The audience will sit on its lawn, right in front of it.

The house in the movie eats its guests. The house on Strawberry Lane only asks you to bring your own chair.

The details