It occurred to me that I hadn't see this in yonks so I though I'd give it another look. It's a bit crap, innit? Hough tries hard with the wacky angles and the brooding misty shots of the exterior, but he can't seem to generate much of an atmosphere, and these things live or die by their atmospherics, it seems to me. It's quite fascinating to compare this with 'The Haunting', which manages somehow to be far more effective by showing a great deal more restraint and by sprinkling a fair few witticisms through the script. Mathieson's script is well below his usual standard, and much of the dialogue is preposterous. The performances are sort of good, but far too po-faced and I get the sense that Revill and McDowall and struggling to keep a straight face. I also get a strong whiff of 'House on Haunted Hill', with McDowall's character reminding me heavily of Elisha Cook Jr's. But even that film, for all its William Castleness, is more atmospheric and more fun than Hell House. I think that an effective haunted house film is a very tricky thing to pull off and although several of the right elements are in place here, it just feels like the whole thing is overcooked. I remain unimpressed with this film!
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Hey, don't apologise - your review made me laugh!
Your entitled to your opinion. Perhaps the film might have been better if the author wasn't the screenwriter. A bit of critical distance might have been achieved, and it might have been more to your taste.
I think we all have a film we are baffled why people like it. I sure if I mentioned some I mind this thread would be filled with 'but Sinister, that's a classic!' and trying to persuade me out of my wrong thing.
Four words, Moods ; Dance of the Vampires.
We can all agree to diagree. It's not like it were politics :-(
Apologies for that wine-fueled post... Of course people who disagree with me about this film are not wrong, they're not idiots, and they have taste, it's just very different from my taste. But this is another of those cases where I'm frankly baffled by the positive opinions people have for a film. I just don't see it.
Well, I've danced around this for years, but it's time to put it on the table. If you think this is a good film, you're wrong, and you have no taste. For most of my life, I thought I was the one who was defective, and everyone kept telling me that I was wrong, about pretty much everything. But recent events have shifted my perspective, and now I understand. Most people are idiots. And they're wrong. And they have no taste.
I must disagree I think the film does the best justice it can to the novel Hell House, which is sexual explicit in places.
Although everything suffers from comparison to the book and film of The Haunting of Hill House.
Let me dig out an interview with the author and quote a little relevant bit from it...
Why was there an 11 year gap between your 1960 war novel The Beardless Warriors and your next novel, Hell House?
"It took me over ten years to write Hell House. Ray Russell said it read like it was written by three different authors. In a sense, it was, because I had changed. I began to write it right after Beardless Warriors. For the first 100 pages or so, it was written in the first person. But that didn't work for me, so I had to backtrack and write it all in the third person. The only reason I finished it in the end was because I was too cheap to give back the $5,000 advance!"
Is it fair to say that the main conflict of Hell House is less between the obvious protagonists, Belasco and the other characters, than between parapsychology and spiritualism?
"What I wanted to do was have three people with differing points of view but who all turned out to be right. It takes both parapsychology and spiritualism to defeat Belasco - it takes the scientist's machine to weaken him and the medium's brutal psychology to confront him. There isn't an inherent conflict between parapsychology and spiritualism - a conflict is force be people's closed-mindedness."
Hell House is the second (published) of your ghost story trilogy, along with Stir of Echos and Earthbound. Each is progressively laced with eroticism. Why is sex the Achilles' hell of your main characters in these tales?
"Sex is mankind's Achilles' hell. I'm merely giving it a context by putting it in a ghost story. David in Earthbound , for instance, being an adulterer is vulnerable to Marinna' seduction. Edith in Hell House, having an impotent husband, is vulnerable to Belasco's seduction. Florence is too, having repressed her sexuality for the sake of being spiritual."
Source: Richard Matherson interview SFX Magazine number 10 circa 1996
Any typos are down to my typing!
I love it! Next to The Innocents and The Haunting it's my favourite haunted house movie*. I love the way it's structured and Delia Derbyshire's score is wonderful.
*There aren't that many good ones IMHO. The Uninvited and Hammer's The Woman in Black are the other good ones that I can think of.
Gad, no mention of Pammy Franklin! You must be getting old. :-p