☆ ☆ ☆
The Legend of Hell House (1973) – J. Hough
Of
course, this film owes a huge debt to Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), based
on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel, which also featured a team of paranormal
investigators visiting a supposedly haunted house to determine its secrets. Here, the visitors include two mediums,
played by Roddy McDowall and Pamela Franklin (who was the young girl in The
Innocents, 1961, another haunted classic), and a physicist (Clive Revill) and
his wife (Gayle Hunnicutt). The house was
fortress of a debauched Crowley-type figure who still haunts the place and has
succeeded in killing earlier investigators (only McDowall escaped an earlier
incident). The set-up is good and creepy
and the early “sittings” by Franklin’s medium capture the right spooky tone. She believes the ghostly son of the evil man
is trapped in the house and wants to free him – but is she being fooled? Things do take a rather sexual turn as the
women are molested or possessed – it is hard not to see this as a bit gratuitous
but I guess it relates to the backstory.
Then, the physicist attempts to suck out all of the spiritual energy
from the house with a big contraption. I’ll
leave it for you to watch to see whether it works but when all is said and done
and the big reveal is revealed, I’m not sure it completely adds up (or at the
very least Richard Matheson’s script does not do a good enough job of highlighting
the important clues). Worth a look, if
only because there are so few good entries in this genre and this does capture
a certain vibe.
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