The Legend of Hell House (1973) Starring Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowall & Gayle Hunnicutt Directed by John Hough Written by Richard Matheson

“What did he do to make this house so evil, Mr. Fischer?”
“Drug addiction, alcoholism, sadism, beastiality, mutilation, murder, vampirism, necrophilia, cannibalism, not to mention a gamut of sexual goodies. Shall I go on?”
“How did it end?”
“If it had ended, we wouldn't be here.”

In my mind, there is no better decade for horror movies than the ‘70’s. There are other contenders, sure. The 30’s saw the rise of the MGM horror classics. In the 50’s you had an array of radioactive monsters and sci-fi exploration. I love me some 80’s films, for all their excess (and Freddy!). And in the modern era, people really respect the horror genre and…well, there are a lot of them, whether they are good or not.

But in the 70’s, the genre (outside of your typical exploitation film) had a real grittiness about it. There was no Hollywood veneer, just a real-life, dirty, visceral scare… SCARE…that’s a word you can’t use to describe a lot of modern horror films. The directors of the 70’s actually set out to give you chills, as opposed to just showing you blood and guts (and T&A), and an amazing percentage of the time, they actually succeeded.

Legend of Hell House is one of my favorite ghost stories for this very reason, it works very hard to make a plausible case for hauntings, keeps the characters very real, and lays the tension on thick. It battles, in my mind, with the extremely similarly plotted The Haunting (1963) for the title of Best Ghost Movie Ever.

In the film, Mr. Deutch is dying. He’s one of those ambiguously rich movie characters terrified of his own mortality, and so he hires an investigative team to spend a week in “The Mount Everest of haunted houses.” to see if the claims are true, and prove to his troubled mind that there is life after death. The crew consists of physicist Lionel Barret (Clive Revell), known for de-bunking paranormal instances, accompanied by his wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt) and Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin), a young and powerful medium. Also along for the ride is Ben Fischer (played to perfection by Roddy McDowell) a medium who was the only survivor of a previous expedition to the infamous Hell House.

Even before the crew is at the house, the tension builds. Director John Hough uses bewildering long shots intermingled with off center tight shots to make a film that is not only visually interesting, but staggers the audience. There’s a minimum of music in the film, aside from a few low moaning synth sounds, and the cast is always so believably jumpy or terse, it’s hard for the audience to not join them. The film’s construction itself is perfectly suited for building a sensation of isolation and paranoia within the audience.

To top it off, the film immediately tries to create a sense of realism by having the investigators all be familiar with hauntings, and using just enough technical jargon to seem well versed in the matter. You feel like there’s a long history of battle with the supernatural amongst the characters, and we’ve just stepped into their title bout. An additional factor to help the scare factor is the bonus that the film never toys with the audience. Never is it supposed that the phenomena may be part of someone’s delusion, or a get-rich-quick ‘Scooby-doo’ style revenge plot. No, make no doubt this house is haunted…but no one has lived long enough to document it!

As the crew continues their exploration of the house, the soul of Belasco, the estate’s deceased owner, begins to work his devilish trickery on its female members. Ann’s feelings of age and inadequacy, as well as her frustration with her career oriented husband, come to light as Belasco pushes her to wander around the house naked, trying to entice the other crew members to join her in an orgy.

Young Florence is used as a physical medium to lash out at Dr. Barrett, her very presence causing a telekinetic backlash of broken glass and flame jets while in the Doctor’s company. She is visited nightly by what she believes to be a series of ghosts, seeking to seduce her. As she fights to maintain her grip on reality, and tries to free the sprits of Belasco’s former victims, she finds herself attacked by specters and (in what may be, oddly enough, the movie’s most remembered and imitated sequence) a possessed cat.

The most interesting emergence in the film is that of Ben. Roddy McDowell may be the most known face in the cast, but at the same time, his character takes a backseat during much of the film’s beginnings. As the film progresses we see that his time with the previous, doomed, expedition has already convinced him that the house is haunted, and now he seeks to find out why, to find out what makes the ghost of Belasco so strong and so vicious. He keeps his psychic powers bottled up, for fear of being overwhelmed, but when he lets them loose, they set him on the track for a startling discovery…

Written by Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, The Night Stalker), Legend of Hell House provides a surprisingly creepy look at scientific investigation of hauntings, and is a well plotted, character driven, story that showcases the talents of writer, director, and cast alike. It’ll give you chills; expect to hear that moaning music cue every time you turn out your lights for YEARS after the film’s conclusion. Its pretty much everything you wish episodes of Ghost Hunters could be.