But Hell House won’t give up that easily… After a series of poltergeist attacks, possessions and sexual assaults on Tanner, which she believes to be the work of Belasco’s son Daniel, Barrett installs his electro-magnetic radiation machine and starts trying to cleanse the house. Accompanied by his wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt), the mental medium Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin) and physical medium Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall), the sole survivor of a previous attempt to exorcise the house, Barrett moves in to the house formerly owned by the notorious Emeric Belasco, a six-foot-five millionaire, sadist and cult leader known to his followers as “The Roaring Giant.” In the week before Christmas, the team begins its investigations, tension soon dividing the rationalist Barrett from the deeply religious Tanner. Physicist Dr Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill) is retained by ailing millionaire Mr Deutsch (Roland Culver) to investigate “survival after death” at the Belasco House, an English country manor (“played” by Wykehurst Park in West Sussex) with a fearsome reputation for supernatural activity. All of this is reasonably engineered and explained but what you've been missing is a real aura or a true frisson in these annals of trance-substantiation.Though there are undoubtedly similarities to the greatest of all haunted house films, Robert Wise‘s The Haunting (1963) (both films revolve around a quartet of investigators retreating to a haunted house with a fearsome reputation) but there’s also more than a hint of Nigel Kneale about John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House, based on the novel Hell House, adapted for the screen by its author Richard Matheson who considerably watered down the original’s sex and violence Barrett's fine desensitizing machine fails.

Barrett's wife become sexually disturbed their benefactor-to-be dies naturally while two others are killed and even Dr. Once again everything and everyone is unsettled: chairs rock and the cutlery cuts up Miss Tanner exposes teeth marks on her breasts and is brutally clawed by a cat she and Dr. The last intrusion left eight victims (dead) and one survivor, Fischer. Barrett, and a medium, Fischer, and a sensitive, Florence Tanner, to investigate the house. You're looking on rather than taken in when a wealthy man offers $100,000 to a physicist, Dr. Although Matheson has lots of equipment as a novelist and screen writer, and all the paranormal information he needs from apports to xenoglossy, somehow he misses. The road to Hell House is paved with bricks - the son of its owner had presumably been sealed up in a wall alive and good intentions - to scare the daylights out of you during an evening's entertainment.

Hell house richard matheson review