The BFI recently screened this film as part of the series
celebrating Martin Scorsese’s favourite British films not directed by Michael
Powell (of course) and it fully justifies the director’s favour on a number of
levels and it makes me wonder why I haven’t watched it before. If you want an
engaging haunted house mystery that maintains its edge without resorting to
gore and predictable jump scares then this is it. The performances of the four
leads are what creates the tension and John Hough directs his players and
atmosphere very well aided by an uncanny score from electronica pioneer Delia
Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson.
The premise is grand and simple with wealthy old man
Rudolph Deutsch (the great Roland Culver) calling scientist Dr. Lionel Barrett
(Clive Revill) to his fabulous country house (take a bow Blenheim Palace) to
task him with proving the existence or otherwise of an afterlife. Barrett is a
sceptic of course but this is why he gets the big bucks, to put the Deutch’s
mind at rest either way, by staying a week at the incredibly haunted Belasco
“Hell” House. Emeric Belasco was a reputed sadist and free-range pervert who is
believed to have committed multiple murders after one excessively sordid orgy
of evil. Any relation to the Great Mage Alistair Crowley and Boleskine House,
the Scottish mansion where he attempted to summon the 12 Kings and Dukes of
Hell, is purely co-incidental.
The House’s horrific reputation is well earned with a
previous scientific survey resulting in disaster with multiple fatalities and
only one survivor Benjamin Franklin Fischer (Roddy McDowall – hurrah!!) who
barely kept his sanity. Fischer is a “physical” psychic around whom
supernatural phenomena is expressed through smashing household objects. He is
joined by Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin) whose gift is more cerebral and
allows her to commune with the spirits of "surviving personalities"
which to Dr Barrett are nothing more than residual electromagnetic energies. He
ain’t afraid of no ghosts.
Now, if all this sounds unpromising you have to have the
cast who can not only say all of this with a straight face but also truly
believe it and this is where the film utterly delivers…
MORE TO FOLLOW!
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