Legend of Hell House, The

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"Although the story of this film is fictitious, the events depicted involving psychic phenomena are not only very much within the bonds of possibility, but could well be true." --Tom Corbett, Clairvoyant and Psychic Consultant to European Royalty. I mean, how can you disregard a film prefaced by a guy who reads fortunes to Royalty?

Over the years that cinema has been around, one of its most popular genres has been horror, going all the way back to the silent days of "Nosferatu" and "The Phantom of the Opera." Of course, there have been monster movies and science-fiction creature features and psychological thrillers, but one of the subclasses of the type that´s always been a favorite of mine is the haunted-house flick. In spite of this category´s appeal, however, there are surprisingly few of their number around with any genuine appeal for serious adults. "The Old Dark House" (1932 and 1963), "The Bat" (1915, 1927, and 1959) and "The Bat Whispers" (1930), "The House on Haunted Hill" (1958 and 1999), "The House That Dripped Blood" (1970), "The Exorcist" (1973), and a multitude of others all have their faithful adherents.

My personal preferences, however, have long been "The Uninvited" (1944), that creepy mixture of humor and atmospheric horror; "The Haunting" (1963), Robert Wise´s rendering of Shirley Jackson´s classic novel; "The Legend of Hell House" (1973), which is the subject of discussion here; "Alien" (1979), the sci-fi horror flick that works like an old-fashioned ghost story; and Stanley Kubrick´s "The Shining" (1980). Of these latter five, it´s Wise´s "The Haunting" that still evokes the most terror and suspense for me, I suppose because the director never shows us anything directly and forces us to use our imagination; but "The Legend of Hell House" is a decent runner-up for haunted-house honors.

Based on his novel, "Hell House," Richard Matheson´s screenplay is a classic spook-house story, with all the quintessential ingredients: a big, scary old mansion, seances in the dark, ectoplasmic manifestations, weird noises, and, of course, things that go bump in the night--namely, ghosts. Matheson also throws in as much accepted psychic mumbo-jumbo as possible to establish a sense of verisimilitude, and for good measure he adds a few touches of implied (and perhaps not-so-implied) eroticism. Then, director John Hough ensures that there´s only a modicum of blood or gore and that the spirits are never seen, just heard and felt, all the more frightening for us. It makes for a heady brew, and one that´s kept me interested in the film for nearly thirty years.

The plot is not unlike "The Haunting" from 1963 in that it involves a group of people investigating a supposedly haunted house. Even the exterior of the old house looks like the one in the earlier film. An elderly multi-billionaire, Mr. Deutsch (Roland Culver), offers each of three persons £1,000,000 each to establish the facts of survival after death. To do so, they must spend a week in Belasco House, the "Mt. Everest of haunted houses." The people involved are Dr. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill), a physicist and parapsychologist; his wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt), who comes along for the ride and presumably must share her husband´s pay; Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin), a young mental medium, meaning, I guess, that she can communicate with the dead but can´t make stuff actually happen; and Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall), a physical psychic and the only survivor of a previous attempt to examine Belasco House twenty years before. He is said to have crawled out of it a mental wreck while everyone else was killed, crippled, or driven insane.

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