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Hell House: “A Study of Evil”?

Books, Reviews, RIG: The Haunted 4 Responses »

Sep 172014

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.

Apologies for the skip partway through. That’s my fault.

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.

Angela and Abstract Daddy in Silent Hill 2

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.

Works Cited

Matheson, Richard. Hell House. New York: Tor, 1971. Print.

The Haunting of Hill House: A Subtle Sense of Wrongness

Books, Reviews, RIG: The Haunted 4 Responses »

Sep 022014

If you aren’t in my class and you weren’t following my blog a year ago, you might be surprised at the number of ghost stories I discuss here over the next few months. The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, is the first book assigned for my Readings in the Genre: The Haunted class.

My thoughts on these stories might also get a little weird, because a friend and I have been talking about the similarities between ghost stories and survival horror games, and how the tropes of a ghost story translate to the mechanics of a survival horror game. Fair warning.

Now, let’s get right into The Haunting of Hill House.

I’d intended to read this book for a while, so it was already on my wish list when I learned I’d need it for this class. I was excited for it, although I didn’t really know what to expect. I knew it’s considered to be a classic horror/ghost novel, but nothing more.

The opening hooked me right away. Dr. Montague’s decision to study a “haunted house,” his letters to people he thought might be able to help him, and the decision of two of those people to come–those things all appealed to me not only because of the plot premise, but also because I know I’d want to go if I received such a letter. When I reviewed Scratches, I said I’d love a creepy old house to write it. I’d love a creepy old house that may or may not be haunted, too. I don’t exactly believe in ghosts and I’ve never been haunted, but part of my always hopes to be proven wrong.

Anyway, as the book continued, one thing that really caught my attention was Hill House itself. Hill House “had an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest possible tolerable length” (Jackson 29).

The strange wrongness about the house isn’t Eleanor’s imagination, and it isn’t the result of supernatural forces, either. Instead, as Montague explains, “every angle is slightly wrong. Hugh Crain must have detested other people and their sensible squared-away houses, because he made his house to suit his mind. Angles which you assume are the right angles you are accustomed to, and have every right to expect are true, are actually a fraction of a degree off in one direction or another” (77).

I found that fascinating. The house is distorted by design, which makes it the perfect setting for a horror story. Besides just sounding like something out of Lovecraft (or maybe an Escher painting), it disturbs and disorients anyone who sets foot into it, which makes it very easy for our characters to get lost. Of course, since I warned I might bring up survival horror, I can’t leave this go without mentioning Silent Hill, a town that shifts and changes, a setting that is itself hostile toward the player. Resident Evil, too, features a strange mansion–not one warped and twisted like Hill House, but still designed by a madman.

Relativity, by Escher

The setting ties in to one of the most interesting parts of The Haunting of Hill House for me. The story disturbed and unsettled me, but most of the horror was unseen.

Of course, there were hauntings, actions of some supernatural force, but the force is never encountered head on and only manifests itself in a select few scenes. Instead, the haunting and horror are conveyed in very subtle ways, not unlike how the subtle differences in Hill House’s angles build on one another to make the house unnatural.

One of the more unsettling sections for me had nothing to do with ghosts after all. Dr. Montague is discussing the eventual arrival of his wife, and the others express joking (we assume) surprise that an outside world still exists:

“‘Unfortunately–‘ the doctor said, and then stopped. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he went on. ‘I meant only to say that word will be reaching us from outside, and of course it is not unfortunate at all. Mrs. Montague–my wife, that is–will be here on Saturday.’

“‘But when is Saturday?’ Luke asked. ‘Delighted to see Mrs. Montague, of course.’

“‘Day after tomorrow.’ The doctor thought. ‘Yes,’ he said after a minute, ‘I believe that the day after tomorrow is Saturday.'” (111)

When Mrs. Montague does arrive, she proves to be quite annoying, so in retrospect that might be why the doctor considered it unfortunate. When I read it, however, I couldn’t help but think of an earlier part of the book, where Dr. Montague brought up the idea of the house claiming them, or of one of them siding with the house against the others. Little by little, I got the sense that the characters were beginning to accept Hill House, like it, and think of nothing else.

It created a build-up of tension (with a few humorous breaks to keep it from becoming too much) that lasted all the way up until the end, but I won’t spoil the ending here in my post, for those of you who haven’t read it.

I enjoyed the Haunting of Hill House and thought it presented its horror in an interesting way–not with noise and frightening imagery, but with its subtle sense of wrongness, both in the house’s design and in the character’s interactions, little things that build upon one another until it is too late.

Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Penguin, 1959.

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