Nearing the end of his long life and worried about what waits after the final breath is taken, the wealthy Rudolph Deutsch puts together a small team to prove or disprove that life goes on after death. The perfect location has been picked, the infamous Belasco House better known as Hell House “the Mount Everest of haunted houses”. If a place was to be haunted, it would be this spot thanks to the actions of noted deviant Emeric Belasco. Belasco, nicknamed the Roaring Giant, would hold parties that consisted of orgies and I’d imagine the kind of things Jeffrey Epstein and his entourage would find great excitement in. The last shindig ended in a massacre of all participants and the vanishing of the notorious Belasco. The team consists of skeptical physicist Dr. Lionel Barrett, his dutiful wife Ann, a naive mental medium Florence Tanner and the only surviving/intact and still kinda sane member of a prior investigation into the house, physical medium Benjamin Franklin Fischer (a still deeply missed Roddy McDowall). The hefty sum of money being offered gets everyone to silence any nagging doubts about diving deep into the paranormal. McDowall works as the bug-eyed expert on the location and the fiend who once laid claim to it, filling in all the startling details of the long and troubled history. Since he’s so damn good at his job, you don’t need any graphic flashbacks, you just need a storyteller offering up the proper emotion to convince of the severity. The doctor is working on a theory involving proven energies causing the disturbances that appear as hauntings, he even has a newly built machine that he believes can drain said energy. Following a séance, the youthful Tanner is convinced that one of the entities hanging around is that of Belasco’s benevolent (and supposedly non-existent) son, Daniel, and he’s simply looking for a way to leave behind this traumatic location trapping him for eternity. They’re both very wrong and it’s going to cost them because there is something in the house and it knows exactly what it’s doing. Ann begins to lean into a sexually charged debauchery that is terrifying her when she’s in control and the intensity behind what walks the halls of the house steadily grows. The malevolent spirit of Belasco exploits both of the bullheaded protagonists, caring not that one is completely dismissive of anything existing outside of scientific reason while the other refuses to accept that her mysticism can be leading her astray. Caught between these opposing “religions” is a medium who recognizes the dangers of the house thanks to his history with it and a woman who doesn’t really have a stance. They go through hell but they also manage to make it out alive whereas the two who refuse to believe there’s a flaw in their logic end up paying the price because it makes them easier to manipulate. Psychology is used to defeat the evil thanks to utilizing information from both sides and it’s proven that even in death, the human ego causes all sorts of problems. Thats a hell of a fine angle for a haunted house flick to run with. John Hough does a wonderful job with Richard Matheson’s script working from his excellent novel that scared the ever-lovin’ shit out of me when I first read it. All of this is aided by a cast in top form treating the material with respect, an impressive set design and an unsettling score.
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