Incidental Haunted House Month! Hell House

Hell House by Richard Matheson

Horror (1971 - 301 pp.)

The year 2021 marks Hell House's 50-year anniversary. What a perfect time for more Richard Matheson on this blog, after 2013's entry on I Am Legend and 2019's entry on Somewhere in Time. It also marks the second haunted house-related entry in June 2021, after Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.*

In Hell House, physicist Lionel Barrett, his wife Edith, spiritual medium Florence Tanner and physical medium Benjamin Franklin Fischer are offered $100,000 by aging plutocrat William Reinhardt Deutsch to investigate the Belasco House, the apparently most haunted house in the world, in Maine in 1970. Previous attempts in 1930 and 1940 had been catastrophic, with most of the investigators dying; a young Ben was part of the 1940 team. Lionel comes armed with the Reversor, a machine that is supposed to negate the electromagnetic energy he believes to be causing the haunting, whereas Florence is more concerned with connecting with the house's energy on a spiritual level. Ben, drawing on his terrifying past experience, wants to use his physical energy to draw out the haunting more gradually. Edith is given no qualification other than being Lionel's wife.

The family patriarch Emeric Belasco had apparently been an early 20th century man of some importance, had many guests, murdered or disfigured many of them, and murdered his son Daniel. As in any Clue-style mansion, the action occurs not only in such mundane rooms as bedrooms, but also in the steam room, swimming pool and chapel. In what I sincerely hope is not a spoiler, the house is indeed haunted.

Matheson's language is middling in description, sticking to the main characters while offering few details about the house's architecture. By the middle of the book, I could imagine Florence standing right in front of me, but I could not imagine what any of the bathrooms look like. Matheson makes the action work by using short, choppy sentences during horror scenes, such as Florence's descent to the cellar in search of Daniel Belasco's body:

She cried out as unseen hands clutched her by the throat. She reached up and began to grapple with the hands. They were cold and moist. She yanked them away and staggered to the side. Regaining direction, she lunged for the wall. (116)

Matheson uses similarly staccato wording when spirits chase Edith later in the book, keeping up the tension, which produces horror that is actually scary:

Darkness fled; she was acutely conscious, knowing even as she flung herself into the empty doorway that she hadn't been allowed to faint. She lunged into the corridor and headed for the stairs. The air was thick with mist. (270)

Other linguistic intrigues include the use of pseudoscientific language to add to the eeriness, such as Lionel referring to "teleplasmic" (93) energy used by his Reversor machine, as well as intense descriptions of gore best left to the reader (184, 267).

Although Hell House has an ensemble cast, Florence is arguably the protagonist. She is the primary victim of the book's grisly body horror, nearly torn to shreds by the book's end. Early on, Edith demurs at how beautiful Florence** is, while Florence's naked body is described in a moderate amount of detail. (95) Florence's body, beautiful as Edith finds it, ends up being a "living puppet", which leads to a scene even I was surprised to read. (242)

When Florence ends up with teeth marks around her nipples, purportedly made by the spirit of Daniel Belasco, the other investigators struggle to believe her (120-121); after a similar attack to her head, they openly wonder whether she is injuring herself during psychotic breaks. This raises a question that I was shocked was never answered. Find a solid chocolate bar, such as a Dairy Milk or Jersey Milk, and take a bite out of it. You'll see that the marks made in the remaining chocolate are shaped differently based on your top and bottom teeth, which are shaped differently. If Florence had bitten her own breasts, the bite marks would appear upside down, as she would have to bring her breast up to her face, so that her top teeth marks would be below her nipple. If the bite marks were right-side up, with the top teeth marks above the nipple, someone else must have done the biting. Matheson's narrator never tells the reader the direction of the bite marks, nor do the characters seem to bother inquiring.

Although Hell House was filmed as The Legend of Hell House in 1973, with Matheson writing the script, Hell House would likely be unfilmable*** today. Hell House's first 50 pages are relatively uneventful, making any properly proportioned movie a slow burn like Psycho more than a modern thriller. The characters' social norms are firmly rooted in Matheson's era, resembling Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land more than anything a modern feminist might appreciate. The Florence body horror scenes would especially shock 2021 audiences' consciences, or else they would have to be so toned down they would lose what makes them scary. (Not because of the gore, to which we are all properly desensitized in this post-Saw world, but in the way the scenes sensationalize the abuse of women.) Hell House's gruesome combination of sex and gore could have worked in the '80s and '90s slasher heyday, but would be seen as retrograde now. For a truly retro comparison, think of how the naturalistic, gory Grand Guignol theatres of 1920s France would not have been seen as appropriate fare during the straight-laced 1950s.

Not only does Hell House feel set in the past because it is too edgy for the present, even the characters' names reflect this. Edith and Florence are names people would have had in 1971 - if they had been 80 years old. (Lionel is slightly more modern, peaking in the 1920s before making a surprising resurgence in the 21st century.) Each of the characters is in his or her 40s, though. Ben is the most pointed example, having been named directly after Benjamin Franklin, (146) who far predates any of the book's events. The Franklin comparison is apt for Ben's calm, patient style of physical medium practice, which can be compared to Franklin's kite experiment, finding ambient electrical charge by relatively simple means.

Although Matheson often straddles genres, at times writing what appears to be science fiction without using any science (Matheson was a journalist by training, for reference), the science fiction nerd in me has to ask: how on Earth does the Reversor work? Although there are vivid descriptions of Florence's medium work during times when the Reversor is operating, a blood and guts description of the Reversor's mechanisms would have been fun. Then again, if the Reversor were so readily describable, we'd all have to live with a different horror: that of some smart young engineer making a homemade Reversor.

Although Hell House isn't as strong a work as Somewhere in Time, and especially not as strong as Matheson's classic I Am Legend, it reads even faster. Once you get past page 100, you won't put it down. As much as I'd recommend Hell House for Halloween, the events take place from December 20-24, 1970. Step aside, Nightmare Before Christmas. It's tough to imagine scarier Christmas entertainment than Hell House.

Ease of Reading: 9

Educational Content: 1

*In a strange coincidence, this is the second consecutive June featuring an incidental theme. June 2020 was Incidental Japan Month, when I read Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 and James Clavell's Shogun. Each of these books addresses a very different Japan, whereas each of June 2021's haunted house books are set in 20th-century New England.

**Florence is described as being 43 years old at the time of the investigation. This may be a feather in the cap of the "older models are pretty too" movement. However, it also makes the casting choice of 23-year-old Pamela Franklin in the 1973 movie The Legend of Hell House a curious one. I haven't yet seen the movie, but it looks like it'd pair well with my popcorn machine.

***New word? It might just be! I need to post a lexicon of all the words I improvise. What they all have in common is that they're close enough to existing words that their meanings are easy to derive from context.