The Hearse (1980) – Movie Summary and Review
The Hearse is an 80s horror movie about a woman haunted by a creepy-looking hearse and its sinister driver.
Trish Van Devere stars as Jane Hardy, a recently divorced school teacher who is also struggling to come to terms with the death of her mother. Times have been hard for Jane, so there is little wonder that she has had a few mental problems. It is also probably not surprising that she feels like getting away from things for a while and decides to take a vacation at her aunt’s house.
Jane’s aunt died over thirty years ago. Since then the house has stood empty. It’s located in the small back-water town of Blackford and, even after driving all day, it’s dark before Jane arrives.
As she is approaching the town, Jane has an encounter with a creepy, old hearse that nearly runs her off the road.
The house remains just as Jane’s aunt left it, with her portrait still hanging on the wall. She looks an awful lot like Jane who discovers her aunt appears to be haunting her old home. At one point, as Jane is cleaning an upstairs window she looks into the room and sees her aunt staring back at her. Poor Jane gets such a shock she very nearly falls off her ladder.
The local townsfolk are less than friendly towards the new arrival and the fact that she looks so much like her aunt probably doesn’t help matters. Jane does not know the full story about her aunt though. It’s only when she finds an old diary and starts to read it that she begins to get a picture of her aunt’s life and discovers that she was involved in Satanic practices.
However, Jane has other things to worry about. She has had several encounters with the hearse, it even pays late-night visits to her home and the hearse’s driver is one creepy-looking dude.
At one point the hearse succeeds in running Jane off the road and her car gets stuck in the soft soil. Fortunately for her, another car comes around the corner, and the driver, a man named Tom, stops and gives her a lift home. He even drops by the next day to return her car to her. Jane is very attracted to her knight in shining armour and a romance develops between them, which seems to mirror her aunt’s romance (as described in the diary).
The Hearse is a pretty good movie. I enjoyed watching it and jumped in my seat more than once. There is no blood or gore, nor is there a lot in the way of special effects, but it still manages to be quite a scary movie, if a little predictable in places.
My main problem with The Hearse is the way it ends. It’s disappointing. I felt really let down and could only ask myself: is that it? Unfortunately, it was. I expected better and I’m sure many other viewers will feel the same way. It’s almost as if the producers ran out of ideas or just had no idea where they were meant to be going with the story in the first place.
Even though the ending is so poor, The Hearse is still a movie I would happily watch again because the good outweighs the bad and it is so creepy it is hard not to love it. If you like horror movies about ghostly vehicles or flicks made in the 1980s, you may enjoy The Hearse too. It may be hard to find options to stream it online but DVD and Blu-ray options are availbe via Amazon and, if you still have a video player and are feeling nostaligic, you may also be able to find it on VHS.