The Legend of Hell House, or, The Mediums Are The Message

There’s one image from The Legend of Hell House that I must’ve seen at an impressionable age, because it’s been seared into my brain as the definitive image of Hammer Horror. Four very 1970s, very British people approach the imposing gates of a gothic mansion shrouded in fog, and look up at it with steely resolve to find out what’s inside. I figured that I must not be the only one to be so impressed by it, since Edgar Wright referenced it in the beginning of his trailer for Don’t. One issue is that it’s not a Hammer Horror movie, at all. And for that matter, it turns out that the most British of British people in the cast, Clive Revill, is from New Zealand. And also, I was incorrect in my assumption that it was probably good. The premise is that a dying man hires a team of experts to investigate “the Mount Everest of haunted houses,” the Belasco House, to get definitive proof of the existence of life after death. One of the experts is a physicist named Lionel Barrett, who attends with…