Outside the Blue Box: The Legend of Hell House (1973)

This article contains spoilers for the bizarre twist ending to The Legend of Hell House (1973). If you have not yet seen the film and wish to remain unspoiled, please watch it before reading further.

What is the first thing you think of when you hear the name Doctor Who? For some, that will be the image of the TARDIS, the Doctor’s iconic time-travelling blue box. Some will think of a specific actor who played the Doctor, such as Tom Baker or David Tennant. For others, images may be conjured up in their minds of patterned scarves and jelly babies, whilst others may associate the name with legendary villains such as the Daleks and Cybermen. Most, however, will not immediately gravitate towards and image or a piece of the show’s beloved iconography, but rather a sound that has crawled into the minds of international audiences, and now sits dormant in the brain like a Quatermass-esque ancestral memory – the uncanny Doctor Who theme music, a groundbreaking composition composed by Ron Grainer, and arranged and realised by Delia Derbyshire.

Any Who fan who is worth their salt knows by now that Delia Derbyshire was a genius, a pioneer in her musical and technological field who practically invented electronic music as we know it. Largely under-appreciated for her work whilst she was alive, today Derbyshire has now been widely reappraised as one of the most important figures in modern musical history, not least in regards to her work at the BBC and her key involvement in the creation of Doctor Who’s otherworldly soundtrack, which would inform the show’s sound (and, indeed, the sound of practically every other televisual sci-fi work) for decades to come. After parting ways with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1973, Derbyshire would team up with another ex-BBC composer, Brian Hodgson – a Who legend in himself, having designed the sound of both the TARDIS and the voices of the Daleks in their earliest appearances – to compose the score for a feature film that allowed them to make the most of their knowledge of frightening, unnatural, and disquieting sound design. That film would be The Legend of Hell House (1973).

Directed by John Hough (Twins of Evil, among others), The Legend of Hell House was adapted from the 1971 novel Hell House by Richard Matheson, who also wrote the screenplay for the film. Best known for his classic 1954 novel I Am Legend, Matheson was an American sci-fi and horror author who was never directly involved in writing an episode of Who, but he was prolific enough that his influence can be felt throughout both the classic and modern eras of the show; Midnight, arguably Russell T. Davies’ masterpiece, is essentially Who’s answer to Matheson’s iconic Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, “The Daemons” and several similarly occult-themed classic Who serials owe a lot to Matheson’s screenplay for Hammer’s The Devil Rides Out (1968), and even Planet of Giants, originally envisioned as the first ever Doctor Who story, was very clearly inspired by his 1956 novel The Shrinking Man and its incredible 1957 film adaptation. It only seems natural that a British adaptation of his work would receive a score from the people who composed the theme to a beloved show which his work lent so much inspiration to.

The Legend of Hell House follows – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – a team of four people, two of whom have some form of psychic ability, who are tasked with staying for a week at the allegedly haunted Belasco House as part of an experiment to determine the existence of the paranormal. The team is made up of sceptical scientist Lionel (Clive Revill), his wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt), devoutly religious psychic medium Florence (Pamela Franklin), and sole sane survivor of a previous expedition – a veteran of the psychic wars, if you will – Benjamin (Roddy McDowall). Theories are thrown around and supernatural shenanigans ensue, all of which surround the notorious former owner of the house, Emeric Belasco, who disappeared back in 1929… but we’ll get back to him in a bit.

If any of that sounds at all familiar, it’s because The Legend of Hell House has a near-identical premise to that of one of my favourite novels of all time, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, as well as its 1963 film adaptation which I have previously talked about at length (including for Bloody Disgusting’s “Horror Queers” podcast). It also, by that extent, bears many similarities to the superb 2013 Matt Smith-era Who story Hide, which in itself is very Haunting-esque. In many ways, Hell House feels like the Torchwood to Hill House’s Doctor Who; it’s the same formula, albeit injected with a good (if, at times, gratuitous) dose of sex, violence, crude language, and general controversy. Hell House also seemingly takes place in a dimension similar to that of Who, one that is enough like ours to be relatable, but also used enough to science-fiction shenanigans that some aspects of the supernatural are merely treated as ‘natural’; in the world of Matheson’s Hell House, concepts such as ESP and psychic energy are not only widely accepted within the scientific community but considered, in essence, to be mundane – yet any suggestion that ghosts or the paranormal might exist is considered preposterous and far-fetched.

Though it isn’t a bad film by any means, The Legend of Hell House does suffer from being noticeably inferior when compared to very similar yet far better films, including Robert Wise’s aforementioned The Haunting (1963) and, perhaps even more noticeably than that, the 1972 made-for-TV technological haunter The Stone Tape, which itself has a chilling and powerful (if non-Derbyshire and Hodgson) BBC Radiophonic Workshop score. For as brilliant a writer as Matheson was, his script for Hell House is frequently muddled, confusing, and conflicted, its central mystery full of contradictions, dead ends, and odd shifts in pacing. It also doesn’t help that, whilst The Haunting remains a powerful tale of mental health struggles and repressed queer identity, and The Stone Tape has turned out to be a rather prescient commentary on tech-bro misogyny and jingoism, The Legend of Hell House is unfortunately quite dated, not least in its all-too-’70s treatment of women as sensitive, more prone to madness than their male counterparts, and very much needing to be slapped out of their episodes of sex-crazed spiritual possession. Much of the treatment of women in The Legend of Hell House seems to be the result of a lot of Matheson’s more perverse and transgressive novel being lost in translation when being brought to the big screen, and apparently the source text is far more interesting and puts far more of a focus on the idea of the house itself as a depraved, corrupting force – though from what I’ve read, the novel is still supposedly quite sexist and contains some racism and homophobia which thankfully weren’t adapted to the film, so maybe that was a blessing upon us.

The real reason why a fair number of people consider The Legend of Hell House to be a stone-cold classic of the haunted house subgenre is its sublime gothic atmosphere; Belasco House is gorgeously realised, a towering black edifice permanently shrouded in fog that comes with its own Poe-esque basement dungeon and shadowy, sinister chapel. This atmosphere is twice as potent thanks to the legitimately brilliant and frightening electronic score by Derbyshire, Hodgson, and an uncredited Dudley Simpson, who was one of Who’s most prolific composers during the ‘60s and ‘70s; their buzzing, rattling, breathing soundscapes are a thing of terrifying beauty, and at times I even felt that same sense of dread that The Haunting still gives me upon every new viewing. The scene in which Hell House’s audio and visuals are combined to greatest effect is this exquisitely horrible moment in which Florence confronts the violent supernatural force in the chapel, and it was at this moment that I was most excited to see what ghastly conclusion the film was working its way towards.

The ending of The Legend of Hell House is quite underwhelming, a bit silly, and very weird. As it turns out, the reason why the late Emeric Belasco haunts the house, has killed a fair number of people, chained up his secret son behind the cellar wall, pretended to be said son’s ghost and sexually assaulted Florence whilst doing so, and committed a long list of depraved acts including necrophilia, bestiality, and vampirism, is… he was embarrassed about being short. In fact, once a shouty (but nonetheless ever-watchable) Roddy McDowall bullies Belasco’s ghost about his height, he gives up on the whole haunting business and reveals his lead-walled tomb at the far end of the chapel; here, we find Belasco’s perfectly preserved corpse, and it is revealed – in confounding and hilarious fashion – that Belasco was believed by many to be tall because he cut off his own legs and replaced them with prosthetics. This is the bizarre note that the viewer is left on as the film abruptly ends, but at least Belasco’s cadaver is played by recurring Who guest star and Hammer horror veteran Michael Gough, who was the original “Celestial” Toymaker back in 1966, and returned as the renegade Councillor Hedin in the Fifth Doctor story Arc of Infinity. Gough is one of those actors, a’ la John Hurt, who was famous outside of Who and made only a few guest appearances on the show as a known name, yet his iconic Doctor Who roles nonetheless make him a key part of the show’s history – but it means I’m never quite sure if his appearance alone should qualify a film for “Outside the Blue Box” coverage. Ah, I’ll figure out how to justify doing an article on Trog (1970) eventually, somehow…

The Legend of Hell House is available on Blu-Ray in the United States from Scream Factory, and on DVD in the UK via 20^th Century Fox.