English Dept.
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.
Haunted Honeymoon came out in the summer of 1986. I was eight. I remember sitting outside on the patio in the summer and seeing an ad for it in the newspaper, The Scranton Times: “Haunted Honeymoon, a comedy chiller.” Can you imagine my excitement? But by the time I'd convinced my parents to take me to see it, probably 10 days later, it was gone. And when a few months later, it arrived on VHS on the shelves of Montage Video, I could not wait to get it first into my hot little hands and then into the waiting maw of our Magnavox VCR. And for eight year-old me, it was 10,000% worth the wait.
THE OLD DARK HOUSE is the progenitor of every scary dark house movie that's ever been made. Since JANE EYRE and THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, haunted houses and lunatics locked behind doors have pretty much been a staple of gothic literature. And of course, with silent films like THE BAT or THE CAT AND THE CANARY, these stories began to be explored in a new medium. But with this film, James Whale amplified everything, dialing it all up to eleven.
