British horror film LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973) is a campy, enjoyable, atmospheric mess of a movie
#31DaysOfHorror: October 6
This October, I’ll be reviewing 31 horror movies in 31 days! You can see the ongoing list of what I’ve watched and reviewed here.
The Plot
A physicist finds himself leading a paranormal investigation at “the Mt. Everest of Haunted Houses,” aka Hell House, aka the former home of the twisted Belasco family. Along with his wife and two mediums, the physicist spends the week leading up to Christmas in the house, conducting experiments in an attempt to prove (or disprove) the existence of life after death.
My Review
I selected The Legend of Hell House because Mike Flanagan is going to turn it into a TV series for Netflix, but apparently I’m wrong and he’s adapting The Haunting of Hill House. Then I thought, wait, they’re making a TV show out of the Vincent Price movie that got remade in the 90s? But that one is House on Haunted Hill. Apparently there’s also a Haunting of Hell House, to confuse everything further, and also several versions of The Haunting, which is based on…drumroll… The Haunting of Hill House.
I’m glad I watched The Legend of Hell House, though, even if it wasn’t one of the 15 other movies I thought I was watching, because this movie is a ton of fun. I don’t think I’d call it good, exactly — which I’ll get into below — but it’s a classic, well-told British ghost story, and the parts that don’t really work are still enjoyable to watch. It’s atmospheric, it’s funny (both intentionally and otherwise), and sometimes, the pieces all line up and it’s genuinely suspenseful.
Hell House is considered one of the most evil locations in the world. This means it sits, abandoned, out in the English countryside. The massive mansion is shrouded by an ever-present fog, as most scary things in England are, and the four paranormal investigators have to be brought to the location by car. The driver tells them he will return the following week to pick them up at 5PM on December 24th. Title cards throughout the film inform us of the date and time, serving as a sort of countdown to rescue; will they all make it out alive, or will the whole group have devolved into complete madness by then?
But first: the fun bits. The physicist’s wife has a vision of two shadows making love above her bed one night, and she stumbles on a book called “Autoerotic Phenomena” that appears to cause her to be possessed with a nymphomaniacal demon. One of the other lead actors is Roddy McDowall, best-known as Cornelius in the original Planet of the Apes franchise. McDowall is now widely understood to have been gay and closeted throughout his career, so his performance here, as an effeminate, quiet, bespectacled, turtleneck-wearing man who has to keep fending off the advances of the physicist’s wife, offers a lot of camp pleasures.
There’s also a cat attack in the film that completely fails to be anything frightening, but is a blast anyway. A black cat that lives in the house attacks the medium played by Pamela Franklin; she throws it around the room, and some of the cat puppetry is incredibly obvious. But, there’s one particular shot where we get a point-of-view shot from the cat’s perspective as it races across the room and leaps on her again that I couldn’t help but love. Often in horror film, the audience is given shots from the killer’s POV and forced into a position of identifying with the villain as they harm the protagonist — frequently a young, pretty woman in various states of undress, as Franklin is here when she’s attacked by the cat. To be forced into identifying with a killer cat is a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, though, there’s simultaneously too much and too little going on for The Legend Of Hell House to really cohere as a compelling horror movie. This is perhaps best exemplified by the scene at the beginning of the film, where Roddy McDowall’s character explains to the rest of the gathered investigators exactly why the Belasco house is so evil.
“What did he do to make this house so evil?” asks the physicist’s wife.
McDowall answers: “Drug addiction. Alcoholism. Sadism. Bestiality. Mutilation. Murder. Vampirism. Necrophilia. Cannibalism. Not to mention a gamut of sexual goodies. Shall I go on?”
That’s a lot of topics for one haunted house story to cover, and aside from this early mention, The Legend of Hell House doesn’t really bother trying. Mostly, the house is just full of things that go bump in the night — which is fine! The practical effects for the things going bump are fun to watch, like something out of a haunted-house amusement park ride. That’s enough for a fun horror movie; we don’t necessarily need to think there is cannibalism and necrophilia and mutilation and vampirism causing it all.
There’s also a current of religious symbolism running through the film, which is also fine as far as it goes. The trouble is, it doesn’t go particularly far. There’s the fact that the whole film takes place in the run-up to Christmas Eve, for one, which, curiously, none of the characters ever mention. It appears that the chapel in the mansion is the most-haunted part of the house, to the point where one of the mediums refuses to set foot in it; the chapel serves as the setting for the climactic showdown between the surviving characters and the remaining spirits that they’re not able to vanquish.
They quickly realize that the primary spirits in the house are Mr. Belasco, the patriarch of the evil family, and his son Daniel, who feels trapped by his father’s evil. This may be intended as a sort of God/Jesus dichotomy, but it’s not really crucial to how the characters realize they must eventually face off with the ghosts, so it mostly just exists because religious imagery used for evil in horror films is scary. Unlike, say, The Exorcist, which uses perversion of religious imagery in service of a meaningful story about questions of faith and control of women’s bodies, The Legend of Hell House doesn’t really do very much with its symbols.
Which, again, doesn’t really take away from how much fun the movie is to watch. As a legitimate story about faith and questions of the afterlife, The Legend of Hell House is not particularly worthwhile. But as a vehicle for thrills, chills, laughs, and shocks, The Legend of Hell House delivers.
But where can I stream it? The Legend of Hell House is available to stream on Netflix,
