‘What did he do to make this house so evil, Mr. Fischer?‘
Despite the fact that all haunted house movies apart from The Shining are just variations of two old novels (Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw or Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House), I still find them irresistible. The Woman in Black, Poltergeist, The Innocents, the Hell House LLC franchise, and on and on… I adore them. The Legend of Hell House is an early variation on all of these stories, and it is one of the lesser known works in the genre, but it still has plenty to offer…
Eccentric millionaire Rudolph Deutsch (Roland Culver) enlists level headed physicist Dr. Barrett (Clive Revill) to investigate the recently reopened Belasco House, the “Mount Everest of haunted houses” as it is memorably described in the dialogue. Deutsch also recruits a pair of mediums for the job – the impossibly young Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin) and Benjamin Fischer (Roddy McDowall) – the only survivor from a previous excursion into the house.
If the words ‘eccentric millionaire’ and ‘haunted house’ look cute together, that’s because we have danced this sinister dance many times before. It’s the plot of so many haunted house movies that it has become a cliché. The problem is that The Legend of Hell House fails to stand up on its own two feet. The ghostly happenings, whilst impressively rendered with some imaginative special effects, would have been old hat even in 1973 when the film was released. The plot is familiar and the twist ending telegraphed. The incredibly melodramatic acting and the erratic cinematography will save this film for some, and indeed, that is where I found most of my enjoyment, but it is easy to see why this film has been forgotten over the years.
For devotees of the haunted house movie, all the familiar tropes here will feel like old friends, and I welcomed them like the old eccentric millionaire welcomes the creaking of a floorboard or a door slamming by itself, but whether The Legend of Hell House deserves to be better remembered is very much up for debate.