The Legend of Hell House

Four brave souls accept the offer (and sizable amounts of cash) from its new owner to spend one week at Belasco House, the “Mount Everest” of haunted houses, in this “Mount Everest” of haunted-house movies. Their assignment: to uncover the facts regarding life after death. And it just so happens that the job takes place the week surrounding Christmas—for some, potentially converging with spirits beats spending time with family.

The house’s previous proprietor, Emeric Belasco, was a hulking sexual deviant, certified creep, and likely murderer. Unusual and extremely twisted debaucherous events took place at the fog-enshrouded, creaky Gothic mansion, also known as Hell House, that eventually resulted in a massacre and Emeric’s disappearance. The quartet who agree to investigate the inner workings of the evil house include a physicist and his wife (Clive Revill and Gayle Hunnicutt), a mental medium (Pamela Franklin), and a physical medium (Roddy McDowall), the lone survivor (and just barely, at that) of the last Hell House excursion 20 years earlier when eight others weren’t so lucky. The performances are all stellar.

During a little séance on the first evening—conducted by Franklin’s spiritualist Florence Tanner—an angry presence warns the unwelcome visitors to get out of the house before he kills them all. What plays out over the following days is a human battle of science vs. mysticism and a head-on collision with raging paranormal forces. Exorcisms, it seems, aren’t just reserved for possessed people.

The scares in genre specialist John Hough’s brilliantly directed masterwork—shot in uncomfortable, sharp angles by Alan Hume and impeccably scored and sound-designed by Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire—are slow and steady. Those with little patience have found the pace a tad too leisurely, but others, like me, delight in the buildup and cherish each atmosphere-dripping second of every viewing. Suggestions of terror are nine out of 10 times more horrifying than visible ghosts galore—but that’s not to imply that we don’t get the satisfaction of some sightings.

The Legend of Hell House may not be as well-regarded as, say, the similarly plotted (but less salacious) The Haunting from a decade earlier, but it’s still an influential, if underseen, classic of ’70s British horror, written by Richard Matheson, based on his own 1971 novel, Hell House. The movie transplants the setting from Maine to rural England, and Matheson’s plot bears more than a few similarities to the source material for the latter film, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House—which, though unidentified, is presumed to be set in New England and also moved to the U.K. for the screen version—but there’s always room for more house-of-horrors movies of this high caliber. 🩸