Following our look at The Haunting of Hill House, we turn to another tale of a haunted house, Richard Matheson’s 1971 novel Hell House. (Yes, we went from Hill House to Hell House.)
As with Hill House, the history of Hell House has a direct bearing on its present, haunted condition. It’s told to us in one long conversation. I prefer horror stories where the history is revealed more gradually, but I’ll overlook it due to the book’s age. The condensed version of Hell House’s history is that the owner of the house, Emeric Belasco, was pretty much a psychopath from the time he was a child. Belasco, who “never felt a twinge of guilt in his life” (Matheson 56), set up a group called Les Aphrodites. They’d all do drugs, have sex, participate in every excess they could think of, and eventually mutilate and murder one another. Belasco wanted to conduct “a study of evil,” so he lured people in and tried to corrupt them as much as possible.
He also boarded up all the windows, which gives the house an immediate physical sense of danger.
Our story begins when a dying man commissions three people to study Hell House for proof as to whether or not spirits really linger after death. One is Dr. Lionel Barrett, who believes hauntings are caused more by evil energy residue and other non-personified events. At the opposite end is Spiritualist Florence Tanner, who absolutely believes in ghosts and wants to help them move on. Then there’s Benjamin Fischer, who survived Hell House once and has no intention of letting it get to him again. Finally, Barrett’s wife, Edith, accompanies them to help.
The conflict of beliefs between Barrett and Florence is a key part of the story, and leads to a central question of whether the events in the house are caused by an actual presence or not. For the sake of this discussion, I’ll just refer to Hell House as the culprit.
The novel gets off to a strong start. As the four look around the disturbing house, a phonograph begins to play on its own. It is a message from Belasco, welcoming them and asking them to think of him as their “unseen host” (38). This reminded me of nothing so much as a little game I still haven’t overcome, Amnesia: Justine. Justine leaves a series of phonographs to guide and/or taunt the player. While her unseen presence is in part to increase the parallel to GLaDOS (the Justine DLC was part of a Portal 2 promotion), it also creates a disturbing impression much like Belasco’s message.
These messages have many things in common. Both begin with a welcome. Both reference the fact that the speaker is not present–Belasco is an “unseen host” and Justine is a “disembodied voice.” Interestingly, even though the events of Hell House take place long after Belasco’s death, he says he will be “with you in spirit” (38), while Justine, though the events of the game are much closer to the recording of the phonograph, says she is “a voice from the past.”
Both are also engaged in a “study.” Belasco wanted to corrupt his guests and observe them to see how far into evil they would descend, while Justine’s test is meant to see if you will take the extra time, effort, and risk to save her prisoners, or if you will sacrifice the prisoners to save your own life.
I don’t know if this means Justine was influenced by Hell House, or if it’s a coincidence. Either way, I liked the setup.
After that, things get a little shakier. It would have helped if I’d liked the characters more. Barrett is the sort of scientific character I usually like, but he spends most of the story saying things–usually about Florence–that make him seem so arrogant and sure of himself, I wanted to give him a smack. Florence, meanwhile, is so sure of herself, that she spends most of the story trusting a ghost just because he had a sob story. Even when she realizes parts of his story were being pulled from her own head, she still trusts him. Fischer, determined not to let his mental blocks down, spends most of the story trying to protect the other characters without actively challenging Hell House, which mainly means he sits around and stops them from committing suicide. Finally, Edith spends most of the story taking her clothes off and worrying about her sexuality.
This, more than my ambivalence toward the characters, is what made the plot wear thin for me after a while. Although Belasco’s study of evil “wasn’t exclusively sex” (58), it’s certainly its most common feature. In essence, Hell House reaches into the minds of the people in it and figures out how to mess with them the most. It can’t do anything with Fischer, because he’s closed himself off. It attacks Barrett a few times, but generally leaves him alone to make him believe he’s right about everything. That leaves it with the two women. Florence is celibate, so the House’s influence over-sexualizes her. Edith is psychologically scarred from rape, averse to sex, afraid she’s a lesbian, and overall sexually repressed, so it over-sexualizes her, too. After a while of these two characters trying to have sex with the men and/or each other and/or ghosts, it starts to feel like Hell House is just obsessed with it.
To me, the novel’s scariest moments were when you weren’t quite sure what was going on–invisible presences, disembodied voices, a telephone ringing all on its own… These people acting out-of-character was disconcerting at first, but eventually it happened enough to make it expected, and therefore too familiar to be frightening. Did Belasco’s study of evil conclude that sex is the ultimate evil?
You could argue the same thing is true of my favorite survival horror series, as Silent Hill manifests sexually-themed horrors for both James Sunderland and Angela Orosco in Silent Hill 2, but they were in very different contexts that connected to the individual characters’ psychologies. Besides, there was plenty of other disturbing stuff going on at the same time.
With all that said, Hell House did have some very effective creepiness at times. The ending felt a little drawn out, but I thought it was decent. I wanted the characters to survive, but I didn’t care enough about them to really have any emotional reactions to their plight.
It was an entertaining read, and I want to say I liked it, but there were just too many things about it that irked me.
I couldn’t agree more about the book being over-sexualized, as I’ve said in my own post. But I think you hit right on what ruined the book for me, that the events just became expected. The repetition of the same types of things just ruined any sense of dread that I might have felt. It just got to the point where you expected it. It was in these moments that Matheson seemed to rely more on sheer shock value than any true creepiness. And while the actions of the characters might have been shocking in the seventies, it just doesn’t translate well to this day and age. Oddly, I felt that “Hill House” translated perfectly well to this day and age, mainly because of how little it relied on shock value.
Yes!
That gets back to our “subtlety vs. in-your-face” horror discussion, too, doesn’t it?
I like how you bring up the possibility of Belasco’s study of evil concluding with sex as the ultimate evil. Considering how prevalent it was in the story, I think this is a solid conclusion. Even more so when you think of Belasco’s Napoleon complex/fake legs. When he wanted everyone to see him as the roaring giant, but was actually a short guy on stilts, I don’t see much opportunity for sexy-time in Belasco’s situation, and being a psycho, it makes sense that he would pervert and fixate on it.
Good point.
(But it still felt overused to me.)