Haunted Houses on Film

After catching The Evil (1978) on one of the streaming services, I was left wondering why so many haunted house movies feel so samey?  Actually, I was also left astonished that The Evil had actually been released to cinemas and wasn't, as I'd previously thought, a TV movie.  It just has that made-for-TV look about it: the anonymous, impersonal, directorial style, the second string cast and bland production values.  It even has the lack of gore and nudity, despite ample opportunities for both, that are typical seventies TV movie horrors.  Which isn't to say that it is bad.  Indeed, for what it is, the film is reasonably well done and, with a running time of just under ninety minutes, at least progresses at a decent pace, piling incident upon incident.  That said, in places it feels very disjointed, with plot developments not properly followed up and consecutive scenes not always feeling as if they should actually follow each other in the narrative.  Ultimately, its main flaw is that it is simply unmemorable, with nothing to really distinguish it from a horde of other haunted house films.  Which brings us back to my original question - why does it feel as if there is so little variation in this genre?  The same sorts of things always happen - doors and window shutters opening and closing of their own account, lights going out, strange noises, the odd spectral presence - with the resolution revealing that it is all down to something nasty in the cellar or attic, (usually the cellar).  

More often than not, these alarming abodes turn out to have been built over the gates of Hell, a graveyard (Native American or otherwise), or was once the site of an asylum or a horrible murder.  Sometimes it is all down a body bricked up behind the walls or buried in the cellar seeking revenge or justice, other times it is simply a spirit unable to 'move on' for some reason.  In the case of The Evil, it turns out to all be down to trap door in the basement that leads to Hell and which has carelessly been left open.  When the surviving characters venture down there, they find the Devil himself, in the unlikely form of Victor Buono.  Whatever the details, the plot always follows the same path of either new residents with no knowledge of the property moving in, or a bunch of psychic investigators turning up to probe the house's secrets, (or sometimes the latter turn up at the behest of the former), weird shit happens, usually including horrible visions, maimings and bizarre deaths, before the phenomena is all traced to the secret room/attic/cellar.  In large part, this pattern is dictated by the supposed 'real life' hauntings (and the books written to cash in on them) that inspire such films.  Often these stories are little more than anecdotal and vague accounts of nocturnal noises and shadowy figures flitting about, sometimes with some poltergeist-type activity of objects moving around thrown in for good measure.  They rarely have any kind of resolution, only speculation as to the causes.  The films, of course, require a resolution, so the makers tend to go for the most obvious and easiest to wrap up within their supernatural narratives.

There are exceptions, which subvert the standard narrative, the most obvious being The Haunting (1963), which gives no definitive explanation for its events, with some of the characters attempting to construct a supernatural explanation from what they know of the house's history, while others offer a purely psychological explanation.  Interestingly, William Castle's gimmicky but entertaining quickie House on Haunted Hill (1959) also eschews a supernatural explanation for its bizarre events, instead revealing that they are all part of unhappily married Vincent Price and Carol Omhart's attempts to kill each other and blame it on the supposed ghosts haunting the titular house.  (The 1999 remakes of both films, however, gave supernatural explanations for their events).  Perhaps most interesting is The Haunting of Hell House (1973), based on Richard Matheson's novel Hell House.  Despite following the classic template of psychic investigators looking into a notorious haunted property, (which has allegedly claimed the lives of several previous investigators), even down to all the phenomena turning out to be emanating from a body in a walled up room, the haunting spirit, it turns out, chose to be walled up and was as evil in life as he was in death.  This spirit is also deliberately misdirects the investigators, leading the down the more traditional haunted house tropes before being revealed.

Of course, in the cinematic tradition, not all things that go bump in the night are either supernatural or psychological in their origin.While The Dunwich Horror (1970), for instance, might not be a haunted house movie, the Whately house does have a sealed room containing Wilbur Whately's monstrous twin brother.  Tigon's Haunted House of Horror (1969) might be a deeply flawed film, (with reshoots by a second director adding an unnecessary sub-plot), but it is interesting as it looks forward to the slasher genre, with its revelation that the house in question isn't haunted by ghosts, but rather a mentally disturbed serial killer.  This format - crossing the haunted house and slasher genres - became more prevalent in the seventies and eighties, with films like Hell Night (1981).  All of which indicates that there is some scope for greater variation in the format for haunted house movies, when the makers can be bothered to use their imaginations a bit more.