In anticipation for a 2017 revival screening, the Chicago Film Society wrote of the film: "Boardinghouse is an essential piece of lunatic cinema, complete with requisite high levels of gore and camp." Noel Murray of The A.V. Club described the film as "a shotgun marriage of Halloween, Carrie and The Amityville Horror." In his book The Gorehound’s Guide to Splatter Films of the 1980s, film scholar Scott Aaron Stine called the film "godawful lousy."
