Another Lively Place of the Dead

Given my fondness for haunted house movies, you'd think I'd be fonder of 1973's The Legend of Hell House. I do enjoy it. It's a lovely, weird old manor. The cast is fine. It feels truncated, though, like too many important scenes were cut.

An old man wanting confirmation of the existence of an afterlife hires three people to stay in the "Hell House", so named because its hauntings are so bad that of the last group who stayed there, only one emerged alive. Sounds like as much confirmation there as the old man's likely to get with the new group.

That one survivor is Roddy McDowall, who's with the new group. Annoyingly, no-one ever asks why he would come back. Or anything specific about his prior experience. There must be some missing scenes, that's all I can think. It's too glaring an absence. I'm thinking back now to Stephen King's Rose Red and how it provided motives even for characters who had very good reason not to want to stay in the haunted house. That's one reason Rose Red is a superior work.

The group in Hell House consists of Dr. Barrett (Clive Revill), Mr. Fischer (McDowall), an angry young medium called Florence (Pamela Frianklin), and Barrett's wife, Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt), tags along. None of them is particularly interesting. The house is a nice enough, gothic monstrosity.

There's a lot of exposition delivered by characters to each other, explaining who the ghosts are and how they operate. There are voices and shadows and falling props. All pretty standard.

X Sonnet #1877

The rocking string was used on many lutes.
For power pots, the time for music came.
Adorn the gnome with special oil boots.
And see the elephant receives the same.
Destruction came with easy charm to them.
In circles, murder fools debate the knife.
A patch of blue would save the rusty djinn.
Immortals rarely fear the end of life.
The boneless roads would serve to stand a man.
Corrupted bets divest the money bags.
Alignment rusts the precious metal ban.
Department stores have started selling rags.
They speak across the pointless fields of stress.
The masters only build a tangled mess.