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If it had ended, we would not be here
The Legend of Hell House (1973) has spent so much time inside my head that it is always a little strange to take it out and look at it with my eyes instead. If that makes the movie sound like an exercise in mediumship, so much the better. It is one of my very favorite ghost films.
Directed by John Hough and adapted faithfully, albeit somewhat less outright pornily, by Richard Matheson from his novel Hell House (1971), the film doesn't flip the script on Shirley Jackson so much as it remixes her chamber-horror conceit of a troubled team of paranormal researchers engulfed by a house where everything from space-time to personal agency has gone whack-a-ding-hoy. The Belasco House is the so-called "Mount Everest of haunted houses," abandoned in 1929 after the disappearance of its ill-reputed millionaire owner and the grotesque deaths of all twenty-seven of his guests at the time. Since then, the house has so dramatically resisted all efforts to investigate its "phenomena" that two previous expeditions have garnered nothing but violent death and insanity, but a rich old man wants evidence that you can take it with you, so a third is assembled in the run-up to Christmas—that dark-and-light hinge of the year—and delivered unto the gates of Hell House. They are a neatly unbalanced little group, introduced before the credits like the pages of a dossier. On the side of science, we have Dr. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill), an experienced physicist who believes that ghosts are nothing more than residual electromagnetic radiation and has been building the machine to prove it; on the side of the spirit, the gravely young mental medium Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin) who interprets her gift through her own devout Christianity as "God's manifestation in man." Between them stands the neutral witness of Ann Barrett (Gayle Hunnicutt), who customarily accompanies her husband on his cases, and as far away from the rest of them as he can get, shoulders hunched, fists in his pockets, glasses so heavy it feels invasive to see his closed door of a face without them, stands one-time precocious physical medium and present-day "mental wreck" Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall) who in 1953, at the age of fifteen, was the sole survivor of the last attempt to explore or exorcise Hell House. They come with their beliefs, their blind spots, their injuries, their affections, all cracks into which the sickly atmosphere of the Belasco House can sink like the dust-drifting fog that shrouds the grounds even by day. At first it's subtle, chiseling at the expected frictions of professional disagreements and personal insecurities; then it's not subtle at all, throwing everything from poltergeist activity to possession to spectral sexual violence at the characters whether they get out of the way fast enough or not. The climax of this movie involves Roddy McDowall screaming at a stained glass window while a wind machine whiplashes him across the floor. Really, it's not subtle. Except that it is, in its own splashily slow-burn fashion, and every time I have rewatched this movie since 2011 I have noticed something else it does well. That category is maybe never going to include the actual final revelation except insofar as I respect how unconditionally it blazes over the top, but that's on Matheson either way.
"What the spiritualists refer to as ectoplasm," Barrett explains following an unexpectedly demonstrative séance, "is derived almost entirely from the medium's body . . . an organic externalization of thought. Mind reduced to matter." For all the intangible dread evoked by its chilly deep-focus photography and its table-rapping score, The Legend of Hell House is a movie of disturbingly physical hauntings, spirit that is more than willing and flesh that doesn't have much say in the matter. Even before his unsavory disappearance, Emeric Belasco marked his house with a libertine's catalogue of "drug addiction, alcoholism, sadism, bestiality, mutilation, murder, vampirism, necrophilia, cannibalism—not to mention a gamut of sexual goodies" and the nature of the phenomena encountered within its walls argues for the survival after death of the libido if nothing else. Successfully realizing an atmosphere of sexual evil is tricky business. Put a phallic symbol wrong and instead of de Sade you get inappropriate giggles, embarrassment squick, or tedium. Here it's built into the design of the house—the exteriors are played by the neo-Gothic wrought iron and spires of Wykehurst Park in West Sussex, but the interiors as dressed by Robert Jones are carnally overstuffed, simultaneously pornographic and repellent. Paintings and etchings offer centuries of nudity, individually artistic but cumulatively combat zone; every statue that can get its tits out has. Ceilings are tiled with a fin-de-siècle swinger's mirrors. An average bookcase stocks titles like Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices, The Worship of Priapus, The Psychology of Sex, The Anatomy of Abuses, and Autoerotic Phenomena. Even the non-figurative furnishings are heavily baroque, inviting the touch as much as the eye. It's all sensual, but none of it looks arousing or even attractive; even without the rotting draperies, the freckled mirrors and the cobwebs, it's decadence already decayed. All the reds are anatomical, all the yellows sulfurous, all the greens arsenical, all the blues like mold. There's something somber and cavernous about even the most lavishly decorated rooms and the cinematography by Alan Hume only heightens the effect with its wide angles and extreme close-ups, its restless camera that sometimes isolates the characters in long shot and sometimes gets literally right up their noses. The living are at a disadvantage in this space dominated by the dead; their very physicality makes them vulnerable, especially to a spirit that so delights in the profanation of bodies as well as souls. In one of the house's rare moments of seduction rather than assault, Ann lies awake in the firelight beside her sleeping husband, watching shadows caress one another in a corner of the ceiling. They are cast from a bronze nymph and satyr entwined on the nightstand; soft moans bubble up through the smoky red light as it streams around them like a hellish magic lantern show. By the time Fischer finds her dreamily fondling the nipples of one of the caryatids on the staircase, however, it is clear that the visions the house has put into her head are not quite so tender: "You . . . me . . . that girl . . . Lionel . . . all together . . . naked . . . drunk . . . clutching . . . sweating . . . biting . . ." She all but growls the words, her face fever-slicked, a maenad in heat who might tear a man to pieces for refusing her. Her second, superficially more self-willed advance is even more mocking and aggressive, clamping her unwilling partner's hand to her breast—Fischer jerks away as if burned—and berating him, "Touch me! Touch me or I'll find somebody who will!" Sex in this house may have been practiced as ritual, around the table in the great hall or in the inverted chapel where a horned Christ like a crucified Devil presides over murals of debauchery, but it's bestial, interchangeable, mutual exploitation at best. Florence lent her voice to the dead as far back as her first night in Hell House, but when she offers her body in the sacrificial conviction that it will give a tormented ghost the strength to move on, she's not just bitten and scratched for her troubles but violated at the most intimate level, her medium's choice to open herself to the unseen world cruelly perverted into uncontrollable possession. The moment when she grins wickedly over her shoulder at the rest of the group is shocking less because she has just been found naked, clawed bloodily from shoulders to thighs as though she really lay with a demon, than because the expression is so alien to the primly zealous, childish face of the black-haired, green-eyed girl who sat for her trances with a silver cross around her neck. "God," she chokes a scene later, "he's inside me!" No jouncing tables or falling chandeliers can be as frightening as this meta-very-physical rape and I doubt any onscreen orgies could have conveyed more in the way of credible blasphemy. We watch the pleasure of the house reinscribed in the pain of its visitors and we know all we need to know.
The person in this story who knows the most, of course, is Ben Fischer, much good it does him for most of the runtime. It's not the first role in which I saw McDowall, but it did functionally imprint me on him—the ghost-ridden PTSD might have done it no matter what, but I can't imagine another actor in the part. Right up to the finale, he's almost a subliminal performance, holding himself in so tightly behind his glasses that are both shields and blinders that he might as well be one more leftover specter of Hell House, his fleeting expressions of wariness or incredulity or warning as remote as his toneless, dissociative ghost-voice that sharpens into an astringent tenor when nettled, as if the only emotion this hollowed-out ex-prodigy can feel beyond terror anymore is a kind of weary irritation with the people who still believe that Hell House can be studied, solved, explained. In his early scenes, he registers mostly as a passive-aggressive infodump, no use psychically speaking—he hasn't shown any talent in years and no one knows if it's because he can't or he won't—and not much better company, but his knowledge of the house is indispensable, even if the manner in which he communicates it invariably suggests that he knows you'll be sorry you asked. Of himself, he says only, almost disinterestedly, "What's to tell? The house tried to kill me. It almost succeeded." His stated goal is to wait out the week, collect his £100,000, and get out with his skin and what's left of his sanity intact. "I know the score! You do not fight this house!" Especially as we watch Ann dissolve into abject fantasies while Florence and Barrett calcify into a war of parapsychological ideologies, it's easy to think of Fischer as the one sensible, unaffected member of the party, but his relentless pessimism starts to look awfully convenient in a house that doesn't want its secrets disturbed. Even so, every now and then we see a bit of incautious warmth from him, a flicker of hope or bravado under the scar tissue even if the next second it's snuffed out again. When he sits up all night with ghost-raped Florence, his tired smile in the morning is the least cynical we've ever seen him, guardedly relieved that she's acting like herself, at least until she begins to shudder between coquetry and panic and finally a deep, contemptuous man's voice comes booming from her mouth like a looping tape of Fischer's ground-in trauma: "Who the hell do you think you are, you bastard? You might have been hot stuff when you were fifteen, but now you're shit!" It might, like all the most effective devils, be hurting him with nothing more than the truth. When a sharp exchange with Barrett stung him into lowering his mental defenses, the exposure left Fischer screaming himself ragged, contorted on the carpet like a pithed marionette: he was kidding himself if he thought he was immune. Maybe it's not pragmatism driving his inaction, just ordinary, immobilizing fear. Either way, he's a bitchy, breaky triumph of a character and I love that when the narrative effectively comes down to a battle of neuroses between him and the malevolent power at the heart of the Belasco House, while of course the audience is rooting for Fischer, that he should finally exorcise himself along with this house that has been his hell for more than half his life, we're really not sure that he won't blink first.
As alluded earlier, the checkmate revelation of The Legend of Hell House—"Legs!"—is dumb with a capital duh and there's nothing to do about it, but I go with it every time because it has its emotional logic all lined up, which cannot be said of its body-horror Napoleon complex. It is cruel but consistent that Florence and Barrett should die in parallel with their intractable beliefs, the spiritualist under the crushing weight of a crucifix and the scientist when his ghost-dispelling machine literally blows up in his face, both of them forced to realize in the last moments of their lives that they were fatally, presumptuously wrong about the nature of the haunting of Hell House; that leaves Ann, who never cared about rationalism vs. the occult so long as they all made it out alive, and Fischer, finally able to synthesize the house's history with the discoveries made by his dead companions into the realization that the corpse behind the curtain is Emeric Belasco (Michael Gough), in life shamefully corporeal, in death a bodiless manipulator of others' meat suits, but only so long as his Bluebeard's chamber lay undisturbed. The mystery ends with the unmasking of the "Roaring Giant" as "a funny little dried-up bastard." I enjoy this writing of exorcism as a game of the psychic dozens: the house has thrown everything it can at Fischer to humiliate him, retraumatize him, even kill him, but this scared-stiff survivor can throw back the final your mom. I love that Fischer who never believed he could save anybody is the only character in the film who actually does, closing the gates of the now-cleansed Belasco House behind himself and Ann at the very last minute of the allotted week. And I like that when we get to see him exert his abilities as a physical medium at last, they are as impressive as his teenage reputation claimed. The prosthetic legs are just still . . . agh. Thank God for the total commitment of Roddy McDowall. If he thought anything he was shouting was silly, it doesn't show.
I have other reasons to like this movie. The pseudo-documentary assurance of the time-stamped subtitles which start the clock ticking on "Friday December 17th 4:08 PM" and roll credits at "Friday December 24th 4:59 PM," leaving the pre-title sequence as our only glimpse of the drained, wintry world beyond the Belasco estate, almost does more to disjoint the timeline than track it. Given the electromagnetic character of the film's ghosts, it only makes sense that their audible signature should be the work of radiophonic pioneers Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire, a nervy, visceral soundscape of dry exhalations and atonal heartbeats, detuned white noise and murky tattoos that feels both uncannily of another world and uncomfortably of this one. The doubling of two millionaires obsessed with survival after death is low-key but clever; the practical effects keep the focus on human reactions, not ghostly jump scares. I never like instances of animal harm, but I comforted myself and my movie cats that the blood in the shower was very obviously fake and the black cat is seen unscathed and prowling at both ends of the film. The cast is tiny and argumentative, but no one is a strawman. I have mentioned before that this movie got into my novelette "The Boatman's Cure" via the suitably liminal roundabout of a dream; I mean it as a tribute when I say that it still seems to hold up while I'm awake. I want the world to be safe for 35 mm so that I can see it in a theater someday. For Christmas, maybe. Till then, cinema isn't less of a haunted medium just because its ghosts are flickering in pixels on a screen. This matter brought to you by my thoughtful backers at Patreon.
Directed by John Hough and adapted faithfully, albeit somewhat less outright pornily, by Richard Matheson from his novel Hell House (1971), the film doesn't flip the script on Shirley Jackson so much as it remixes her chamber-horror conceit of a troubled team of paranormal researchers engulfed by a house where everything from space-time to personal agency has gone whack-a-ding-hoy. The Belasco House is the so-called "Mount Everest of haunted houses," abandoned in 1929 after the disappearance of its ill-reputed millionaire owner and the grotesque deaths of all twenty-seven of his guests at the time. Since then, the house has so dramatically resisted all efforts to investigate its "phenomena" that two previous expeditions have garnered nothing but violent death and insanity, but a rich old man wants evidence that you can take it with you, so a third is assembled in the run-up to Christmas—that dark-and-light hinge of the year—and delivered unto the gates of Hell House. They are a neatly unbalanced little group, introduced before the credits like the pages of a dossier. On the side of science, we have Dr. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill), an experienced physicist who believes that ghosts are nothing more than residual electromagnetic radiation and has been building the machine to prove it; on the side of the spirit, the gravely young mental medium Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin) who interprets her gift through her own devout Christianity as "God's manifestation in man." Between them stands the neutral witness of Ann Barrett (Gayle Hunnicutt), who customarily accompanies her husband on his cases, and as far away from the rest of them as he can get, shoulders hunched, fists in his pockets, glasses so heavy it feels invasive to see his closed door of a face without them, stands one-time precocious physical medium and present-day "mental wreck" Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall) who in 1953, at the age of fifteen, was the sole survivor of the last attempt to explore or exorcise Hell House. They come with their beliefs, their blind spots, their injuries, their affections, all cracks into which the sickly atmosphere of the Belasco House can sink like the dust-drifting fog that shrouds the grounds even by day. At first it's subtle, chiseling at the expected frictions of professional disagreements and personal insecurities; then it's not subtle at all, throwing everything from poltergeist activity to possession to spectral sexual violence at the characters whether they get out of the way fast enough or not. The climax of this movie involves Roddy McDowall screaming at a stained glass window while a wind machine whiplashes him across the floor. Really, it's not subtle. Except that it is, in its own splashily slow-burn fashion, and every time I have rewatched this movie since 2011 I have noticed something else it does well. That category is maybe never going to include the actual final revelation except insofar as I respect how unconditionally it blazes over the top, but that's on Matheson either way.
"What the spiritualists refer to as ectoplasm," Barrett explains following an unexpectedly demonstrative séance, "is derived almost entirely from the medium's body . . . an organic externalization of thought. Mind reduced to matter." For all the intangible dread evoked by its chilly deep-focus photography and its table-rapping score, The Legend of Hell House is a movie of disturbingly physical hauntings, spirit that is more than willing and flesh that doesn't have much say in the matter. Even before his unsavory disappearance, Emeric Belasco marked his house with a libertine's catalogue of "drug addiction, alcoholism, sadism, bestiality, mutilation, murder, vampirism, necrophilia, cannibalism—not to mention a gamut of sexual goodies" and the nature of the phenomena encountered within its walls argues for the survival after death of the libido if nothing else. Successfully realizing an atmosphere of sexual evil is tricky business. Put a phallic symbol wrong and instead of de Sade you get inappropriate giggles, embarrassment squick, or tedium. Here it's built into the design of the house—the exteriors are played by the neo-Gothic wrought iron and spires of Wykehurst Park in West Sussex, but the interiors as dressed by Robert Jones are carnally overstuffed, simultaneously pornographic and repellent. Paintings and etchings offer centuries of nudity, individually artistic but cumulatively combat zone; every statue that can get its tits out has. Ceilings are tiled with a fin-de-siècle swinger's mirrors. An average bookcase stocks titles like Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices, The Worship of Priapus, The Psychology of Sex, The Anatomy of Abuses, and Autoerotic Phenomena. Even the non-figurative furnishings are heavily baroque, inviting the touch as much as the eye. It's all sensual, but none of it looks arousing or even attractive; even without the rotting draperies, the freckled mirrors and the cobwebs, it's decadence already decayed. All the reds are anatomical, all the yellows sulfurous, all the greens arsenical, all the blues like mold. There's something somber and cavernous about even the most lavishly decorated rooms and the cinematography by Alan Hume only heightens the effect with its wide angles and extreme close-ups, its restless camera that sometimes isolates the characters in long shot and sometimes gets literally right up their noses. The living are at a disadvantage in this space dominated by the dead; their very physicality makes them vulnerable, especially to a spirit that so delights in the profanation of bodies as well as souls. In one of the house's rare moments of seduction rather than assault, Ann lies awake in the firelight beside her sleeping husband, watching shadows caress one another in a corner of the ceiling. They are cast from a bronze nymph and satyr entwined on the nightstand; soft moans bubble up through the smoky red light as it streams around them like a hellish magic lantern show. By the time Fischer finds her dreamily fondling the nipples of one of the caryatids on the staircase, however, it is clear that the visions the house has put into her head are not quite so tender: "You . . . me . . . that girl . . . Lionel . . . all together . . . naked . . . drunk . . . clutching . . . sweating . . . biting . . ." She all but growls the words, her face fever-slicked, a maenad in heat who might tear a man to pieces for refusing her. Her second, superficially more self-willed advance is even more mocking and aggressive, clamping her unwilling partner's hand to her breast—Fischer jerks away as if burned—and berating him, "Touch me! Touch me or I'll find somebody who will!" Sex in this house may have been practiced as ritual, around the table in the great hall or in the inverted chapel where a horned Christ like a crucified Devil presides over murals of debauchery, but it's bestial, interchangeable, mutual exploitation at best. Florence lent her voice to the dead as far back as her first night in Hell House, but when she offers her body in the sacrificial conviction that it will give a tormented ghost the strength to move on, she's not just bitten and scratched for her troubles but violated at the most intimate level, her medium's choice to open herself to the unseen world cruelly perverted into uncontrollable possession. The moment when she grins wickedly over her shoulder at the rest of the group is shocking less because she has just been found naked, clawed bloodily from shoulders to thighs as though she really lay with a demon, than because the expression is so alien to the primly zealous, childish face of the black-haired, green-eyed girl who sat for her trances with a silver cross around her neck. "God," she chokes a scene later, "he's inside me!" No jouncing tables or falling chandeliers can be as frightening as this meta-very-physical rape and I doubt any onscreen orgies could have conveyed more in the way of credible blasphemy. We watch the pleasure of the house reinscribed in the pain of its visitors and we know all we need to know.
The person in this story who knows the most, of course, is Ben Fischer, much good it does him for most of the runtime. It's not the first role in which I saw McDowall, but it did functionally imprint me on him—the ghost-ridden PTSD might have done it no matter what, but I can't imagine another actor in the part. Right up to the finale, he's almost a subliminal performance, holding himself in so tightly behind his glasses that are both shields and blinders that he might as well be one more leftover specter of Hell House, his fleeting expressions of wariness or incredulity or warning as remote as his toneless, dissociative ghost-voice that sharpens into an astringent tenor when nettled, as if the only emotion this hollowed-out ex-prodigy can feel beyond terror anymore is a kind of weary irritation with the people who still believe that Hell House can be studied, solved, explained. In his early scenes, he registers mostly as a passive-aggressive infodump, no use psychically speaking—he hasn't shown any talent in years and no one knows if it's because he can't or he won't—and not much better company, but his knowledge of the house is indispensable, even if the manner in which he communicates it invariably suggests that he knows you'll be sorry you asked. Of himself, he says only, almost disinterestedly, "What's to tell? The house tried to kill me. It almost succeeded." His stated goal is to wait out the week, collect his £100,000, and get out with his skin and what's left of his sanity intact. "I know the score! You do not fight this house!" Especially as we watch Ann dissolve into abject fantasies while Florence and Barrett calcify into a war of parapsychological ideologies, it's easy to think of Fischer as the one sensible, unaffected member of the party, but his relentless pessimism starts to look awfully convenient in a house that doesn't want its secrets disturbed. Even so, every now and then we see a bit of incautious warmth from him, a flicker of hope or bravado under the scar tissue even if the next second it's snuffed out again. When he sits up all night with ghost-raped Florence, his tired smile in the morning is the least cynical we've ever seen him, guardedly relieved that she's acting like herself, at least until she begins to shudder between coquetry and panic and finally a deep, contemptuous man's voice comes booming from her mouth like a looping tape of Fischer's ground-in trauma: "Who the hell do you think you are, you bastard? You might have been hot stuff when you were fifteen, but now you're shit!" It might, like all the most effective devils, be hurting him with nothing more than the truth. When a sharp exchange with Barrett stung him into lowering his mental defenses, the exposure left Fischer screaming himself ragged, contorted on the carpet like a pithed marionette: he was kidding himself if he thought he was immune. Maybe it's not pragmatism driving his inaction, just ordinary, immobilizing fear. Either way, he's a bitchy, breaky triumph of a character and I love that when the narrative effectively comes down to a battle of neuroses between him and the malevolent power at the heart of the Belasco House, while of course the audience is rooting for Fischer, that he should finally exorcise himself along with this house that has been his hell for more than half his life, we're really not sure that he won't blink first.
As alluded earlier, the checkmate revelation of The Legend of Hell House—"Legs!"—is dumb with a capital duh and there's nothing to do about it, but I go with it every time because it has its emotional logic all lined up, which cannot be said of its body-horror Napoleon complex. It is cruel but consistent that Florence and Barrett should die in parallel with their intractable beliefs, the spiritualist under the crushing weight of a crucifix and the scientist when his ghost-dispelling machine literally blows up in his face, both of them forced to realize in the last moments of their lives that they were fatally, presumptuously wrong about the nature of the haunting of Hell House; that leaves Ann, who never cared about rationalism vs. the occult so long as they all made it out alive, and Fischer, finally able to synthesize the house's history with the discoveries made by his dead companions into the realization that the corpse behind the curtain is Emeric Belasco (Michael Gough), in life shamefully corporeal, in death a bodiless manipulator of others' meat suits, but only so long as his Bluebeard's chamber lay undisturbed. The mystery ends with the unmasking of the "Roaring Giant" as "a funny little dried-up bastard." I enjoy this writing of exorcism as a game of the psychic dozens: the house has thrown everything it can at Fischer to humiliate him, retraumatize him, even kill him, but this scared-stiff survivor can throw back the final your mom. I love that Fischer who never believed he could save anybody is the only character in the film who actually does, closing the gates of the now-cleansed Belasco House behind himself and Ann at the very last minute of the allotted week. And I like that when we get to see him exert his abilities as a physical medium at last, they are as impressive as his teenage reputation claimed. The prosthetic legs are just still . . . agh. Thank God for the total commitment of Roddy McDowall. If he thought anything he was shouting was silly, it doesn't show.
I have other reasons to like this movie. The pseudo-documentary assurance of the time-stamped subtitles which start the clock ticking on "Friday December 17th 4:08 PM" and roll credits at "Friday December 24th 4:59 PM," leaving the pre-title sequence as our only glimpse of the drained, wintry world beyond the Belasco estate, almost does more to disjoint the timeline than track it. Given the electromagnetic character of the film's ghosts, it only makes sense that their audible signature should be the work of radiophonic pioneers Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire, a nervy, visceral soundscape of dry exhalations and atonal heartbeats, detuned white noise and murky tattoos that feels both uncannily of another world and uncomfortably of this one. The doubling of two millionaires obsessed with survival after death is low-key but clever; the practical effects keep the focus on human reactions, not ghostly jump scares. I never like instances of animal harm, but I comforted myself and my movie cats that the blood in the shower was very obviously fake and the black cat is seen unscathed and prowling at both ends of the film. The cast is tiny and argumentative, but no one is a strawman. I have mentioned before that this movie got into my novelette "The Boatman's Cure" via the suitably liminal roundabout of a dream; I mean it as a tribute when I say that it still seems to hold up while I'm awake. I want the world to be safe for 35 mm so that I can see it in a theater someday. For Christmas, maybe. Till then, cinema isn't less of a haunted medium just because its ghosts are flickering in pixels on a screen. This matter brought to you by my thoughtful backers at Patreon.
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You are welcome! And you're so right about the Mina-Renfield axis of Florence and Fischer: the only other person who knows what it feels like. (Belasco does like to try his toys on for size.) He would have been doing the house's bidding if he had kept his head down and let it do as it would with the rest of them; it's so tenuous but so wonderful that he finally fights back, which it occurred to me this time to wonder if Belasco was afraid he would, the one that got away, after all. Stronger in the broken places, which is basically all of Fischer when he walks back into Hell House. If it works, it works.
I am charmed by Cal's newest phrase, although I can probably say that because I'm not hearing it every time I ask him something.
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Thank you! He was instantly important to me.
I should probably read the novel?
I have not actually read the novel! Gemma reviewed it years ago for some now-defunct online horror zine from which I gathered the porniness. (The only bit I remember clearly is ghostly anal sex, but I feel like that sufficiently proves my point.) I'm just as glad the film is more suggestive; it gets the necessary ickiness across without falling into any of the failure modes. I should probably also read it if just for comparison. My experience of Matheson's fiction is that his prose is just sort of there, but I read a collection of his Twilight Zone scripts once that were great.
I'm sure the film was edited and full of commercials. Mainly I remember that Roddy McDowall was yelling and I was feverish but contented.
Aw. That is an understandable state while watching Roddy McDowall.
(It took me until this rewatch to realize that I am reasonably confident that McDowall himself was not that tall, but somehow Fischer is one of those lanky awkward people who fold up like deck chairs when they sit down. That also impresses me.)
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I had an unexpected access of Tiny Wittgenstein trying to answer this comment, so: thank you! I didn't want it to become one of the movies I loved so much, I never wrote about it.
I think it maybe takes a slightly flawed film to really show the value of a strong performance. Certainly, that's what I take from your comments about McDowall in the climax of this one.
I think it's true. It's not like I don't love films that fire on all cylinders, but it can be really breathtaking to see someone working magic without an assist from the script.
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I shall endeavor to do what I can in the remainder of this month and proceed from there!