The 1986 film, Sorority House Massacre, tells the story of two people who share a psychic bond.

Beth (Angela O’Neill) is a college student who can’t remember anything about her childhood and who was raised by her aunt.  After her aunt dies, Beth joins a sorority and moves into their house.  Almost from the minute that she arrives, Beth starts to have disturbing visions and dreams of a man with a knife and blood dripping from the ceiling.  With most of the members of the sorority leaving for the Memorial Day weekend, Beth ends up staying with Linda (Wendy Martel), Sara (Pamela Ross), and Tracy (Nicole Rio).  The other girls want to have a fun weekend but instead, they find themselves dealing with Beth and her glum attitude.  Linda and Sara sincerely want to help.  Tracy is a bit annoyed with the whole thing and I don’t blame her.

Meanwhile, a man named Bobby (John C. Russell) is a patient at a mental asylum.  He’s been a patient ever since he was arrested for murdering almost his entire family.  Bobby has been in a rage for the past few days, beating his head on the walls and attacking anyone who enters the room.  Just as Beth finds herself having visions of Bobby, Bobby has visions of Beth.  When Bobby does finally manage to escape from the hospital, the first thing he does is break into a hardware store and steal a hunting knife.  (He uses the knife to take care of the owner of the store.)  Then he steals a car and promptly drives off towards Los Angeles and the sorority house.

Sorority House Massacre was produced by Roger Corman and, just as he did with Slumber Party Massacre, he hired a woman to both direct and write the film.  As such, while Sorority House Massacre has all of the usual scenes of sorority girls taking showers, trying on clothes, and running around in states of undress, it’s still never as misogynistic as some other slasher films.  Beth, Sara, Linda, and Tracy all come across as being fully-rounded characters and the viewer doesn’t want anything bad to happen to any of them.  If anything, in this film, it’s the various boyfriends who are portrayed as being somewhat disposable and easily victimized.  Certainly, not a single one of the guys proves to be particularly useful once Bobby shows up at the sorority house and starts his massacre.

Why is Bobby fixated on the sorority house and Beth in particular?  Director Carol Frank does a good job of portraying the killer’s mental state, with a good deal of the film’s scenes being shot from his own point of view.  (Perhaps the scariest moments are not the ones featuring blood and knives but the ones in which the killer moves from location to location and we see, through his point of view, just how relentless he is.)  Frank also takes us straight into Beth’s mind, showing us her vivid hallucinations as they happen and the end result is that Sorority House Massacre often has an unexpectedly surreal feel to it.  It’s a low-budget slasher film that plays out like a filmed nightmare and it sticks with you, even after the end credits.