Western society has always been fascinated by the paranormal, particularly as a reflection of the powerlessness felt during certain times of war and civil unrest. In cinema, as with the rest of the culture, the late Sixties and Seventies were a very fertile period of fascination with the supernatural. Horror cinema in particular entered a new maturity with the release of Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), a rare mainstream horror hit, purposefully conceived for contemporary adult audiences. Still recovering from the twin tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and fearing an escalation of the war in Vietnam, North American cinema-goers flocked to escapist entertainment, making blockbusters out of such ground-breaking genre classics as The Planet of the Apes (1968) and 2001:A Space Odyssey (1968). Most horror films however, were still trapped in a gothic style fostered by filmmakers such as Roger Corman, and Britain's Hammer Films. Unlike those traditionalists, Polanskidared to tell a hip urban story of the supernatural that would ultimately sow the sensational seeds of a Seventies sci-fi and horror boom shrouded by Watergate paranoia and Middle-East conflict. Under the growing influence of a youth culture obsessed by free love and the occult, movies had finally started to relax their parochial self-censorship, thus allowing a film such as The Exorcist (1973) to be made, despite explicit content which would have prevented it from even being considered for production only a few years before. Veteran fantasy author and screenwriter Richard Matheson (The Incredible Shrinking Man) witnessed these changing winds, so when he came to write his sexually provocative horror novel Hell House in 1971, he took advantage of this new-found freedom. As with most authors, Matheson had experienced both good and bad times adapting his literary worksfor Hollywood, but he was well aware that controversial material sometimes had to be excised or toned-down for mass consumption. With box-office in mind, he turned outa PG-rated screenplay of his own R-rated novel, re-titled The Legend of Hell House, the story of the Belasco estate in Maine, with the reputation of being "the Mount Everest of haunted houses". For more traditional cinematic purposes, Matheson moved the novel's stately mansion to England, but the book's four ghost-hunting protagonists, a renowned para-psychologist (Clive Revill), his wife (Gayle Hunnicutt), and two spiritual mediums (Roddy McDowall & Pamela Franklin) remain largely unchanged. British director John Hough, who had cut his cinematic horror teeth on Hammer's last great vampire film Twins of Evil (1971), brings an appropriately sober eye to the potentially baroque paranormal atmosphere. The story unfolds in a visual and editing style that approximates realistic rhythms and lighting, without sacrificing any of the screenplay's carefully constructed sequences of suspense and terror. Hough even eschews a conventional film score, choosing instead to use sound effects and aural environments to convey the manor's macabre mileu. Although the novel featured a more graphically debauched incubus, Matheson's adaptation possesses a sufficient number of genuinely disturbing scenes, enough to convince audiences at the time that a perverted evil was manifesting itself amongst the vulnerable cast of characters. Although a modest success in America, it was unfortunately preceded in the U.K. by The Stone Tape (1972), a memorably harrowing television film with a spookily similar premise. Hough would later re-visit the haunted house genre with the disastrous Walt Disney production The Watcher In The Woods (1980), a film compromised by a re-shot vague ending intended to make it more palatable for family audiences. With The Legend of Hell House Hough and Matheson experienced no such pressures, for they knew what it takes to frighten a willing audience, and the result is a small marvel of tasteful terror. DVD & BLU-RAY
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