Twenty years of wracking my brain finally laid to rest.

Today I finally tracked down the title of a movie I've been trying to find out for decades. Of course, most of my "research" consisted of randomly trying to describe it to people and hoping they'd remember, which wasn't as effective as it sounds. I did this with my husband when we first started dating, and he was positive it was Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, but I was just as positive that wasn't it.

After reading yesterday's Vine over at TN, it occurred to me that somebody, somewhere on the Internet must have tried to track down this same movie at some point. That began hours of obsessive searching through 1970s horror titles and synopses (to the detriment of my NaNoFiMo word count), until finally I followed a link to The Flick Chick, where on the second page I found my not-so-holy grail of movie titles: The House of Seven Corpses. I'm 99.9% certain that this is the movie. It was the dead cat that cinched it for me.

When I was an impressionable grade-schooler in the early eighties, my dad and I had a regular Saturday night ritual of watching the local "Creature Feature" together in the dark. A lot of those movies were pretty forgettable, but this is one that I remember scaring the living crap out of me. I don't even know if I could finish watching it, I was so terrified. Of course, now that I'm all grown up and jaded, I'm sure it will inspire more giggles and groans than anything, but even so, it is now at the top of my Netflix queue. And that's one less mystery that will keep me awake at night from now on.