Victorian Science and Spiritualism in the Legend of Hell House

HOST 5 (1) pp. 31–46 Intellect Limited 2014 Horror Studies Volume 5 Number 1 © 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/host.5.1.31_1 Murray Leeder University of Manitoba Victorian science and spiritualism in The Legend of Hell House abstract Keywords This article explores how The Legend of Hell House (1973), the cinematic adap- ghosts tation of Richard Matheson’s novel Hell House ([1971] 1999), updates debates cinema and struggles between scientists and spiritualists in the Victorian period, reworking hauntings many key themes and even individual personages. It shows that the film exposes the Victorian links between understandings of the scientific and the supernatural that underlie Richard Matheson their superficial opposition. It also discusses how The Legend of Hell House self-reflexively comments upon the ‘supernaturalization’ of modern media technology and especially the ‘supernatural’ characteristics ascribed to cinema in its first years. Near the end of a review essay entitled ‘Ghosts of ghosts’, Nina Auerbach states that, ‘Most monsters mutate with their times, but our own ghosts, both those of literature and science, cling intractably to Victorian visions’ (2004: 283). Her observation echoes a statement made by R. C. Finucane in his history of ghosts in western culture that ‘… on the whole there is no essen- tial difference between twentieth-century apparitions and their nineteenth century prototypes’ (Finucane 1982: 221); in essence, the spiritualist move- ment, incalculably popular in the middle and late nineteenth century, indel- ibly reshaped the cultural understanding of the ghost and there has been scant change since then. While this is claim is perhaps excessive, the vestigial 31 HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 31 3/26/14 10:30:14 AM Murray Leeder 1. Despite the year of its ‘Victorianness’ of the ghost is certainly still with us. This article focuses on construction, the house very much appears one cinematic example of this indebtedness to Victorian debates about the Victorian, its exteriors nature of ghosts by discussing a neglected ghost film: The Legend of Hell House played by Wykehurst (Hough, 1973). Based on Richard Matheson’s novel Hell House ([1971] 1999) Place in Bolney, West Sussex, built in and with a screenplay by Matheson himself, it tends to be discussed as a less 1871. The interiors ambiguous and perhaps less successful variation on The Haunting (Wise, 1963), are stuffed full of a the film of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). While both sets particularly ugly brand of quasi-Victorian of books and films broadly share similar outlines (the investigation of a noto- kitsch. rious haunted house by a team of specialists), they are very different in tone and theme. Rather than considering it in the shadow of its famous predeces- sor, this article shows how The Legend of Hell House’s cites Victorian debates on spiritualism and science, reworking ideas and individual personages of that era, while examining the supernatural character of modern science and technology. While much of what I argue here also applies to Matheson’s novel (the film is a very faithful, if tamer, adaptation), my focus here is indeed on the film. I will show how the film’s themes of supernaturalized technology, though adapted from the book, are extended into to a self-reflexive commen- tary on cinema itself, especially through the construction of the film’s villain and the formal properties of the film’s haunted spaces. The Legend of Hell House concerns an investigation into the existence of ghosts and the possibility of survival after death on the behest of a millionaire named Deutsch (Roland Culver), conducted in the ‘Mount Everest of haunted houses’, the Belasco House. Nicknamed Hell House, it was the abode of the degenerate millionaire Emeric Belasco (Michael Gough), who built the house in 1919 to serve as a palace of sin and debauchery for himself and his guests.1 In 1929, all were found dead except for Belasco, whose body was missing. The novel explains Belasco’s cruel excesses with page on page of stomach-churning details, which the film condenses to tantalizing succinctness: ‘Drug addiction, alcoholism, sadism, bestiality, murder, vampirism, necrophilia, cannibalism, not to mention a gamut of sexual goodies’. The horrors did not end, as since then, the house has violently resisted all attempts at investigation, leaving most researchers dead or insane. The present team investigating on Deutsch’s behalf consists of physicist/parapsychologist Dr Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill) and a pair of mediums, the ardent spiritualist and mental medium Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin) and the physical medium B. F. Fischer (Roddy McDowall), the only survivor of the last investigation into Hell House and consequently the most cautious and practical of the three. They are accompanied by Barrett’s wife, Ann (Gayle Hunnicut). As the quartet are beset by supernatural phenomena, tension mounts between Barrett and Tanner, the embodiments of oppo- sitional viewpoints about the nature of ghosts, constantly at odds as they both refuse to budge from their beliefs. The house ultimately kills them both, leaving it to Fischer and Ann to solve the mystery of Emeric Belasco, divining that Belasco was actually a dwarf who had his legs removed and replaced with stilts to become ‘the Roaring Giant’. Belasco had arranged for his body to be preserved and hidden in a secret lead-shielded compartment behind his satanic chapel. Faced with the exposure of his secret, Belasco is dispelled at last. the supernaturaL, science and spirituaLisM The Legend of Hell House opens with a full-screen testimonial from Tom Corbett, ‘Clairvoyant and Psychic Consultant to European Royalty’, claiming that: ‘Although the story of this film is fictitious, the events depicted involving 32 HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 32 3/25/14 8:42:07 AM Victorian science and spiritualism in The Legend of Hell House psychic phenomena are not only very much within the bounds of possibility, 2. Corbett was a real 2 person, and is also but could well be true’. The statement manages the curious trick of seeming credited as a technical to be both redundant and self-contradictory, but just what it is doing there? advisor on The Legend Can Corbett truly be stating that everything in the film could happen in real- of Hell House; this is not a reference to the ity? On one hand, the quote serves to claim for the film a kind of verisimilitude television and comics in its depiction of the supernatural. But since the film gives us overzealous character ‘Tom Corbett, clairvoyants whose powers are genuine but unreliable, what stock should we Space Cadet’. put in Corbett’s assertions? The Corbett quotation sets up a conflict between different versions of what Deutsch calls ‘the facts concerning life after death’. The film depicts an investigation of a haunted house, but the investigators have distinctly different agenda and different criteria for what constitutes facts about the supernatural. Hell House ([1971] 1999) and The Legend of Hell House have been described as updating a celebrated Victorian ghost tale, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘The haunted and the haunters, or the house and the brain’ (Tibbetts 2002: 100). Called ‘the apogee of the naturalized supernatural in the Victorian age’ (Milbank 2002: 163; see also Briggs 1977: 58–59), it concerns a man decid- ing to spend a night in a notorious London haunted house. The narrator is a rational yet open-minded sort of Victorian subject: Now, my theory is that the Supernatural is the Impossible … therefore, if a ghost rise before me, I have not the right to say, ‘So, then, the supernatural is possible,’ but rather ‘So, then, the apparition of a ghost, is, contrary to received opinion, within the laws of nature; that is, not supernatural’. (Bulwer-Lytton [1859] 1980: 315) It is therefore his hope, like many of the psychical researchers of the follow- ing decades, that phenomenon deemed supernatural will ultimately be recon- ciled with a scientific mindset. Like a great many Victorian ghost stories, the tale justifies its supernatural phenomena with references to electromagnetism, mesmerism, spiritualism and other then-current discourses. The haunting is ultimately attributed to a piece of occult technology built by an evil mesmerist, designed to hold ghosts to the house: Upon a small book, or rather table, was placed a saucer of crystal: this saucer was filled with a clear liquid – on that liquid floated a kind of compass, with a needle shifting rapidly round; but instead of the usual points of a compass were seven strange characters, not very unlike those used by astrologers to denote the planets. (Bulwer-Lytton [1859] 1980: 326–27) With this object destroyed, the house becomes inhabitable once again. Whether or not Matheson drew directly on ‘The haunted and the haunters’, The Legend of Hell House is on a generic lineage with Bulwer-Lytton’s tale and others like it: haunted house stories that depend on the blurring of the scientific (particularly the electromagnetic) and the occult for the production of a sense of technological uncanny. As numerous scholars have explored, complexities and paradoxes of the Victorian supernatural reflected a society simultaneously committed to rationalism and obsessed with the supernatural and occult. Spiritualism emerged around 1850 and would become one of the most significant social forces in the remainder of the nineteenth century. 33 HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 33 3/25/14 8:42:07 AM Murray Leeder Jeffrey Sconce connects the invention of the telegraph, first demonstrated by Samuel Morse in 1844, and the origins of spiritualism, conventionally dated to the ‘Rochester Knockings’ or ‘Rochester Tappings’ in 1848 and the subse- quent frenzy of similar paranormal activity reported across America.

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