Watching Robert Wise’s The Haunting and John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House back to back is instructive — a perfect illustration of the difference between craftsmanship and hackery as well as a primer on different modes of expression. Both films feature a haunted house with a history of evil acts, and both hinge on invasive acts by the house directed at the female lead.
The Haunting’s terrorizing is primarily mental, with the rickety psyche of Julie Harris being slowly dissembled by the forces at work in the house. To express this, Wise goes for an expressive directorial style, using lots of shadow and extreme angles. (Wise may not be an auteur in any sense — there isn’t much of a throughline connecting, say, The Day the Earth Stood Still or The Sound of Music to this — but he was a studio man of the first order.) There’s even a built-in irony in how Wise shoots this: the angles and sharp cutting prove an effective reflection of Harris’s disturbed mindset even as Wise uses his camera moves to achieve a fluidity of thought that eludes poor Nell. Arguably, the directorial style, Nell’s psyche and the house itself (with its incorrect angles and doors that never stay open) are all of one piece, and the cumulative effect is terrific. It could be nothing more than an exemplary haunted-house flick, or it could be all just an extension of the heroine’s deranged mind.
Hell House has no such ambitions or use for subtlety — its house is decidedly evil and its actions are far more physical. If The Haunting is about mental deterioration in the teeth of the unknowable, Hell House is about the fragility of the corporeal when confronted with the ectoplasmic; the house’s resident spook causes grievous bodily harm to anyone it can (mostly Clive Revill’s thick-headed physicist) and literally fucks Pamela Franklin’s young medium, causing her to subsequently caterwaul about him still being “inside her.” Hell House has little use for intellect or other mental things; if this were only a thematic thing (i.e. the rational Revill getting it in the neck or Franklin’s “mental” medium forcibly becoming a “physical” medium), it would be excusable, but this distaste for things beyond that which can be touched and sensed extends to the filmmaking as well. The sense of malevolence is there, yet it’s always a disappointingly palpable thing — the house is dangerous but far from spooky. It’s a literalist’s idea of a haunted house. Though a journeyman like Wise, Hough’s direction carries little of his predecessor’s imagination. A couple of shots impress (notably the early shot of the car driving though the mist, as seen from behind the gate of the Belasco house), but for the most part Hough shoots this with an eye towards TV, keeping many of his compositions boringly centric. I’m not saying that all horror films need to strive towards art (some of my best friends are rotgut), but there’s a way to do it with panache. Hell House wants nothing more than to be a straightforward booga-booga creepfest, yet it’s ultimately as stolid as The Haunting is ornate.
In conclusion: Think of the Wise film as a fine Bordeaux and the Hough film as gutter hooch. Both will get you fucked up within their parameters. But you’ll only enjoy one of them.
