Victorian Science and Spiritualism in the Legend of Hell House

HOST 5 (1) pp. 31–46 Intellect Limited 2014

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 movement, 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

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

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 following 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.

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. Kate and Margaret Fox, ages 12 and 15, found that a ghostly presence within their cottage in Hydesville, New York, could communicate with them through rapping (Sconce 2002: 22–24), once for yes and twice for no. The rappings quickly became a sensation, with 500 people apparently witnessing the phenomenon in the first week alone. The Fox House stands as the original mediatized haunted house, with the whole story unfolding into an atmosphere of excitement and anxiety from newly unveiled technologies of electrical communication. The nascent spiritualist movement was itself a bastard child of technological advancement, and swiftly tethered itself in fundamental ways to media technology. In defining ghosts as beings of electromagnetic radiation, The Legend of Hell House reproduces the uncanny qualities ascribed to electricity in the nineteenth century. In the film, Dr Barrett explains his theory of the supernatural:

The body emits a form of energy invisible to the human eye. This energy can be expanded far beyond the confines of the body, where it can create mechanical, chemical, physical effects, sounds, the movement of objects and the like, such as we have experienced. The energy I talk about is a field of electromagnetic radiation … Such power must saturate its environment. Is it any wonder, then, that Hell House is the way it is? Consider this structure’s mental and physical residual energy which has been poured into its interior. In essence, the house is a giant battery, the residual energy of which must inevitably be tapped by those who enter it.

Barrett discounts Tanner’s suggestion that electromagnetic radiation is what we survive as after death (surviving personalities); it is merely, he says, ‘mindless, directionless energy’. E. M. R. is actually so general a term that it encom- passes the visual light spectrum, ultra-violet and infrared, X-rays, microwaves and radio signals, but within the film’s verisimilitude, the label is sufficient to justify blurring the supernatural and the technological, harkening back to the supernatural affinities of electricity in the Victorian period (Marvin 1998; Weinstein 2004; Simon 2004; McQuire 2006). D. A. Oakes writes that the Dr Barrett of the novel ‘is a complex and contradictory character … clearly open to unusual ideas … [H]owever, his openness actually turns out to be limited because he cannot entertain ideas other than his own about the phenomena in Hell House’ (Oakes 2000: 86). Though he is wrong to discount surviving personalities, Barrett is perfectly correct about haunting being electrical in character, and indeed the film asso- ciates ghosts with electricity in a number of ways. The poltergeist activity in the film is often accompanied by sparks thrown from lighting fixtures, and early on Deutsch’s assistant Hanley (Peter Bowles) promises that electricity is restored in the Belasco House, but on arrival they find that this is not the case, and have to operate the Belasco House’s own generator. This apparent detail introduces the theme of electricity in the film’s first minutes, while simultaneously marking Belasco House as being ‘off the grid’, disconnected from the world at large The electrical presence that powers the house from within parallels Belasco’s continued electromagnetic presence as the house’s

HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 34 3/25/14 8:42:07 AM Victorian science and spiritualism in The Legend of Hell House

haunting force. On the phonograph Tanner discovers, Belasco’s voice point- 3. A connection drawn explicitly in the novel, edly says that he hopes the guests will find ‘illumination’. The Reversor, the which even Tanner ungainly machine Barrett brings into the Belasco House, creates ‘a massive acknowledges: ‘We are counter-charge of electromagnetic radiation [to] oppose the polarity of the like Geiger counters in a way. Expose us to atmosphere, reverse and dissipate it’. Designed to dispel and disprove the psychic emanations, supernatural, the Reversor is a counterpoint to the machines of spiritualist and we tick’ (Matheson fantasies that mixed mechanical and spiritual elements (Sconce 2002: 39). It [1971] 1999: 47, original emphasis). fails only because Belasco has foreseen the use of such a tactic against his spirit and concealed his body in a lead-lined tomb. When Tanner loses her patience and protests against Barrett for expecting mediums to perform under scientific terms, she cries ‘We’re not machines, we’re human beings!’ But in fact the film’s two mediums are paralleled with pieces of technology used to measure and interact with supernatural forces3; Fischer is repeatedly described as being ‘shut off’, protecting himself from Belasco by refusing to use his powers. In a visual encapsulation of the mediatized qualities of mediumship, we see Tanner’s reflection off the spin- ning record to which she is drawn by Belasco’s force of will. Tanner, like the standard medium, is a young woman. We first meet her standing outside of a church and throughout the film she reveals herself to be practically fanatical in her spiritualist faith (the somewhat older Tanner of the book is a spiritualist minister). Throughout the film she and Dr Barrett lock horns over the status of the force that both agree exists in the Belasco House. For Barrett, it is a ‘mindless, directionless’ charge of electromagnetic radiation that has taken on the negativity of its environment; for Tanner, the house is occu- pied by Belasco’s son Daniel, a troubled but sympathetic spirit who needs her help to escape the house. Tanner also conceives the theory of ‘control- led multiple hauntings’, believing that Belasco’s force of will dominates other ghosts in the house. However, both Barrett and Tanner prove wrong. There is only one ghost in the house, Belasco, who has been impersonating his son (who possibly never existed) for his own cruel purposes, and likewise Barrett’s theories fatally fail to account for the survival of Belasco’s vicious and clever personality. Barrett and Tanner are equally intractable zealots, both convinced of their absolute rightness (at one point Tanner petulantly declares ‘I just know I’m right!’ when being questioned by Fischer). Between them, they embody the dynamic between the Victorian scientists and spiritualists as described by Richard Noakes:

Rival notions of the supernatural, the natural and the lawful, with partic- ipants agreeing implicitly that spirits were natural and lawful, and that their own approaches were the most scientific, but fiercely disagreeing over what exactly counted as natural and lawful, and who counted as scientific. (Noakes 2004: 39)

Both Barrett and Tanner are present in the Belasco House less for Deutsch’s money than the opportunity to verify their respective belief systems. They feud constantly, demonstrating a visceral dislike of each other from the film’s first minutes. After Tanner attempts to smash the Reversor, Barrett remarks ‘She had to destroy my beliefs before mine could destroy hers’, exposing the inter- changeability of scientific doctrine and faith. The two characters are mirror images: Tanner hopes to reconcile her religious convictions with scientific

HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 35 3/25/14 8:42:07 AM Murray Leeder

4. For sources on Barrett, evidence, and Barrett’s outré brand of science owes more than a little to spirit- see Oppenheim (1985 136–37, 357–71, 377–8), ualist ideas. Both refuse to leave the Belasco House despite Fischer’s pleadings Hamilton (2009 102–04, because they need to be there … both for reasons that prove invalid. These 111–12, 118–20), Blum parallel crusaders are given parallel deaths, the devout spiritualist crushed by (1996: 71–2, 139–40) and McCorristine (2010 a giant crucifix and the scientist shouting ‘I do not accept this!’ as his machine 109–15). explodes in his face. In both cases, Belasco seems to take pleasure in confront- ing them with their own wrongness before killing them. The Legend of Hell House’s interest in Victorian investigations of the supernatural is signalled by character names. Barrett is almost certainly named for William Fletcher Barrett (1844–1925). Like his fictional name- sake, he was a physicist who devoted the latter part of his career to psychical investigation. This Dr Barrett was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, the London-based organization founded in 1882 for the purpose of scientific investigation of psychic powers, mediumship, haunted houses and the like. As early as 1876 he was working on a theory of though transference (later dubbed ‘telepathy’ by his colleague F. W. H. Myers), the study of which consumed much of his professional career.4 Florence Tanner, on the other hand, was likely named for the English medium Florence Cook (1856–1904). In the mid-1870s, the teenaged Cook became known for her alter ego Katie King. King was a ‘control’, a friendly denizen of the Other Side. In this period mediums practiced ‘full materializations’: trumping the previous table-wrappings and disembodied voices, a physically embodied ghost would appear to the séance-goers, even as the medium was ostensibly locked away in a ‘spirit cabinet’ to prohibit trickery. A particularly beautiful and personable spectre, the sensational Katie King could manifest physically in the séance room and meet, flirt with and even kiss guests … even as Cook was purportedly tucked away in the spirit cabinet, bound and immo- bilized to prevent the suggestion of fraud. Cook/King was investigated by the chemist Sir William Crookes, whom Shane McCorristine describes alongside W. F. Barrett as the two key figures in the ‘scientification’ of the nascent field of psychical research (McCorristine 2010: 109). Crookes was the discoverer of the element thal- lium and the inventor of the radiometer, as well as an early proponent of psychical research. Crookes’s 1874 report on mediumship, which so scan- dalized his scientific peers that there was talk of removing him from the fellowship of the Royal Society, contained 44 photographs of King, who, despite Crookes’s claims to the contrary, looks much like Cook. Scholarship has generally concluded that Crookes was a wilful party in Cook’s hoax, most likely because they were having an affair (Crookes being married with eight children, and Cook’s senior by decades) (Hall 1964; Raia-Grean 2008). Some dispute this claim; biographer William H. Brock absolves Crookes of sexual immodesty but concludes that he was at least hoodwinked by a variety of enterprising mediums (2008: 203). W. F. Barrett and several of his S.P.R. colleagues were also the victims of a scam by a set of young girls, the Creery sisters of Derbyshire. The hundreds of thought transference tests performed on the Creery sisters were the foundation for the S.P.R.’s claims to have verified scientifically the existence of telepathy … a claim shattered in October 1887, when the Creery sisters were caught cheating during an experiment conducted in Cambridge and confessed to employing a set of codes all along (Oppenheim 1985: 359–60). The characters Barrett and Tanner are thus both named for Victorian personages entangled in struggles between the spiritualists’ and the scientists’

HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 36 3/25/14 8:42:07 AM Victorian science and spiritualism in The Legend of Hell House

differing understandings of the supernatural … a distinctly gendered struggle, 5. As for the names of the other characters, in which young girls appear to be transparent vessels of spirit subject to the the book makes analysis of masculine science, but ultimately prove more wilful and uncon- it clear that B. F. trollable.5 Tanner’s two sittings for Barrett echo the overt gender dynamic Fischer is named for Benjamin Franklin, that existed in the Crookes/King case: female medium a passive receptacle the quintessential through which spirit flows, presided over by male authority. The femininity experimenter in of mediumship was based around an electrical model of sex: ‘All mediums, electricity and a common ghostly men or women, had to be, in Spiritualist parlance, feminine, or negative … visitor to nineteenth- in order to let the spirit world manifest itself’ (Gunning 1995: 52).6 From this century séances (Sconce 2002: 39). The position of negativity and apparent passivity, however, came a curious variety name ‘Belasco’ may of empowerment, as mediums could address large groups when few women reference playwright/ had that privilege.7 showman David Belasco, appropriately Tanner expresses the belief that ‘mediumship is God’s manifestation in associating the film’s man’ and quotes Ezekiel 3:27: ‘I will open thy mouth, and thou shalt say to Belasco with the them: Thus saith the Lord’. Yet rather than becoming a vessel of heavenly staging of elaborate spectacles. It is reputed communication, she becomes an unwilling mouthpiece for the devil of Hell that his ghost haunts House, Belasco. Her mediumship gives way to its dark double: possession. the Belasco Theatre in Manhattan. The name In one of the film’s most unnerving moments, Tanner is suddenly taken also appears as one of over by Belasco’s voice to cruelly berate Fischer: ‘You may have been hot the vampire’s aliases stuff when you were fifteen, but now you’re shit!’ The ‘negative’ poten- in The Night Stalker (Moxey, 1972), for which tial that allows her to speak with the dead also allows Belasco to invade Matheson wrote the her body and subvert her speech at will. Tanner epitomizes the Victorian screenplay. capacity for ‘identifying women as dangerously defined by their bodies on 6. The rare male mediums the one hand and ethereal, essentially disembodied creatures on the other’ were often described (Hurley 1996: 10). Usually dressed in white, with her opalescent skin, as effete and feminine, and in The Legend of green eyes, Tanner’s sylphlike ethereality underlines her ambiguous status Hell House there is as a being between this world and the next, as well as between child- more than the fact of being played by Roddy hood and adulthood (in contrast to the Tanner of the novel, a Juno-esque McDowall to suggest beauty in her forties). But her physicality is reinforced, horrifically, as the that Ben Fischer is film proceeds. gay: when Mrs Barrett attempts to seduce In the second of the film’s two séances, under red lights and the scrutiny him under Belasco’s of Barrett’s cameras and recorders, we see the entranced Tanner exude ecto- influence, his reaction plasm. Before the word took on a somewhat different meaning in the 1980s is horror and disgust. In the novel, she pelts (Badley 1995: 44–48), it described the whitish substance that was said to ooze him with ‘sexless’ and from the mediums’ orifices – usually noses, mouths, genitals and nipples – ‘fairy’ (Matheson [1971] forming into full-fledged two- or three-dimensional forms, often shaping into 1999:171). the faces of the dead, turning the female medium’s body into an ‘uncanny 7. For gender and spiritualism, see Owen photomat, dispensing images from its orifices’ (Gunning 1995: 36). The film (1989), Braude (2001), envisions ectoplasm as a transparent substance exuding from Tanner’s finger- Scheitle (2004–2005) tips, two strands uniting into one as she follows Barrett’s repeated instruction and McGarry (2008: 95–120). to ‘leave a sample in the jar, please’. According to Barrett, ‘What the spiritualists describe as ectoplasm is derived almost entirely from the medium’s 8. For sources on ectoplasm, see body … the bulk of it is organic living matter. An organic externalization Beckman (2003: 77–87) of thought’. Just as ectoplasm troubles the line between body and spirit, it and Schoonover (2003). also paradoxically re-emphasizes the female body in its abject dimensions, in contrast with spiritualism’s association of femininity with purity and disembodiment.8 The fact that Tanner believes that sex with Daniel Belasco will help him gain the energy to escape reflects the overall constructions of mediums’ bodies as points of contact with the next world. The physical dimension of mediumship turns brutal as Tanner’s body ultimately endures the brunt of Belasco’s cruelty. She is scratched, bitten, brutalized and raped, and her body ultimately crushed.

HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 37 3/26/14 10:31:17 AM Murray Leeder

9. See Smajic´ (2010: It is only in the wake of the deaths of Tanner and Barrett that Fischer, 131–35) and Saler (2012: 105-29). I develop the previously almost a stereotype of the feckless, self-loathing homosexual, is able detective/medium link to regain his confidence and confront his archenemy Belasco. Throughout the in more detail in Leeder film, Fischer is equally wary of Barrett and Tanner’s beliefs, having witnessed (2012). overconfident believers destroyed by Belasco before. Instead, he is the only character who comes armed with knowledge of the house’s history and of Belasco himself, which allows him to piece together Belasco’s fatal secret through logical deduction. Fischer’s achieves victory by taking take on the role of another key Victorian archetype, the detective, literalizing the long-standing link between the detection and mediumship:

The rise of the fictional detective coincided with the rise of spiritualism … The medium’s role can be seen as being similar to that of a detective in a murder case. Both are trying to make the dead speak in order to reveal a truth. (Willis 2000: 60)

The fact that Arthur Conan Doyle himself was a devout spiritualist reflects spiritualism’s continuities with the modern rational investigative mindset.9 In the film’s last moments, Fischer stresses that, however unwittingly, Barrett and Tanner were working together. He tells Ann Barrett, ‘Your husband really did have part of the answer, and Florence had part of it too, and with her help, I finally found the last part’. With Belasco’s power broken, Fischer again stresses cooperation, and in particular the idea that Barrett and Tanner were always working together even though they did not realize it: ‘Your husband and Florence helped us to rid this house of Belasco. Let us hope that their spirits guide him to everlasting peace’. This surprisingly rosy sentiment shows that even the cynical Fischer is capable of spiritualist positivity that would not deny salvation even to a soul as vile as Belasco’s. From this hopeful unification of Barrett and Tanner as partners in death as they were unwitting partners in life comes the realization that (masculine) science and (feminine) spiritualism were never truly opponents, but estranged members of the same modern family. Fischer, finally, is able to take the best parts of both.

The corpse behind the curtain: Emeric Belasco and cinematic self-reflexivity The Legend of Hell House’s ending inspires little love. Jonathan Rigby charac- terizes it as ‘one of the most ludicrous pay-offs in horror history … So all the paranormal unpleasantness at Hell House was the result of someone having a complex about his height? Pull the other one’ (2006: 242–23). The reve- lation about Belasco’s legs is a critical stumbling block to the extent that at least one scholar on the book simply elides it, referring to Belasco’s ‘weak- nesses’ and ‘the truth’ without ever characterizing them (Oakes 2000: 87). I will not be doing much more to explore the mystery of Belasco’s legs in this article, though it seems amenable to a psychoanalytic reading through castra- tion anxiety; the house is indeed haunted by the failure of Belasco’s mascu- linity, an indication of how far K. A. Fowkes’s points on how male ghosts in comedies ‘suffer a feminization in their inability to affect their surroundings’ (Fowkes 1998: 12) carry over into the horror film. Instead I will pursue the place of Belasco in The Legend of Hell House’s construction of science and the supernatural. Belasco is not only a (seemingly)

HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 38 3/25/14 8:42:08 AM Victorian science and spiritualism in The Legend of Hell House

disembodied electromagnetic presence, but also a master of media, broad- casting his manipulations from his lead-shielded tomb. He is at the centre of the film’s self-reflexive construction of film as a haunted medium, which also rhymes with the film’s construction of Victorianness. Let us recall Auerbach’s observations about our ghosts being eternally Victorian. Barry Curtis makes a related observation:

The mise en scène of the haunted house film is overwhelmingly possessed by the spirit of the nineteenth century. Theorists have suggested that a shift of emphasis between the visual and the other senses took place at that time. A visuality was produced that manifested desire for new kinds of images, that assumed a more mobile, dematerialized point of view, detaching the act of looking from the body and creating a ‘gazed subject’ free to range across space and time …[T]he screen became a mysterious profound virtual stage. (2008: 25)

Several scholars have explored the heavily optical character of the modern supernatural. This is not to say that ghosts are always visual (they are often auditory, or manifest in ways that are not readily described through the five senses), but rather that the ghost looms in the cultural imagination first and foremost as things to be seen, though sometimes with one’s mind rather than one’s eyes. The sceptical and empirical tenor of the age, along with increased study of the science of optics, created a powerful gap between what one sees and what one knows to be true … a gap in which the supernatural thrives. Tom Gunning argues that in modernity,

not only does the optical uncanny becomes crucial and dramatic … but the modern scientific and technological exploration of visions and optics (such as the proliferation of new optical devices) multiply and articulate the possibilities of the optical uncanny. (2008: 70)

Bulwer-Lytton’s narrator in ‘The haunted and the haunters’ sees ghosts as ‘Shadows’: ‘both the male shape and the female, though defined, were evidently unsubstantial, impalpable – simulacra – phantasms’ ([1859] 1980: 316). The situation carries proto-cinematic implications, as the narrator perceives ghosts as living shadows that he watches but cannot interact with. The Legend of Hell House gives us several comparable examples of ghost- as-shadow. In one, Tanner finds a twisted shadow on her shower door, a shadow that nothing seems to be casting. There is also the sequence where Ann Barrett joins her sleeping husband in bed, in a room lit by a flicker- ing fire. Her eyes are first drawn to a small statue of embracing lovers, and then to its shadow on the wall above. The film cuts between her face and image of the animate shadows writhing on the wall. With the smoke roiling around these erotic shadows, the image suggests cinema’s ancestry in the gloomy spectacles of the Phantasmagoria, pioneered in the late eighteenth century and lasting in some form to the late Victorian period, which mixed magic lantern projections with smoke, sound effects and grim lectures, and favoured images of ghosts, skeletons, demons and the like (Castle 1995; Mannoni 2000; Heard 2006). Manipulating the space between seeing and believing, it pioneered techniques that would provide the basis for

HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 39 3/25/14 8:42:08 AM Murray Leeder

10. For explorations of innumerable optical feats in the nineteenth century. Belasco is as a master of the links between cinema and (Satanic) the Phantasmagoric, a conjurer of light and shadow who must always keep deception, see Gunning the means of his manipulations secret, since his illusions lose their power (1995). when they are explained. He is like the Devil of medieval Christian tradi- 11. Sources on spirit tions, who cannot create but can only work feats of deception: ‘a mimic, an photography include actor, a performance artist … The master of lies, of imitating and simulating Gunning (1995), Tucker 10 (2005: 159–93), Leja and pretending’ (Warner 2006: 123). The peepshow-like quality of these (2006: 21–58), Jolly erotic shadows also harkens back to ‘the emergence of new visual technolo- (2006), Harvey (2007), gies … was repeatedly associated with the indulgence of consumer desires Kaplan (2008) and Natale (2012). for cheap, mass sexual imagery’ (Nead 2007: 181), confounding the binary of embodiment and disembodiment by encouraging a tactile engagement 12. For historical takes on the matter of cinema’s with the image. ghostliness, see Nead I have already alluded to the supernatural implications new media often (2007: 45–104) and Davies (2007: 187–215). possess: as John Durham Peters states, ‘Every new medium is a machine for the production of ghosts’ (1999: 141). The spiritualist movement’s initial auditory phase, related to telegraphy, would give way to an embrace of visual phenomena, with the spirit photograph emerging in the 1860s as a means of delivering purported images of the dead through spirit photography.11 Given the spiritualists’ perennial interest in new technologies, it is no surprise that the (proto-) cinematic found its way into their rhetorical arsenal. In the October 1896 issue of his quarterly journal Borderland, W. T. Stead, promi- nent British spiritualist and ‘New Journalist’, offers a dozen pages worth of ‘Suggestions from Science for Psychic Students: Useful Analogies from Recent Discoveries and Inventions’. He states:

The discovery of the Rontgen rays has compelled many a hardened sceptic to admit, when discussing Borderland, that ‘there may be some- thing in it after all.’ In like manner many of the latest inventions and scientific discoveries make psychic phenomena thinkable, even by those who have no personal experience of their own to compel conviction. I string together a few of these helpful analogies, claiming only that they at least supply stepping stones that may lead to a rational understanding of much that is now incomprehensible. (Stead 1896: 400)

In an article that follows, Stead draws analogies from electricity, the phonograph, the telephone, the photograph, the camera obscura and the kineto- scope, the motion picture viewing device that Thomas Edison had unveiled two years earlier. Sections called ‘The Kinetiscope of Nature’ and ‘The Kinetiscope of the Mind’ liken various features of new recording media to observed supernatural phenomena. Stead does not so much ascribe supernatural powers directly to cinema as using it as a cognate for supernatural, but this distinction is basically a thin one. If there was never to be properly cinematic equivalent of spirit photography which would display evidence of the existence of ghosts on-screen, such a ‘Spirit-Cinema’ was indeed craved by various writers (Solomon 2010: 24–25); Martyn Jolly writes that a spiritualist named Dr Guy Bogart visited the set of The Bishop of the Ozarks (Fox, 1923), a film with a pro-spiritualist theme, ‘and was convinced he saw a real spirit manifest itself on the set to complement the film’s special effects’ (Jolly 2006: 143). The idea of film as a haunted medium12 did not always wear such a friendly aspect. In the well-known essay beginning with ‘Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows’, written about a Lumière programme he viewed in

HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 40 3/25/14 8:42:08 AM Victorian science and spiritualism in The Legend of Hell House

Nizhni-Novgorod in 1896, Maxim Gorky constructed film as the product of 13. For another argument linking early cinema’s an evil magician: mode audience address to horror, see Curses and ghosts, the evil spirits that have cast entire cities into eter- Lowenstein (2011). nal sleep, come to mind and you feel as though Merlin’s vicious trick 14. This is of course is being enacted before you. He dwarfed the people in corresponding a fairly typical strategy in (especially proportion … under this guise he shoved his grotesque creation into the postclassical) horror dark room of a restaurant. films and haunted ([1960] 1896: 408) house films in particular; Noël Carroll singles out In The Legend of Hell House, Ann echoes Bulwer-Lytton’s narrator as she a a similar example in The Changeling watches those shadow-ghosts, and at the same time she also stands in for the (Medak, 1980): ‘the cinematic (or pre-cinematic) spectator, always at a remove from the images of audience cannot help the screen yet capable of immersion into their world (after witnessing those postulating that the camera movement erotic shadows, the repressed Ann becomes hypersexualized and engages in might represent the the unlikely behaviour of trying to seduce Fischer). The early tendency, seen presence of some in Gorky, to describe cinema (alongside the X-ray, its twin of 1895) through unseen, supernatural force … The audience shadow metaphors has been related back to the magician’s art of shadowg- cannot know this for raphy (Borden 2012). Also called ombromanie, shadowgraphy was ‘the abil- sure; but the point of the camera movement ity of performers to configure their hands adroitly in a beam of light so as to is to prompt the create nuanced shadow profiles of people and animals’ (Solomon 2000: 11). A spectator into a state Satanic grand showman, Belasco practices this art on a large scale. Charting of uncertainty in which she is tempted toward a lineage tracing back to early cinema and trick film-makers like Georges a supernatural account’ Méliès, Kevin Heffernan writes that (1995: 150).

In many horror films, the narrative’s storytelling process is often enacted in a magician or trickster figure who accompanies his acts of sorcery with elaborate gestures to the audience that have their origins in the deliberately distracting sleight-of-hand of the stage magician. (2004: 26)

This monstrateur character is on some level an internal avatar of authorship, sharing the same objectives (terrifying an audience) and methods of a horror film director. Belasco represents perhaps the ultimate incarnation of this ‘dark auteur’, like Gorky’s evil Merlin/film-maker: an unseen trickster who tries to control everything seen and experienced by those within his house, whose presence fills the haunted space (much in the way haunted houses are tradi- tionally understood as having merged with their owner’s personality) and cinematic space alike. It is only a small exaggeration to say that Belasco is that house, and is the film, too.13 We spend all but a few minutes of The Legend of Hell House in the Belasco House, a space brimming with the cinematic uncanny. Within the house, the gaze of the camera itself is frequently associated with that of Belasco.14 Throughout, elements of film form are tweaked just so slightly to create an uncanny, disorienting mode (note the preponderance of unusually high and low angle shots, as well as a fondness for extreme close-ups, canted angles and wide angle lenses), and the frequently mobile camera creates the ambiguous impression that we may be – but are not certainly – seeing from the perspec- tive of the unseen Belasco at any time. Fischer alludes to this possibility after the characters listen to Belasco’s message on a phonograph: ‘Our attention was on that a moment ago. How do you know he didn’t walk right by us?’ This scene also cues us to the importance of sound to the film’s self-reflexive

HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 41 3/25/14 8:42:08 AM Murray Leeder

15. The score was by Delia technique, abetting the visual character of the film’s supernatural phenomena Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, the electronic with aural equivalents. Inchoate rumbles and faint whispers fill the film’s fully music pioneers most electronic soundtrack,15 operating as subtle and unnerving indexes of Belasco’s famous for the music electromagnetic presence. To use Michel Chion’s terminology, Belasco is and sound effects from Doctor Who. a being of the acousmêtre, the sound that is heard without its source being evident on-screen. Writes Chion, ‘The powers [of the acousmêtre] are four: 16. The trope of cinema as haunted gained new the ability to be everywhere, to see all, to know all, and to have complete visibility in the ‘spectral power’; one example Chion raises is ‘the voices of invisible ghosts who move turn’ following Jacques about wherever the action goes, and from whom nothing can be hidden’ Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993). See (1999: 24–25), just like Belasco. Whenever we hear Belasco’s dead voice it is Cholodenko (2004) mediatized, either coming through the phonograph or Tanner’s mouth, and in for a representative example. the latter case, we hear it through an electronic distortion related to the noises of the soundtrack. Belasco appears to be an omnipresent source of masculine authority until the climax when, like so many acoustmêtric characters, Belasco must be brought down to materiality and embodiment. Belasco’s demystifying and de-acousmatization moment occurs as Fischer and Ann Barrett enter Belasco’s tomb, echoing the famous self-reflexive moment in The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939). Belasco is laid bare as the corpse behind the curtain. Stripped of his disembodied presence, he revealed as the quintessential figure of abject materiality: the corpse. Belasco’s fatal flaw was one of his body, and his decision to preserve his body after death, rather than efface its materiality, only draws more attention to it. As his body is finally freed of its soul, so is his house. Hell House no longer, the Belasco House is just an empty shell. It is the same with the animating spirit of cinema, so the film must end too. It is appropriate that The Legend of Hell House ends with a departure, as Fischer and Ann Barrett leave the Belasco house, shut an iron gate behind them, and cue our matching departure from the film-space. The way Belasco and indeed the Belasco House are ultimately demonstrated to be both material and supernatural reflects the way cinema’s first audiences received it simultaneously as new technological wonder and as possessing supernatural implications … a strand of rhetoric that persists to this day.16

Closing the gate The affidavit from Tom Corbett that opens the film remains puzzling. It ostensibly borrows the authority of a ‘real’ psychic to lend credibility to the film’s depictions of the supernatural, which sits uneasily with the film’s demystifying impulses, in which Belasco’s illusions and by extension those of the film itself are shown to be empty and fallible. The Legend of Hell House terrifies you with its cinematic bag of tricks and then it explains that the tricks are merely that, with authorial power finally being invested in a weak and pathetic legless corpse. One is reminded of Terry Castle’s description of how ‘Producers of phantasmagoria often claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that the new entertainment would serve the cause of public enlightenment … Ancient supersti- tions would be eradicated when everyone realized that so-called apparitions were in fact only optical illusions’ (1995: 143). But these lofty ambitions often fell short because the showmen refused to explain how their illusions func- tioned, and thus ‘the spectral technology of the phantasmagoria mysteriously recreated the emotional aura of the supernatural’ (1995: 144). The same double impulse has been present throughout the history of visual illusions, including in the Victorian entertainment culture that birthed cinema: between acknowl- edging the illusion for what it is and preserving its powerful supernatural

HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 42 3/25/14 8:42:08 AM Victorian science and spiritualism in The Legend of Hell House

affinities. There is a rough parallel here with the struggle between science and 17. Famously, when John Henry Pepper spiritualism: a Barrett half insisting that cinema is nothing more than illu- unveiled the theatrical sionary technology and a Tanner half embracing it as a means of communion trick later called with the dead or touching alternate worlds.17 But this opposition is drawn too ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ at the London Polytechnic starkly, and I would suggest, once again, that The Legend of Hell House gravi- in 1862, the scientist/ tates towards a Fischer-like middle ground, prompting reflection on the para- showman declined to doxical relationships between immateriality and materiality, life and death, at explain how the trick worked because of the the heart of cinema. sensation it provoked in its audience (Steinmeyer 2003: 30). AcknowledgEments Special thanks to André Loiselle.

References Auerbach, N. (2004), ‘Ghosts of ghosts’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 32: 1, pp. 277–84. Badley, L. (1995), Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic, Westport: Greenwood. Beckman, K. (2003), Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism, Durham: Duke University Press. Blum, D. (2006), Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, New York: Penguin. Borden, A. E. (2012), ‘Corporeal permeability and shadow pictures: reconside- ring Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show’, in M. Braun, C. Keil, R. King, P. Moore and L. Pelletier (eds), Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema, New Barnett, Hertfordshire: John Libbey, pp. 168–75. Braude, A. (2001), Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Writers in Nineteenth-Century America, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Briggs, J. (1977), Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story, Faber: London. Brock, W. H. (2008), William Crookes (1832–1919) and the Commercialization of Science, Aldershot and Hants: Ashgate. Brummett, B. (1985), ‘Electric literature as equipment for living: Haunted house films’, Critical Studies in Mass Communications, 2: 3, pp. 247–61. Bulwer-Lytton, E. ([1859] 1980), ‘The haunted and the haunters, or the house and the brain’, in The Caxtons; Zicci; the Haunted and the Haunters, or The House and the Brain, Boston: Aldine Book Publishing, pp. 297–328. Carroll, N. (1990), The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart, New York: Routledge. Castle, T. (1995), The Female Thermometer: 18th Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, New York: Oxford University Press. Chion, M. (1999), The Voice in Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press. Cholodenko, A. (2004), ‘The crypt, the haunted house, of cinema’, Cultural Studies Review, 10: 2, pp. 99–113. Curtis, B. (2008), Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film, London: Reaktion. Davies, O. (2007), The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Derrida, J. (1994), Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Morning and the New International, New York: Routledge. Finucane, R. C. (1982), Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts, London: Junction Books. Fleming, Victor (1939), The Wizard of Oz, Los Angeles: MGM.

HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 43 3/25/14 8:42:08 AM Murray Leeder

Fowkes, K. A. (1998), Giving Up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts and Angels in Mainstream Comedy Films, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Fox, Finis (1923), The Bishop of the Ozarks, New York City: Cosmopolitan Productions. Gomel, E. (2007), ‘“Spirits in the Material World”: Spiritualism and identity in the Fin De Siècle’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 35: 1, pp. 189–213. Gorky, M. ([1960] 1896), ‘A review of the Lumière programme at the Nizhni- Novgorod Fair, as printed in the Nizhegorodskilistok, newspaper, 4 July 1986, and signed “I.M. Pacatus”’, in J. Leyda (ed.), A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, London: Unwin House, pp. 407–09. Gunning, T. (1995), ‘Phantom images and modern manifestations: Spirit photography, magic theatre, trick films and photography’s uncanny’, in P. Petro (ed.), Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 42–71. —— (2004), ‘Flickers: On cinema’s power for evil’, in M. Pomerance (ed.), Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil and Slime on Screen, Albany: State University Press, pp. 21–38. —— (2008), ‘Uncanny reflections, modern illusion: Sighting the modern optical uncanny’, in J. Collis and J. Jervis (eds), Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, Houndmills, Basingstoke and Hants: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 68–90. Hall, T. H. (1964), The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney, London: Duckworth. Hamilton, T. (2009), Immortal Longings: F.W.H. Myers and the Victorian Search for Life after Death, Exeter: Imprint Academic. Harvey, J. (2007), Photography and Spirit, London: Reaktion Books. Heard, M. (2006), Phantasmagoria: The Secret Life of the Magic Lantern, London: The Projection Box. Heffernan, K. J. (2004), Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953–1968, Durham: Duke University Press. Hough, John (1973), The Legend of Hell House, London: Academy Pictures Corporation. Hurley, K. (1996), The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jolly, M. (2006), Faces of the Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, London: British Library. Kaplan, L. (2008), The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Leeder, M. (2012), ‘Ghost-seeing and detection in Stir of Echoes’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 30: 2, pp. 76–88. Leja, M. (2006), Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp, Berkeley: University of California Press. Lowenstein, A. (2011), ‘A reintroduction to the American horror film’, in C. Lucia, R. Grundmann and A. Simon (eds), The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, vol. 4, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 154–76. Mannoni, L. (2000), The Great Art of Light and Shadow: The Archaeology of the Cinema, Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Marvin, C. (1988), When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century, New York: University of Oxford Press. Matheson, Richard ([1971] 1999), Hell House, New York: Tor. McCorristine, S. (2010), Specters of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost- Seeing in England, 1750–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 44 3/25/14 8:42:08 AM Victorian science and spiritualism in The Legend of Hell House

McGarry, M. (2008), Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America, Berkeley: University of California Press. McQuire, S. (2006), ‘Dream cities: The uncanny powers of electric light’, in J. Potts and E. Scheer (eds), Technologies of Magic: A Cultural Study of Ghosts, Machines and the Uncanny, Sydney: Power Publications, pp. 2–13. Medak, Peter (1980), The Changeling, Toronto: Chessman Film Productions. Milbank, A. (2002), ‘The Victorian gothic in English novels and stories, 1830–1880’, in J. E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 145–65. Moxey, John Llewellyn (1972), The Night Stalker, Los Angeles: ABC. Natale, S. (2012), ‘A short history of superimposition: From spirit photography to early cinema’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 10: 2, pp. 125–45. Nead, L. (2007), The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900, New Haven: Yale University Press. Noakes, R. (2004), ‘Spiritualism, science and the supernatural in mid-Victorian Britain’, in N. Bown, C. Burdett and P. Thurschwell (eds), The Victorian Supernatural, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 23–43. Oakes, D. A. (2000), Science and Destabilization in the Modern American Gothic: Lovecraft, Matheson and King, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Oppenheim, J. (1985), The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in English, 1850–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Owen, A. (1989), The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Nineteenth Century England, London: Virago. Peters, J. D. (1999), Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Raia-Grean, C. (2008), ‘Picturing the supernatural: Spirit photography, radiant matter, and the spectacular science of Sir William Crookes’, in M. Kang and A. Woodson-Boutlon (eds), Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830–1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in Europe, Aldershot and Hants: Ashgate, pp. 55–80. Rigby, J. (2006), English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema, Richmond, Surrey: Reynolds & Hearn. Saler, M. (2012), As if: Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, New York: Oxford University Press. Scheitle, C.P. (2004-5), ‘Bringing out the dead: Gender and historical cycles of spiritualism’, Omega: The Journal of Death and Dying, 50: 3, pp. 237–53. Schoonover, K. (2003), ‘Ectoplasms, evanescence and photography’, Art Journal, 62: 3, pp. 30–41. Sconce, J. (2000), Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham: Duke University Press. Simon, L. (2004), Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray, Orlando: Harcourt. Smajic’, S. (2010), Ghost-Seers, Detectives and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science, New York: Cambridge University Press. Solomon, M. (2000), ‘“Twenty-Five Heads Under One Hats”: Quick-change in the 1890s’, in V. Sobchack (ed.), Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 3–20. —— (2010), Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Stead, W. T. (1896), ‘Suggestions from science for psychic students: Useful analogies from recent discoveries and inventions’, Borderland, 3: 4, pp. 400–11.

HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 45 3/25/14 8:42:08 AM Murray Leeder

Steinmeyer, J. (2003), Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear, New York: Carol & Graf Publishers. Tibbetts, J. C. (2002), ‘The Turn of the Screw and The Innocents’, in S. Chibnall and J. Petley (eds), British Horror Cinema, London: Routledge, pp. 99–116. Tucker, J. (2005), Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Warner, M. (2006), Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weinstein, S. (2004), ‘Technologies of vision: Spiritualism and science in nineteenth-century America’, in J. A. Weinstock (ed.), Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 124–40. Willis, C. (2000), ‘Making the dead speak: Spiritualism and detective fiction’, in W. Chernaik, M. Swales and R. Vilain (eds), The Art of Detective Fiction, Houndmills, Basingstoke and Hants: Palgrave McMillan, pp. 60–74. Wise, Robert (1963), The Haunting, Beverly Hills, CA: MGM.

Suggested citation Leeder, M. (2014), ‘Victorian science and spiritualism in The Legend of Hell House’, Horror Studies 5: 1, pp. 31–46, doi: 10.1386/host.5.1.31_1

Contributor details Murray Leeder holds a Ph.D. from Carleton University (2011) and currently teaches at the University of Manitoba. In addition to numerous articles, mainly on cinematic horror films and cinematic ghosts, he is the author of Halloween (Auteur, 2014) and is the editor of the forthcoming collection Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (Bloomsbury Academic). Contact: Department of English, Film, and Theatre, 625 Fletcher Argue Building, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada MB R3T 2N2. E-mail: [email protected]

Murray Leeder has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

HOST_5.1_Leeder_31-46.indd 46 3/25/14 8:42:08 AM