The Legend of Hell House

A turreted, crenellated monstrosity, the Belasco mansion lurks in a foam of swirling mist. As a skeptical man of science, a physicist, travels to the place for a week of ghost-hunting, he announces to his beautiful young wife: “It is the Mount Everest of haunted houses.” Belasco, it seems, was a wealthy man, the so-called “roaring giant”, and a tormented psychic, played by Roddy McDowell, explains to the company of paranormal investigators that the house sponsored gatherings featuring “alcoholism, drug addiction, sadism, bestiality, cannibalism, and necrophilia.” Richard Matheson wrote the script, which is mostly awful, and John Houff directed this 1973 film: the “legend of the Belasco House,” of course, lacks panache, and so the movie is called “The Legend of Hell House.” The picture has gaudy Hammer Films production values -- it was made at Elstree Studios near London -- and most of the actors speak with plummy British accents. The sets are attractive, ill-lit gloomy baronial chambers clogged with erotic knick-knacks, sub-Courbet paintings on the wall and bedrooms with red velvet walls and mirrored ceilings. Belasco’s corpse preserved like Jeremy Bentham lurks behind some stained glass in a chapel that features a hideously gaunt crucified Christ and Bosch-style murals of hell. The dead body looks debonair and holds, incongruously, a glass of sherry in which the liquid has somehow persisted across the decades. The actresses are skinny, depraved-looking versions of Twiggy, but, when they shriek, their eyes bug out like the great, eerie scream queen, Barbara Steele. The film is awful and unintentionally funny, but, I think, it was influential in its day. Clearly, Kubrick had this movie in mind when he made “The Shining” -- both films are dominated by an elaborate set that is, at once, large and impressive and, also, claustrophobic; both movies also feature a completely pointless motif of designating the time by date, day of the week, and, even, hour and minute. (The difference is that Kubrick knew the device was meaningless and uses it surrealistically -- the effect is simply inept in “The Legend of Hell House”.) Another noteworthy innovation in this film is to foreground an aspect of earlier haunted house pictures implicit but never fully dramatized -- that is, the theme of polymorphously perverse sexuality. The ghosts in Hell House seem primarily focused on fornicating with the comely leading ladies and their male consorts. The physicist’s wife gets all hot and bothered when she opens a cabinet and discovers books on “priapism” as well as a sinister-looking box labeled “auto-eroticism”. (Who knows what horrors that box contains?) After discovering these artifacts, the woman wanders about the spook-house looking for men to seduce. Later, her husband confronts her and she weeps tragically and, of course, the audience wonders why the tight-lipped and dour physicist seems so angry -- after all, his wife in the form of a succubus seems a lot more attractive and frisky than she was before becoming possessed by the amorous spirits. (The sexual themes seems to have resonated with the team that made “Ghostbusters” -- some of the scenes with Sigourney Weaver in that film seem to parody images and situations in “Hell House.”) In sequences in which the physicist deploys a big box of electronics -- it looks like HAL 9000 from “2001” -- the movie seems to anticipate all the green-screen high-tech paranormal shows that now litter the TV wasteland: this is serious ghosthunting replete with pseudo-scientific temperature and “dynamometer” readings: “the house is a giant battery,” the physicist declares when he tries to de-energize the place with his machine and there is lots of talk about electro-magnetic fields and residual haunts. The movie isn’t really frightening. Roddy McDowell looks baffled behind mild, and bland-looking granny-glasses -- he seems pretty overtly homosexual and so the scenes involving the possessed wife’s attempts to bed him are exercises in dimwitted futility. (McDowell is wasted -- he’s silent for three-quarters of the film, traumatized by a previous encounter with the house; in the last couple reels, he gets to rant, albeit unconvincingly.) The sexual stuff is unintentionally funny and the secret behind the raging ghosts is truly risible: it turns out that the wicked Belasco became a savage and perverse necrophiliac cannibal because he was…short -- less than five feet tall. Has there ever been so much ado about nothing?