The Legend of Hell House, or as I like to call it, Florence and the Machine, it's like a charming little Christmas movie. And it has an uncredited appearance by Michael Gough as Emeric Belasco, who effectively serves to pull Hell House into a lineage of Hammer and Amicus horror pictures that have brought us up to the point at which this was released. But this is, I think, very different from those films. And while it has all of the comforts of a WPIX Saturday spooker from our childhood, from the subject matter to the film stock, I discovered this one much later when I was living in Greenpoint and I plucked it from those exceptionally well curated shelves at Photo Play, which was a lamentably shuttered DVD rental shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
There is a certain kind of 1970s European chic to it, especially Gayle Hunnicutt, who passed away on August 31st, as the very tightly wound and repressed Anne. (And let me just say that my three honor roll mentions tonight should be for Gayle Hunnicutt's hair, her fur, and her nose, but they won't be.) It's not like an aristocratic chic or half as decadent as like Daughters of Darkness, which we covered last season, though I do love a no bullshit aristocrat like Rudy Deutsch, whose obsession with knowing what comes after death is sort of the engine of the story (and he has a Chinese Chippendale library that's got a pipe organ in it, so how can you not love that?). I find it elegant in the same sort of circa-1973 way that I find Tom Ford's work for Gucci in the late 90s and early 2000s elegant. And I think its tidy ensemble cast is basically uniformly excellent in their performances of the material, especially Roddy McDowell as a sort of stunted, psychic twisted nerve. And Pamela Franklin in her ecclesiastical couture looks like Margaret White by way of Carnaby Street.
But again, it's an English made, English set and mostly English acted picture with the exception of our gal Gayle, who was Texas born but maybe the most English of all of the characters in it. So of course, I expect good acting and it delivers that fairly consistently.
Each of the characters is unique and complex and has a set of character-driven motivations for why he or she is present in the story. Ben, Roddy McDowell's character, is a Cassandra in the Greekist sense. He fully understands what's going on, what's going to happen, and how it will ultimately play out.
And it has atmosphere, atmosphere everywhere. No pun intended, I promise. It is drenched in atmosphere and fog and obfuscation. And that fog is so dense. It could be a William Castle flick shot with a fog machine in a studio. It's got fog like The Further in Insidious. The physical design of the production’s exteriors are all real, but the interiors (with the exception of Blenheim Palace where that meeting with Deutsch was shot), which are filled with leering satyrs in the statuary and billowing sails of cobwebs and dust motes like tumbleweed, were all built at Elstree Studios.
Though the name of the house is the actual title of the film, I would not describe the house as a character in the film. But the sense of foreboding that it instills, and the building tension that's palpable from the start, all of this is aided and enhanced and lifted by the gooby percussive score. I love this film because I love the intersection of hard reality and horror, especially the supernatural. And like in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which we also covered last season, where law and the judicial system rub against demonic possession, in The Legend of Hell House, science and technology are implements of the exploration of terror.
It's a thoughtful film and it's quiet—except when it isn't. After about 15 minutes of focused exposition, mostly delivered by a young, nubile, young Roderick McDowell, the film starts punching pretty hard and pretty fast. It's about 30 minutes in that things get really explosive. I think that sort of the use of strong language and unsettling sexuality must have been pretty shocking for the time that it was made. And blood, the few times we see it in The Legend of Hell House, looks real. It's not the Kensington Gore that we should expect to see in films from this period. It's brown, black, crimson, brick red blood like we would see in real life. And when Dr. Barrett fires the dynamos, because the film has been—again, I qualify this statement (l'm fully aware that we're watching a horror film written by a masterful horror writer)—because the film has been so realistic up to that point (sometimes almost looking and feeling a bit like documentary verite), I think we, or I, want to trust what I think is the resolution. But as Annie Lennox tells us in the Eurythmics song, 'I've got a life, it ain't over."
The house is a giant battery, Dr. Barrett says. But culturally, the film, like the machine in it, is more of a capacitor than it is a battery. Because you can see and feel the influences going into it and coming out of it. There are very striking similarities to The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and to The Haunting, both the black and white Julie Harris-Claire Bloom adaptation from 10 years prior, and also the remake with Lily Taylor and Catherine Zeta-Jones. There are similarities to things like either Thirt13en Ghosts, to The Quiet Ones with Jared Harris from 2014, and even to both Poltergeists (the remake of which also featured Harris as a psychical researcher) and even things like Ghost Watch, which aired on TV in England, and apparently terrified the nation when it was presented, because it was presented as a documentary and it perpetrated a hoax on Great Britain. But it takes its impulses and configures them into its own unique and eminently watchable thing.
To listen to our episode on The Legend of Hell House, click here.
Bradford Louryk