Hell House
“Isn’t it just another so-called haunted house?”
“I’m afraid it isn’t. It’s the Mount Everest of haunted houses.”
~~~===~~~
“Because I know the score! You do not fight this house! Hell House doesn’t mind a visitor or two… but if you try to do anything more, you’re a dead man! With a dead wife at your side!
“…He isn’t going to listen, is he?”
~~~===~~~
Hell House, and its associated movie, are two of my all-time horror favorites, and I’m going to spoil the Hell out of them both here (pun thoroughly intended.) The movie’s over 30 years old, the book older than that… so I think the statute of limitations on spoilers is thoroughly expired.
Hell House is, in my opinion, one of the finest haunted house stories of all time. Very similar to Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Matheson’s version is much more pulp-oriented, with a greater focus on horrific physical threats than Jackson’s book, which focuses strongly on the psychological.
The Basics:
The basic story of Hell House is as follows. Three people are hired by a very old, very wealthy man for a ridiculous sum in the 1970′s to establish the facts regarding life after death. To do so, they must investigate Hell House, “the Mount Everest of haunted houses.” And so, Dr. Barrett, a skeptic and parapsychologist, takes his wife Edith, mental medium Florence Tanner, and physical medium Benjamin Franklin Fischer (the sole survivor of the last attempt to investigate the house) into the maelstrom.
The story is excellently paced, with no pretense at hiding the house’s reputation, or serious effort to conceal that there are supernatural (or supernormal, as Dr. Barrett calls them) events taking place. The real question is where these events are coming from – are they driven by Florence Tanner’s spiritual beliefs, as Dr. Barrett insists, or are they the result of haunting spirits, as Tanner believes?
Or, as Fischer believes, are they all the victims of the House’s malevolent presence?
The story becomes a roller coaster ride, with typical hauntings punctuated by attempts on the lives of various members of the expedition. Matheson’s writing makes it entirely believable throughout that everything could be Miss Tanner’s fault, without her realizing it. The beauty of it is that this mirrors the structure of The Haunting of Hill House, where the serious question is just how much of the ‘haunting’ is the result of troubled misfit Eleanor’s mental state.
Unfortunately for the guests of Hell House, there’s more than one troubled soul here. Barrett is blinded by science – so utterly convinced of his correctness that he absolutely ignores the possibility that somebody else could be right too. Further, he disregards the fact that his theories actually fall short of being scientific hypotheses – the way he structures them, the way he defends them, there is absolutely no way that he could be proven wrong, short of proving that there’s no such thing as the supernatural. That part is obvious… the question of surviving spirits, however, isn’t, and he won’t tolerate any serious suggestion that he’s mistaken about their existence (or lack thereof)… something he fails to correctly attribute to a backlash against his overzealous mother, rather than scientific conviction.
Florence Tanner has her own troubled background. A deeply religious woman, she’s as convinced in the righteousness of her faith as Barrett is in his. Overflowing with psychic talent, and the desire to use it to help spirits along, she willingly jumps into the whirlpool of power that is Hell House, and is ultimately consumed by it.
Edith, while not a psychic, is perhaps the most damaged of them all. Raised by a mother who hated her drunken, abusive, womanizing husband, nearly raped by the same man at an earlier age, Edith is a walking mass of neuroses. Earlier in her life, when her husband left her during a work trip, she very nearly tried to kill herself. Unfortunately, Dr. Barrett knows nothing about this… or maybe he’d have either given up the job, or had her hospitalized while they were at Hell House, rather than taking her to a place that can manipulate her so very well.
Finally, we have Fischer. Once just as bad as Florence (worse, by his own admission), he learned his lesson when he barely survived Hell House. He goes into the house almost completely shut off, fooling himself into believing that he could single-handedly unwrap the house’s plan… he differs from Tanner and Barrett only in that he realizes he’s a self-deluded fool before the House manages to kill him, which gives him the chance to come back and finish the job.
In the end, unlike in many horror novels, good triumphs ovber evil, albeit with heavy casualties. Fischer and Edith survive, laying the spirit of the house to rest, and taking their dead back to be buried. The group of them overcomes the greatest weakness they have – their inability to work together. They finally begin to put their individual pieces and strengths together, after two of them are dead, and defeat Belasco. But along the way… oh yes, along the way….
The original novel is by far more explicit and horrific than either the movie or the graphic novel. Of the three formats, only this one includes the inner thoughts of the characters that help us to get an insight into their flaws and weaknesses, the same sort of insight that allows Belasco to turn them against each other. And, unlike the movie, this includes all the twisted games that Belasco plays with Tanner and Edith. Belasco, a powerfully charismatic sadist with a taste for the corruption of innocent souls, attacks these two where they’re weakest. Tanner, with the memories of her brother’s death, and his final sorrows. Edith, with her somewhat warped views of sexuality as a fearful thing. Perhaps the greatest horror of Hell House is that its master so easily attacks the deepest, most intimate parts of a person’s identity – your core beliefs, your sexuality, your emotions, your very mind.
Interestingly, that very target is what proves to be Belasco’s undoing. Realizing that the one point that Belasco can be attacked on is his ego, Fischer hunts him down and begins ripping Belasco’s inflated ego to pieces, slowly destroying the spirit as they face each other. This scene exists in all versions, though in the movie it’s perhaps at its weakest (in writing, not in portrayal – more on that later.) If you don’t want to read it, then look for one of the audiobook versions, preferably unabridged – it’s about an eight-hour listen, but well worth it.
Of the three versions… this is the weakest. Ironically, it’s much closer to the novel than the movie, and has some nice visual touches (as a Lovecraft fan, I was particularly amused by the Cthulhoid face in the bottom of the pool in the overhead shot.) It covers all the major elements of the plot, and portrays the mental and phsyical degradation of the house’s occupants the best. Unfortunately, it edits out all of the interior parts that are so badly needed to understand everybody. While the movie does the same, you rather expect that of a film. A graphic novel could at least include the occasional reference… but it chooses not to. While just as explicit as the novel, it’s hamstrung by the fact that the novel is just as easy to read as the graphic novel… and, as such, can’t really be a full recommendation. That said, if you can’t bring yourself to read a full page, and you want to get the full version along with lesbian undertones, you could do worse… like watching the recent remake of The Haunting.
While the book is better, and the movie too focused on one particular element of Belasco’s ego, the movie is perhaps my favorite version… and it’s all because of Roddy McDowall. While McDowall can overact with the best of them, for most of the movie he underplays the tense, paranoid Fischer. Only as events begin to unravel, and Fischer begins to become unhinged, does McDowall take the brakes off and start letting out his energy. While most critics hate the ending of the movie, I think it’s my favorite version – McDowall’s delivery is perfect, and you never get the ridiculous feeling any of a thousand other actors might have provided when you watch them monologuing to an empty space and expecting it to answer back. While the movie is, at best, a heavily censored version of the original… it’s also a very, very good one, and I can’t recommend it highly enough to fans of the haunted house film.
