Ghost stories, particularly the subset focusing on haunted houses, often feel like a distinctly feminine approach to horror. Which is not to say that they are effeminate, not at all, but that the genre seems to particularly focus on female protagonists. A haunted house is essentially an attack on a realm traditionally ruled by women, and hauntings, real or imagined, are frequently used as signs of some failure on a woman’s part to live up to an expected standard as wife, mother or care-taker. Richard Matheson’s novel, and his screenplay adapting it, seem like a response to that type of ghost story. Because Matheson takes that core concept of a psychic essence living on in a building, and makes it into a story of sexual repression and impotency rather than one of domestic shortcomings.

Matheson sets up this situation by introducing us to a skeptical physicist who has spent years trying to prove that “hauntings” are not evidence of life after death, bribed by a dying rich man to find some definitive answer. He is tasked with taking a small team of psychics into the “Belasco House”, a building in which such sexually and criminally depraved acts occurred that it has been tainted with evil. Evil so strong that of the two previous attempts to investigate the hauntings, only one person escaped sane and alive. Into this environment steps the skeptical, rationalist doctor, his wife, the sole survivor of the previous expedition, a psychic who refuses to use his abilities (played by Roddy McDowall, in one of those curious casting decisions where it’s not quite clear whether casting McDowall is meant to be an indication that his character is gay or not), and a mental psychic who believes her abilities are the powers of God made manifest. Almost immediately the groups finds itself at odds, with the doctor refusing to believe in a supernatural explanation for the haunting, even in the face of physical evidence, and the female psychic who believes that Belasco’s previously unknown son is trying to make contact with her. Relations between the group degenerate, as an occult force possesses the doctor’s wife and tries to get her to seduce McDowall and Belasco’s “son” tries to get the good Christian girl to “sleep” with him. When the doctor builds a device intended to destroy residual electromagnetic energy, thus disrupting the deus ex machina fields that make it appear that the house is haunted, the conflict between the doctor and the psychic becomes physical, and in short order she finds herself crushed beneath a large crucifix and he is impaled by a chandelier.

At this point, the theme of the film starts to become clearer. Everything to do with the haunting has had to do with sex, specifically the sex drives of the investigators. One psychic is sexually repressed, so the house attempts to seduce her with a lost soul needing comfort. The doctor already devotes more time to his work than his wife, and so the house attacks him by revving his wife’s sexual appetite. Belasco, we’ve been told, was a man of tremendous and disgusting sexual appetites, but…the big reveal, the source of the haunting, as discovered by McDowall, is that Belasco was a man of such tremendous inadequacy that he actually cut off his own legs and had them mechanically elongated in order to appear taller. The implication here, the subtext, is that if Belasco was that much of a fraud and failure, he must have been impotent as well. Just as McDowall was, in a sense, when he refused to use his psychic abilities. Just as the Doctor was when he ignored his wife’s needs. And when his machines failed. Hell House is essentially haunted because men can’t get it up.
Like I said, it’s Matheson trying to butch up the genre. It’s an interesting idea he’s going for, but in execution it comes off so misogynist as to be almost comical. Even if the bickering between the believer and the skeptic is resolved with the both of them being destroyed by symbols of their faith is a nice dramatic touch.

What eventually saves Hell House from itself is the superb use of atmosphere. Haunted house movies are tricky. If you go overboard with physical or visual effects to represent the supernatural presence, you turn your film into just another monster movie (or worse). If you keep your film purely psychological, you’ve got a movie about people going insane over nothing happening whatsoever. Hell House actually strikes a good balance, with one spectacular scene of overt menace, and then quieter, more restrained physical effects, with the rest of the haunting effects communicated by the actors and very carefully chosen and filmed close ups. With this approach, the essentially intangible nature of the haunting is made clear, but the audience is still given something to see and react to themselves.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 12:01 AM and is filed under Spooky Month, movies, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.