Kinky, intense, and memorably rendered, John Hough’s filming of a Richard Matheson screenplay, drawn from Matheson’s own novel, plays with the motifs of classic haunted house tales, especially Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, whilst blending a pseudo-scientific spirit similar to that of Nigel Kneale, and presaging Matheson’s own deepening interest in life-after-death occultism. It’s also one of those transitional films in the genre, a deliberately corrosive take on the old-fashioned haunted house movie, charged with the full regalia of modern concerns, sex and violence nudging away the metaphors and taking over the dramatic landscape, but still retaining familiar structures and tensions before a more anarchic, reductive style of horror arrived. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill) is the parapsychologist commissioned by interested industrialist Rudolph Deutsch (Roland Culver) to investigate the multifarious mysteries and dangers of the world’s only truly, not yet debunked haunted house, the mansion that had belonged to one Emeric Belasco (Michael Gough), a monstrous magnate whose perversions and sadistic egotism led him to turn his house into a fortress that was the scene of debaucheries and murders, before he was finally bricked up somewhere within the structure to maintain overlordship over his home from beyond the grave.
Barrett camps out in the mansion with his wife and assistant Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt) and two reputable mediums, Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin) and Benjamin Franklin Fischer (Roddy McDowall), a dichotomous pair in their personalities and varieties of receptivity. Fischer was the soul, sane, physically intact survivor of a previous attempt to plumb the house’s mysteries when he was a teenager, and he is a physical medium who determines to keep himself mentally intact by resisting reading the house at all costs, terrified with very good reason of the forces within, long enough to collect the money Deutsch will pay. Florence
Hough wields the familiar imagery of the jutting, foreboding gables of the house rising out of thick veiling fog, a prowling black cat hinting at the malevolent presence lurking within, with unembarrassed relish. Soon a glutinous air of threat and eroticism entangles both the females of the party, Florence
The narrative works then like a pressure cooker that sees the characters’ ever-so-slight misreading of each-other and the situation spiral into tragic explosions of violence. Fooling, perverting, and gradually tearing Florence to bits is Belasco’s chief delight, of course, whilst Florence is desperate to prove herself competent and rational in the glare of Barrett’s increasingly dismissive, smouldering masculine contempt and Fischer’s moral and metaphorical impotence. Franklin’s superbly sustained performance is a great part of the film’s cumulative effect, increasingly bedraggled and near-crazed, covered in unholy stigmata. She is left giggling like a madman after her attempt satiate the spirit with her body sees her get the rudest of possible shocks, but refusing to cop out of the dangerous situation, even when she knows she is likely to die. Ann, in turn, is ripe for an inversion of repression, moving from chipper second-fiddle to her husband’s stalwart cleverness, to sweating and shivering with untapped passion, as she prowls about in horny hypnosis, fondling the breasts of a feminine statue before coming on to Fischer. Fischer himself is too neurotic and damaged to be of use to either lady, at least until the climax. Everything seems to wind inwards towards the dark heart of the house, the chapel, the place Florence
Hough’s another interesting director who managed some good early work in the horror genre but whose career never really went anywhere: having debuted with the seriously uneven but in many respects admirable Twins of Evil the year before, he moved on to this generally classier piece of work. Hell House has a potential that might have come to purest life in the hands of a great expressionist stylist like Mario Bava or Dario Argento, to construct a truly enveloping sense of space and architecture as erotic and emotional trap, which remains only stolidly present in Hough’s hands. On the other hand, his concentration on psychological stress achieves its own authority, and Hough’s use of the house itself as a weapon, characters pinioned under crushing weights and riddled with the psychically directed household objects, anticipate the way Argento uses similar objects as sources of torture and pain in Deep Red (1975) and Suspiria (1976). The production is clumsy in places: the big clunky machine with which Barrett tries to cleanse the house of residual psychic energy looks like a lost Doctor Who prop, and Franklin’s wrestling match with an evil cat (animal attacks are almost always a weak point of horror films) is likewise more amusing than scary. Some of Hough’s hammy camera effects, spinning about or dangling from the ceiling pointlessly, do over-emphasise the film’s forward rush into pure hysteria. Hough’s creative use of distorting perspective lenses, especially in his epic close-ups, which render the perspiration-flecked pores and anxious lines of his actors’ faces battlegrounds of the ethereal yet wearing psychic war being fought, is much more effective in building and sustaining the fraught atmosphere.
Hell House, for some of the reasons I’ve spoken about, doesn’t hit classic status, but it does execute some riveting scenes, including that in which Florence lies crushed and bloodied under the colossal crucifix that Belasco drops on her in the blackest of jokes, dying but now fully aware and defiant, knowing that in killing her Belasco has exposed his own weakness. Even better is the finale in which Fischer, horrified by Florence and Barrett’s deaths, finally refuses to run away and instead begins to intuitively unravel the mystery of Belasco, realising, with beautiful thematic resonance, that Belasco’s vicious, eternity-defying egotism and misogyny was sourced in physical inadequacy, manifest in the ultimate bodily frustration, having had his legs cleaved off and replaced by false ones to make himself look taller. McDowall’s terrific performance, up until this point full of neurotic, restrained energy, repetitively making gestures with fists and tense fingers that emphasise his efforts to keep his body and soul together, explodes into exultant mockery of Belasco, the heretofore unstoppably evil spirit now knocking him over repeatedly in the most childish of tantrums, until his power collapses entirely, allowing the final penetration of Belasco’s hidden mausoleum and the revealing of Belasco’s corpse, embalmed in sitting position, still sporting his wooden legs. The final revelation is absurd on one level, but it fits in well with the idea of Freudian anxieties and bodily horror provoking emotions strong enough to last far beyond death, and Fischer’s victory is one of the best-realised heroic moments in the genre.
