I'll try to make quick work of this, but, IMHO, Richard Matheson's 'The Haunting of Hell House' is the best haunted house flick ever to have been made.
As much of Matheson's work were tweaks on older, familiar stories, 'Hell House' is no different: 'Hell House' is something of a Mathesization of Shirley Jackson's 'The Haunting of Hill House', the same novel that became 1963's 'The Haunting' – but the Matheson version has an edge that Robert Wise was unable to bestow upon his creation. It was shot as a documentary.
Yes, more than 25 years before 'The Blair Witch Project', John Hough directed a film from a Matheson script that had been written as a documentary. And the documentary style wasn't a novelty in the UK as numerous other horror pieces had been done as faux-documentaries for the BBC. Much of Nigel Kneale's work for the BBC had been in documentary style, 'The Quatermass Experiment', 'Qutermass and the Pit' and 'The Stone Tape' each pushed the fine suspension-of-disbeleif envelopes becase they weren't set in dingy and soiled archaic settings, but rather they were put together on shoestring budgets, building compelling characters that the audience couldn't help but build allegience to; thus, when thing start to go wrong, it's not the cobwebs or apparations one's seeing in mirrors and such, only the subjectivity of the performers, selling their personal horror to the camera.
This is my favorite Haunted House movie and has maintained that status for more than 20 years because it doesn't depend on special effects and such to get its point across. Much like William Freidkin's 'Exorcist', it earned its dinnerby placing modern, intelligent people in circumstances beyond their control,even if the parting shot of the film is more sci-fi than it is horror.
Among the many treats of this movie are Roddy MacDowall, child-star turned 30-something thesp and ex-pat Texan Gayle Hunnicutt in convincing, well-written parts.
And unlike the Vincent Price movies that preceeded this, I'm not sure that there's a cobweb or a black cat featured andwhere in the production. As the features of the House's story start to add up, the film becomes nothing less than a straight-ahead nail-biter.
***** out of *****