Home isn’t always where the heart is

When I was in seventh grade, my Naval officer father was transferred to Newport, R.I. He and my mother bought a small house in nearby Middletown, a smallish three-bedroom bungalow set in a quiet suburb.

It wasn’t a particularly impressive place in any way. But I remember the first night we stayed in the house. Our furniture had arrived, but we’d had time to unpack only the essentials.

So there I was, set up in a single bed, in a dark strange room that had shiny hardwood floors, high ceilings and bare, white walls. It felt like a hospital room, stark and antiseptic.

No wonder I had trouble going to sleep that night. Of course, I woke up the next morning to discover that I, along with Middletown’s other seventh-graders, was going to have to be bussed 20 miles away to attend school in an old barracks on the Portsmouth Naval Base. So maybe I was seeing visions of that horror to come.

Whatever. I remember that first night as one of sheer night terrors. And I’ve always blamed it on the house.

Which brings us to the point of this post. On the always-interesting movie site Film School Rejects , the writers have posted a list of what they call “10 Cinematic Houses You Don’t Want to Live In.” It includes, of course, Norman Bates’ creepy Victorian from Hitchcock’s 1960 chiller “Psycho.” And it goes from there.

None, though, is quite as scary as that house in Middletown was to me on that late-summer night of 1959.