The Legend of Hell House (1973)

Though there are undoubtedly similarities to the greatest of all haunted house films, Robert Wise‘s The Haunting (1963) (both films revolve around a quartet of investigators retreating to a haunted house with a fearsome reputation) but there’s also more than a hint of Nigel Kneale about John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House, based on the novel Hell House, adapted for the screen by its author Richard Matheson who considerably watered down the original’s sex and violence

Physicist Dr Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill) is retained by ailing millionaire Mr Deutsch (Roland Culver) to investigate “survival after death” at the Belasco House, an English country manor (“played” by Wykehurst Park in West Sussex) with a fearsome reputation for supernatural activity. Accompanied by his wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt), the mental medium Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin) and physical medium Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall), the sole survivor of a previous attempt to exorcise the house, Barrett moves in to the house formerly owned by the notorious Emeric Belasco, a six-foot-five millionaire, sadist and cult leader known to his followers as “The Roaring Giant.” In the week before Christmas, the team begins its investigations, tension soon dividing the rationalist Barrett from the deeply religious Tanner. After a series of poltergeist attacks, possessions and sexual assaults on Tanner, which she believes to be the work of Belasco’s son Daniel, Barrett installs his electro-magnetic radiation machine and starts trying to cleanse the house. But Hell House won’t give up that easily…

Hough doesn’t skimp on the big effects-laden set-pieces when they’re required (the poltergeist attack on Barrett is electrifying) but he tempers the extravagances with atmosphere to spare – there’s a real sense of dread slithering around the edges of every frame of film. Hough and his director of photography Alan Hume (a graduate from the Carry On stable with Hammer (The Kiss of the Vampire (1963)) and Amicus (Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965)) credits to his name) open their big bag of camera tricks and pour the contents liberally over the entire film. We get odd angles, deep focus and lots of shots captured in reflective surfaces, all beautifully filmed and lit. The distorting lenses get a bit tiresome after a while and a spinning camera effect following Hunnicutt along a corridor is a gimmick too far but it ensures that the film looks like nothing else being produced by British horror at the time.

It sounds distinctive too, thanks to a wonderfully percussive score from Doctor Who regulars Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, recorded at the latter’s state-of-the-art Electrophon studio in London (Dudley Simpson, another old Doctor Who hand is said to have chipped in uncredited). Used sparingly and effectively, the mix of electronics and mournful bassoon motifs is unsettling and the low-key but insistent chatter of a sequenced synthesizer adds a sense of quiet urgency to the proceedings. It’s long been a matter of some regret that the score has never been commercially released.

Matheson was less than impressed when he saw the finished product (he’d ambitiously envisaged Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the lead roles), claiming to have been “sick with disappointment” which is something on an over-reaction. And in fairness, the film’s major liability – the ludicrous ending – was all Matheson’s doing anyway. After an hour and a half of creepy supernatural manifestations and just-about-plausible scientific mumbo-jumbo we arrive at the big climax in which an uncredited Michael Gough sits still in a chair as the long-dead but preserved Emeric Belasco while the house is effectively exorcised by someone shouting at it. In the end, all the unpleasantness at the Belasco House, all the depravity, the death and suffering, the “drug addiction, alcoholism, sadism, bestiality, mutilation, murder, vampirism, necrophilia, cannibalism, not to mention a gamut of sexual goodies” all came down to a particularly bad case of short-man syndrome. It feels like there should have been more really, that the “Mount Everest of haunted houses” deserved a grander exit.

But while the ending is ludicrous and the film is further handicapped by some some uncertain and at times overwrought performances (though Franklin is excellent throughout), The Legend of Hell House remains a briskly paced and hugely enjoyable shocker, full of creepy interludes and explosive effects set pieces and dripping with wonderfully ominous dialogue (“Hell House doesn’t mind a guest or two. What it doesn’t like is people who attack it. Belasco doesn’t like it, his people, they don’t like it, and they will fight back and they will kill you”). The ending will annoy the hell out of you but the journey there is exhilarating and one worth taking.

The Legend of Hell House was the first film to be produced by James H. Nicholson after his split with American International Pictures in 1972 – in fact there would be only one other, Hough’s Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry in 1974, neither of which Nicholson lived to see, succumbing to a brain tumour in December 1972, six months or so before Hell House was released. Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, part of a slate of films that Nicholson had signed to produce for Twentieth Century-Fox, eventually went into production under the auspices of Nicholson’s company Academy Pictures Corporation though the producer was long gone before production even began.

The Legend of Hell House was John Hough’s last truly great film. He’d made his mark on the genre already with his masterly Hammer film Twins of Evil (1971) and still had the fun crime thriller Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974) to come but Disney (Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), Return from Witch Mountain (1978), The Watcher in the Woods (1980)) and episodic television (The Protectors (1972-1974), The Zoo Gang (1974), The New Avengers (1976-1977)) came calling and he was never the same director again. The less said about his latter-day returns to the genre (Incubus (1981), American Gothic (1987), Howling IV: The Original Nightmare (1988)) the better.