The Scare Salon

I know I did a book vs. movie comparison not terribly long ago (Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in case you missed it), but the process of doing that one made me want to jump into another one as soon as possible. And for a long time, I’d been itching to reread Richard Matheson’s 1971 novel Hell House and compare it to its film adaptation, The Legend of Hell House, which was directed by John Hough, came out in 1973, and is one of my favorite horror movies of the 70s.

It had actually been so long since I’d read Hell House that I’d forgotten how much more horrific, lurid, and over the top it was than the movie; don’t get me wrong, the film adaptation is fairly faithful (which isn’t surprising, since the screenplay was also written by Matheson), but a LOT of incidents were left out (especially ones of a more overtly sexual nature) and the ending is way more dramatic, gruesome, and prolonged than the one in the movie.

As I usually do in these long-ass posts, I will follow along with the general plot, and then interject where there are notable differences between the movie and the novel. And as always, this post will have major spoilers for both book and film; this is your one and only warning.

At the beginning of the movie, there’s a scene where physicist and parapsychologist Dr. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill) is taking on an assignment from a crabby, dying old millionaire named Rudolph Deutsch (William Reinhardt Deutsch in the book). Deutsch wants to know if there’s survival beyond death, and is willing to pay a team one hundred thousand smackers each if they can prove it to him one way or the other.

And just how are they going to definitively prove such a nebulous concept, you might ask? Well, Deutsch has purchased the so-called “Everest of Haunted Houses,” a massive mansion built back in 1918 (1919 in the movie) by a reclusive and completely degenerate motherfucker named Emeric Belasco. His house, now more aptly termed Hell House, has played host to pretty much every supernatural phenomenon ever recorded, and has been empty for thirty years (twenty in the film). There had been two previous research incursions by paranormal teams, one in 1931 and one in 1940 (these years are different in the movie, obviously), but both ended with nearly everyone going mad or dying in horrible ways. The sole survivor of the 1940 incident, physical medium Ben Fischer (played by Roddy McDowall in the film), was found naked and curled in a fetal position on the house’s front porch back then (though this isn’t explicitly mentioned in the film; Barrett just says he crawled out of the house with his sanity barely intact, or something to that effect). Fischer will be one of the team accompanying Dr. Barrett on this latest expedition, which will last the week leading up to Christmas.

All this is very similar in both formats, but one of the major differences I want to point out right in the beginning is that in the book, Dr. Barrett is disabled; one of his legs is partially paralyzed from when he had polio as a child, and he hobbles along with a cane. This is not portrayed in the film in any fashion, and I’m not entirely sure why, because his disability has also made him largely impotent, which factors quite a bit into the later paranormal shenanigans involving his wife (named Edith in the book but Ann in the film, where she’s played by Gayle Hunnicutt). I guess because the sexual stuff in the novel is toned down considerably for the movie, they figured they didn’t need the disability/impotence angle as much, but honestly, I liked that aspect of the story because it’s a nice parallel with what the team discover about Belasco himself near the end of the book. It’s possible that Matheson, when he wrote the screenplay, set up another kind of parallel in this regard, but I’ll get to that later.

Oh, and also, in the novel, Hell House is in Maine, but since the film is British, the movie house is in England.

Anyway, the investigative group includes the aforementioned Dr. Barrett, his wife Ann (or Edith), the aforementioned Ben Fischer, and a mental medium named Florence Tanner, who Deutsch chose specifically, over Barrett’s objections. In the movie, Florence is played by the adorable Pamela Franklin, a dark-haired waif who at the time of filming was twenty-three years old. In the book, Florence is forty-three years old, and is a tall, voluptuous, red-haired knockout; at one point, Edith tells her husband that Florence makes her (Edith) look like a boy. In the movie, Florence’s youth is another thing used to minimize her views somewhat (Barrett even tells Deutsch at one stage that she’s just a child), and though she is dismissed by Dr. Barrett in a similar way in the novel, she’s much older and more experienced. In fact, there’s a scene in the book before the team goes to Hell House in which Florence is sentimentally looking over the small Spiritualist church she founded, and thinking how nice it will be to have that hundred grand so she can build a proper church for her congregation.

In the novel, there are a few more interactions with the characters prior to their arrival at Hell House, many of them revolving around Barrett being apprehensive about taking his wife along on the trip. In the book, Edith often accompanied him on his “field work,” and played an integral part in helping him with experiment protocols (such as searching mediums for means of fraud at seances, for example). This time, because of the gravity of the situation, he is hesitant to put her in danger, but she insists she wants to go along as usual, since it’s just another “haunted house.” In the movie, Ann does mention that she always goes with him on his investigations, but she seems more like just a tagalong instead of an integrated member of the team.

In the book, there’s also a brief section from Fischer’s point of view before he goes to the house, where it’s revealed that he was one of the most powerful physical mediums in the world when he was fifteen years old, and thirty years later, he’s somewhat stoked to get another crack at Hell House.

Just as in the book, there is immediate tension between Barrett and Florence Tanner; Barrett is a physicist who has observed what he terms “supernormal” phenomena, but believes it’s essentially caused by purposeless energy generated from living human beings. Florence, by contrast, wholeheartedly believes in the survival of the soul or personality after death, and therefore thinks that hauntings are caused by literal ghosts with their own agendas. As in the book, Barrett is having a machine built to his specifications that he is obnoxiously confident will “clear” Hell House of its manifestations by counteracting and neutralizing all the unfocused electromagnetic energy that’s causing the trouble. The machine will be delivered a few days into their stay. In the book, the machine is specifically called the Reversor, but I don’t think it’s named in the film. Neither Florence nor Fischer believe the machine will do a goddamn thing, but Barrett is eager to prove them wrong.

The arrival at Hell House is similar in both formats, though in the novel, the house has a tarn (a marshy lake, pretty much) on the property that plays into the narrative a few times during the story but does not appear in the movie. Fischer tells the gang a bit later that it’s called Bastard Bog, because during all the debauchery that took place at the house during Belasco’s residency, many women got pregnant and subsequently drowned the babies in the tarn. This is not mentioned in the movie.

I’ll also note that the house has an indoor pool and a steam room in the book, which Barrett regularly uses because of his disability. These also factor a lot into later events, but are not shown or mentioned in the film.

In both the book and the movie, the electricity in the house is provided by generators and is ostensibly already on and ready for them. In the film, the team goes into the house and the electricity isn’t working, but it’s just a matter of a minute or two before Fischer finds the emergency generator and gets everything squared away. The power is on for the remainder of the movie. By contrast, in the book, the generator that was supposed to provide the power isn’t working (possibly because of some supernatural jiggery-pokery), so they’re obliged to spend the first day there creeping around with candles (the house is dark as shit because all the windows have been bricked up). A crew is scheduled to come the next day to install a new generator, as well as build a cabinet for Florence to use during their seances.

The gang comes across a chapel while they’re exploring the house, and Florence is unable to enter it because the terrible vibes overwhelm her. The other three go in and find that the walls of the place are covered with pornographic murals, and the large crucified Jesus behind the altar has a ridiculously huge, erect schlong. This is, of course, not shown in the movie; there is a Satanic-looking Jesus on the cross, but he has a loincloth on, and there’s only one mural that’s kinda smutty but not all that shocking.

When they emerge from the chapel, they find that Florence has vanished, and they panic for a bit while they look for her, candles in hand (at least in the book; remember the lights are on in the movie). They find her inside the great hall, standing near an old-timey phonograph. She says she heard voices in here and followed them, and found this old record player, which seems to have wound itself up and started playing by itself. When they play the record again, it’s Belasco’s voice, welcoming them to the house and saying he’s sorry he couldn’t be with them physically. Edith/Ann is weirded out, but Barrett says that obviously the record was made decades ago before Belasco disappeared and presumably died, and it’s just a coincidence that it sounds like he’s talking directly to them. Fischer and Florence aren’t so sure, and in fact Fischer says that one of Belasco’s favorite tricks was to draw everyone’s attention to a particular object, then move among the crowd without them noticing him. Fischer speculates that Belasco’s spirit could have walked right by them just now while they were all listening to the record.

A bit later on, after everyone has claimed their bedrooms and what not, Florence and Fischer explore a bit on their own (a scene that is not in the film). Florence picks up all kinds of impressions, talks in a different voice for a second as though she’s channeling someone, and things of that nature. She also has very bad feelings about the steam room and the old wine cellar. Fischer seems bemused by the whole thing, and it’s here where we start to suspect that Fischer might be closing himself off to whatever is in the house, whether consciously or not. Florence accuses him of this very thing, but Fischer argues that he isn’t feeling anything because there isn’t anything there.

That evening, they’re sitting around at dinner. In the movie, there was already enough food laid in for them for the week, with the implication that they presumably prepared their own meals, but in the book, a couple from the nearby village brings them their meals and then skedaddles again without being seen (except for a couple times later in the book, in a sort of jump scare moment). The group decides that Florence will do a sitting after supper.

While they’re eating, Fischer, who has spent the previous thirty years learning everything there is to know about the Belasco House, regales them with the sordid history of the place. Belasco, he says in the book, was the illegitimate son of a wealthy munitions maker and his actress mistress, and he was evil from the start: cutting up kitty cats, raping his younger sister, and so forth. He was sent off to boarding school, and later inherited a shit ton of money when his father died. He was very well-educated, particularly in the fields of religion, ethics, and philosophy, and was a strong believer in the power of will and mastery of influence over others. Also significant to the story was the fact that he was a huge man, standing about six-foot-five with a terrifying face, and was referred to as “The Roaring Giant.”

After building Hell House, he began hosting dinner parties and salons, trying to recreate European high society in the United States (obviously this is from the book, as the movie is set in Europe). But as time went on, the parties got more and more decadent and depraved, becoming first drunken bacchanalias that descended into orgies, then finally culminating in every kind of sadistic, twisted act, including rape, bestiality, murder, necrophilia, cannibalism, feeding virgins to hungry leopards…if you can imagine it, the people at Belasco’s “parties” eventually got around to it. It got to the point, in fact, where a large number of people simply never left the house, and became embroiled in Belasco’s competitions to see who could come up with the most disturbing, fucked up shit. They were filthy and disease-ridden and lived worse than animals. Some time later, when someone came checking on a missing relative, they found twenty-seven people dead, many of them mutilated, half-eaten, and who knows what else. Belasco, however, was nowhere to be found. The house was sealed shortly thereafter, and rumors of an extreme, violent haunting began, hence the interest from paranormal investigators over the years.

Some of this catalog of horrors is in the movie, but it mostly just skims the surface, referring to Belasco’s size, a general, sanitized list of the iniquities that occurred, the fact that twenty-seven people were found dead, and that Belasco disappeared.

Later that evening, they sit down for their first seance. Florence’s cabinet hasn’t arrived yet, so it’s an informal affair: they just sit around a table that has all Barrett’s equipment on it (in the movie, they sit in armchairs in front of the fireplace). Florence sort of explains the difference between a mental and a physical medium (which wasn’t in the movie); basically, a mental medium simply has impressions and visions, and channels spirits, while a physical medium can levitate, make objects move, produce disembodied knocking, manifest ectoplasm, and so on (which is what Fischer was known for back in his heyday).

In the movie, Florence goes into a trance and almost immediately seems to start communicating with some spirit or other, at first saying seemingly random things like, “Extremes and limits. Terminations and extremities.” Then she says she senses a young man in the chair next to her, and thereafter her voice changes and she begins ostensibly channeling this person, saying things like, “I don’t want to hurt you but I will. Get out of here before I kill you all!”

As things come to a head, objects begin rattling around on the table beside her, which shocks everyone present because Florence is a mental medium, not a physical one, and has never made objects move before.

This all happens similarly in the book, but this scene goes on way longer, and actually begins with Florence summoning her “spirit guide,” Red Cloud. Hilariously, when she communicates as Red Cloud, she talks like a stereotypical “Indian” in a racist old Western or something, saying things like, “Me Red Cloud. Me come from afar. Bad house. Place of sickness. Evil here. Bad medicine.” This is admittedly pretty cringey, but in the book’s defense, spirit mediums in real life often claimed they had Native American spirit guides and did hokey voices like this when they “talked” to them; and also, the other three investigators in the book just kinda chuckle and roll their eyes at it like it’s the most ridiculous shit ever. Later in the book, Fischer even scoffs to himself about the whole Red Cloud thing, implying that there’s no way he thinks Florence is communicating with a real dead Native American and is simply making him up and portraying him as she thinks others would expect him to sound (though maybe she’s not doing it consciously).

Anyway, Florence is surprised to learn that she caused physical phenomena when she was in her trance, but she takes the whole thing in stride, basically saying that God works in mysterious ways, and all that. Fischer, though, is clearly starting to think that maybe something more nefarious is going on.

In the book, there’s a scene immediately after this where Barrett and Edith are in their room. Barrett is working on his manuscript and talking to his wife, when suddenly a rocking chair begins to move of its own accord. Edith is frightened, but Barrett assures her it’s not a ghost, just some residual psychic energy floating around and nothing to worry about whatsoever. This incident is not in the film.

We then check in with Florence, who is getting ready for bed and thinking about the events that just transpired. Suddenly the door to her room opens by itself and she hears footsteps coming toward her. Believing this to be the spirit of the young man she spoke to earlier, she is not alarmed at all, and simply begins asking who he is. She doesn’t think it’s Emeric Belasco because this spirit seems to be in anguish which she doesn’t believe Belasco was capable of feeling, but she finally gets the impression that this is Belasco’s son Daniel, a person no one was certain ever existed. She can hear him breathing and whispering to her, and she offers to help him. In the book, he snatches the comforter off the bed and throws it over himself so she can see his shape, thus confirming that he is not Emeric Belasco (because he’s not six-foot-five). He also grabs her ass. In the movie, he simply pulls off the comforter and throws it over her head after she asks him why he’s still trapped in the house if he’s so clever. He then tantrums out of the room with a rush of wind and a sob, making the door slam behind him.

The next couple of scenes in the book do not appear in the film at all. The first involves Barrett and Edith going to try out the steam room. The power is still out at this stage, so they go in there with candles, and Edith begins seeing the shadows in the room doing really creepy things. She gets freaked out and they leave.

After that, Florence goes to Fischer’s room to tell him about her visit from Daniel, but he’s asleep, so she goes to Emeric Belasco’s old room instead, where she opens herself up and gets impressions of what we’re led to assume are the circumstances surrounding Daniel’s birth.

We then pick up the movie thread again with the following scene, where Florence goes to the dining hall and finds Barrett and his wife having breakfast. Florence cheerfully tells them that she’s partially solved the haunting, which she asserts is caused by the tormented spirit of Daniel Belasco. Barrett clearly does not believe this happy horseshit at all, thinking that Daniel is a figment of her imagination.

At this point in the book, the crew arrives to install the generator and build Florence’s cabinet. They also bring a cat at Dr. Barrett’s request, since he’s convinced animals can sense psychic energy better than humans and will serve as an additional verification of any untoward energy or presence in the house. There is also a cat in the film (and he doesn’t make it in either medium, sorry to say), but it’s never explained where he came from.

There then follows the second seance, this time done under stringent scientific conditions. In the movie, we just see through context clues that Florence is clad in a skin-tight leotard to keep her from hiding anything, is sitting behind a net with her hands on electrical sensors that will set off alarms if she moves them, and so on. In the book, there’s more of a set-up, with Florence teasingly getting offended at all the rigmarole she has to go through to ensure she isn’t faking anything. One thing that definitely isn’t in the movie is the bit where Edith is tasked with going into Florence’s cabinet and doing a full body search on her, to make sure she isn’t concealing anything in any of her…y’know, orifices. It’s established that Edith has done this with other mediums loads of times before, but for some reason, this time she gets super flustered, especially because Florence is smoking hot and isn’t embarrassed at all by the invasive procedure. Edith keeps feeling like some unseen presence is watching her, and when Florence spreads her legs so Edith can inspect her vagina, Edith nopes out and tells her husband she finished the job. He notices she’s acting strange, but doesn’t think too much about it.

I’ll also note here that in the book, Edith seems to not mind (much) that her husband is largely impotent, since she herself is afraid of sex. We discover that she was raised in a very religious household where sex was seen as shameful, and we find out even later on that her father may have molested her (hence why she married a much older, impotent man, it’s suggested). It’s also stated pretty overtly that she may have latent lesbian tendencies, though given the events of the book, bisexual would perhaps be the more accurate term. None of this is mentioned in the film, though it is implied that Ann is sexually frustrated and repressed, a weakness that the entity in the house will use against her.

Once the seance begins, Florence again goes into a trance, and in both book and film, everyone starts to smell ozone, and Florence begins to emit ectoplasm from the tips of her fingers that weaves together as tendrils and starts to rise up toward her face. Barrett dispassionately asks Florence/the ectoplasm to leave a sample in a glass jar he has placed there, and the ectoplasm obliges.

In the movie, Ann wigs out and screams for some unclear reason, startling Florence out of the trance and ending the seance in “premature retraction” of the ectoplasm. In the book, the seance goes on longer, with the ectoplasm forming a sort of ragged, linen-looking mask around Florence’s face and eventually morphing into a partial male face and figure that laughs creepily, looks at Edith, and reaches for her, at which point she (understandably) screams and abruptly ends the session.

Just as in the movie, Edith apologizes to her husband for interrupting the festivities, but he’s pleased with the data he got, and asks Edith to look into the microscope, where he has the sample of the ectoplasm on a slide. He notes that it’s almost all organic material, mainly cells from Florence’s body, mixed in with particles of dust, fabric, and other things floating around in the air. This bolsters his theory, because it’s plain the ectoplasm isn’t otherworldly in any way, but was formed from Florence’s body, a phenomenon he terms, “organic externalization of thought.”

The following scene, similar in both book and film, sees Florence recovering in her room, petting the cat. The kitty suddenly bows up and hisses at the door, at which point a figure appears under the covers of the bed. In the book, Florence can see the ghost’s junk outlined in the bedspread (told you there was a lot more sexual stuff in the book), and the spirit even yells, “Boo!” at her before laughing at her and collapsing the covers. She scolds him, at which point he breaks some shit in the room and storms out again, slamming the door. In the movie, Florence just pulls the bedspread back and sees that no one is there, but he does whisper to her as well.

Florence goes down to dinner and tells Fischer and the Barretts that Daniel was in her room again. Barrett is not shy about hiding his annoyance at her continued belief in Daniel, and Florence begins to get worked up, telling Barrett essentially that she’s tired of being belittled and mistrusted, that she didn’t choose to be a medium and it sometimes sucks, and that having to perform under scientific conditions is unfairly onerous because she’s not a machine. Barrett can barely get a word in edgewise, wondering where this sudden tirade came from, when all hell breaks loose. Dishes start flying everywhere, the huge chandeliers start swinging, and the massive dining table slides across the room and smashes against the fireplace. The bulk of the phenomena seems to be aimed at Barrett, and indeed, he is injured in the melee.

At a word from Florence, everything stops abruptly, at which point she turns to Fischer and says that he’d better leave the house. He doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about, but she’s all, you’re the physical medium, buddy, not me. But of course Barrett and Fischer are convinced that Florence was the one responsible for the manifestations, especially because she was getting righteously pissed off with Barrett right before the shit hit the fan. She doesn’t believe that she’s the one who did it, but Fischer tells her that maybe she had better leave because the house is beginning to use her.

Edith and Barrett retreat to their room to tend to Barrett’s wounds, and Barrett tells Edith he thinks she should leave because the investigation is getting too dangerous, but Edith refuses. Florence, who is questioning whether she really was responsible for the outburst, prays for a bit before going to Barrett’s room to speak to him. She tells him that the attack was not actually her, but Daniel, and that Daniel was only trying to pin the attack on Florence in order to get everyone in the house to turn on one another to make them easier prey. Obviously Barrett is not convinced because he doesn’t think Daniel is real, and he basically tells Florence to GTFO.

Later that night, Edith/Ann is lying awake after Barrett has fallen asleep. In the movie, she sees the shadow of an erotic statue in the room start to move on its own as though the figures are having sex, and she hears sexual moaning. When she blinks and looks back, the shadow is still again.

In the novel, she gets out of bed restlessly and goes over to the shelves to find something to read. One of the books falls open and its pages are hollowed out. Inside are a bunch of old photographs, all of which are pornographic. Some of them were clearly taken in the great hall, and feature people having sex on the table while a bunch of other people stand around watching them. Disgusted, Edith shoves the book back onto the shelf and gets back in bed, but then starts to feel like someone’s watching her again. She tries to tell herself that ghosts aren’t real, but it’s clear she’s not convinced.

Meanwhile, also in the novel, Fischer is downstairs drinking a bourbon to try to calm his nerves when a harried Florence comes downstairs and says she’s looking for Daniel. She goes off toward the dining hall, and though Fischer considers going with her, he decides against it. He also speculates that Florence is entirely too open to the house and is going to have a bad time because of it.

Suddenly, Fischer sees a figure coming down the stairs and heading toward the front door. Shocked, he sees it’s Edith, and he starts after her, wondering at the same time if it’s really her or if the house is trying to trick him. He follows her as she goes outside and he realizes that she’s heading toward the tarn. He panics and grabs her, leading her back to the house, but she seems completely out of it, not even noticing the freezing weather. Fischer puts her in front of the fire so she can warm herself back up, but she starts taking off her pajamas, despite his protests. She gets naked and pushes herself up against him, but Fischer slaps her, snapping her out of her trance. She looks down at herself, horrified, obviously having no idea what she was doing. Fischer tells her she was sleepwalking and was going toward the tarn, presumably to drown herself. He also tells her that it was the house doing it, not her. Edith just stares at him with a terrified expression and runs back upstairs. This scene is not in the film; there is a very similar sequence to this in the movie, but it happens later on in the book.

We then check back in with Florence, who has been drawn to the cellar in her search for Daniel. As her psychic senses hone in on a particular wall in the wine cellar, an unseen force grabs her throat and starts flinging her around, ostensibly trying to keep her away from the area. Undaunted, she presses on, finally touching the wall and being flooded with certainty that Daniel lies behind it. In the movie, Florence does find Daniel in a hidden room in the wine cellar, but a ghost doesn’t try to prevent her from getting to him, though she does see a flash of an apparition that looks like the remains they ultimately find, at which point she screams, summoning the others.

In the novel, Barrett and Edith are awakened by Florence screaming, and when they rush into her room (not the wine cellar as in the movie), they find her in bed with horrible bite marks around her nipples (this also does not happen in the film). Fischer joins them in short order. She tells them that Daniel is punishing her, and that she found Daniel’s body in the wine cellar the night before. Barrett is naturally skeptical, but she pleads with him to help her tear down the wall so they can exhume his remains and give him a proper burial. Obviously Barrett is disabled and wounded from the poltergeist attack, so Fischer says he’ll help her take down the wall.

In both the book and the movie, the gang discovers a mummified man shackled to the wall in the wine cellar, though in the movie, the body is just in a secret room, while in the book they have to remove a section of wall with a crowbar before they find him. Also in the book, the corpse is wearing a ring with the initials DB on it, thus confirming for Florence that this is indeed Daniel Belasco. In the movie, there’s no ring. In both mediums, though, Barrett is not convinced that this is actually Daniel, claiming it could be pretty much anybody and that he needs more proof. Florence is frustrated by his stubbornness and tries to convince him to work together with her to solve this haunting, because it’s possible that both of them are right. Barrett says he needs more time to come up with an interpretation of these events and essentially blows her off in a pretty arrogant fashion. He later tells Edith that even though the body is real, there’s no way of knowing who it was, and asserts that Florence is unknowingly using her power and that of the house in order to bolster (or perhaps even construct) her case. He also thinks the bite marks on her breasts are akin to stigmata; in other words, unconsciously self-inflicted.

Florence and Fischer bury the corpse on the property and say prayers over it, hoping this will end much of the phenomena. In the book, after the funeral, Florence clasps Daniel’s ring in her hand and has a bunch of visions of him, starting out as happy and innocent but growing more and more dark as he falls under the corrupting influence of his father. In the vision, she sees and feels herself falling into a black pit, and she’s terrified of the power she senses emanating from Belasco’s spirit. When she partially awakens in her room, she hears the door open and close, and footsteps approaching. She then feels someone sitting on the bed and sees a figure, like a black paper cutout. She senses this is Daniel, but she’s confused, because she buried his body in consecrated ground, and by all rights he should be at rest, yet here he still is.

She asks him why he’s still in the house, and he tells her he can’t leave, and that she knows what she has to do in order to free him. She won’t do whatever this is, and he says he’ll have to kill her, at which point she feels cold hands around her neck. She panics and wakes out of this weird half-trance, only to find the cat in the bed next to her, making a weird noise. It attacks her, clawing and biting her before she’s able to fight it off by hitting it in the head with the phone receiver. She then locks herself in the bathroom to tend to her wounds while the cat scrabbles at the door. The cat attack scene occurs similarly in the movie, though most of the lead-up with the visions of the black pit and so forth is not shown.

At this stage, Barrett’s machine arrives and he starts to unpack it. In the book, he has some trouble doing this because of his disability and his injuries from the earlier poltergeist incident, and while he’s struggling, he tells Edith about some of the amazing stuff Fischer did at some of his seances when he was a kid. It’s clear that Barrett believes both Fischer and Florence are “real” mediums, but he doesn’t believe their powers come from anything supernatural. This discussion does not occur in the film.

In both book and movie, Fischer interrupts the machine unboxing to tell the Barretts that Florence has been hurt again. They all rush up to see her and find her completely scratched up and covered with cat bites. Barrett gets to work on her wounds with his medical bag, and she tells them that Daniel possessed the cat and attacked her. Of course Barrett isn’t having that, but they don’t argue about it. He does tell her that he thinks she should leave, but again, she refuses.

That night, Edith can’t sleep again and decides to have a bit of a tipple of the brandy that’s in their room. In the book, it’s specified that she never really drank before because her father was an alcoholic and she was afraid she’d become one too, but this is not mentioned in the film. She does drink some in the movie, but her history with it is not brought up.

After a few slugs, she decides she should find Fischer and apologize to him, and to thank him for saving her from walking into the tarn. She goes into his room and starts kinda poking around before he comes in and sees her. He tells her she really shouldn’t be wandering around alone and that maybe she should tie her wrist to the bed. He also says that she shouldn’t drink in this house and that she’s starting to lose control. She gets upset and defensive at this and leaves. This sequence is not in the film.

The following scene is similar in both mediums, and has Fischer going to see Florence as she’s recovering in her room. He basically tells her that he agrees with Barrett that she should leave, because she’s being “torn to pieces.” She protests, but Fischer asks her how she’s so sure that it’s Daniel doing all this and that she isn’t being fooled. Fischer then points out that one of the mediums on the investigation back in 1940, Grace Lauter, was convinced the house was haunted by a pair of sisters, and seemingly had evidence backing up her case. She ended up slashing her own throat (this last bit about the sisters and the throat slashing is not in the film).

I will note here that during this conversation in the movie, Fischer mentions specifically how all the people with him back in 1940 died, such as falling from balconies, being crushed or crippled by heavy objects, and so forth. This ends up tying in with the discovery of Emeric Belasco toward the end, as all the people died by having something happen to their legs. This angle is not in the book (all the people died in different ways that had nothing to do with legs), and this is what I meant when I said earlier that this might have been the parallel that Richard Matheson set up in the screenplay after taking out the whole “disabled Barrett” thing that was a big part of the novel. That was my perception, anyway.

So in the book, Florence goes on to tell Fischer about her brief time as an actress and how she was embroiled in a bit of an overblown scandal because she was a Spiritualist. She also mentions that she had a brother who died at seventeen of spinal meningitis, and it’s later revealed that it was this incident that influenced the house/Belasco’s spirit to target her with the sympathetic character of Daniel, who was about her brother’s age and needed her help. Before Fischer leaves the room, Florence tells him she wants to do a sitting later to try and contact Daniel, and asks if Fischer will sit with her. He agrees. None of this is in the movie.

Likewise, the following (terrifying) scene does not appear in the film, unfortunately. Barrett is swimming in the pool to try and soothe his various pains. He and Edith then go into the steam room, and Edith, obviously under the influence of the house, starts getting a mite frisky, taking off all her clothes and climbing into Barrett’s lap, working furiously at his ween and ordering him to, “Make it hard.” A shocked Barrett is unable to perform and is flabbergasted at seeing his wife act this way; not only that, but her aggressive maneuvers are worsening previous injuries to his head and hand. He pushes her off, and she angrily stomps out. Barrett tries to go after her, but finds that the door to the steam room refuses to open. As Barrett starts to get more and more apprehensive, the steam in the room begins to thicken so much he can’t see anything. Edith tries to get the door open from her side, but it won’t budge, so he tells her to go get Fischer.

After she scuttles off, Barrett starts to hear a weird slithering noise in the steam room. Trying to convince himself it’s just his imagination, he gropes around for the tap wheel to turn off the steam, but he gets this gross black muck on his hands and can’t figure out what it is. He realizes that the slime smells just like the tarn, and as he’s crawling around, he feels something blocking his path to the door that essentially feels like a disgusting blob monster, and he even sees it for a second before Edith and Fischer are able to wrench open the door and drag him out. Of course, when he’s rescued, there’s no black ooze or monster to be seen anywhere.

There are a couple brief scenes in the book after this, one with Fischer contemplating everything that’s going on, and one with Barrett trying to tell Edith to leave the house and that everything will be over and done with tomorrow after he turns his machine on. He is very adamant that even though what happened to him in the steam room was horrifying, he knows it wasn’t ghosts, and he’s so convinced his machine will work that he says he would rather die than leave before he can prove it.

I’ll note also that there’s a scene somewhere around here in the movie where Florence goes into her bathroom and sees a creepy, creature-like shadow behind the frosted glass of the shower, but when she opens the shower door, she finds the dead cat all bloody on the tiles. Florence also finds the dead cat in the book (sliced in half, to be specific), but it happens much later in the story under different circumstances.

In the novel, Florence and Fischer sit for an impromptu seance to contact Daniel. Florence goes into a trance and produces another ectoplasmic figure that speaks and claims to be Daniel. He tells them that it was indeed his body they found in the wine cellar. But when they ask Daniel if he was the one who possessed the cat, bit Florence’s nipples, and attacked Barrett in the steam room, he claims it wasn’t him. He also says that he can’t leave the house, but won’t tell them why. Eventually they get him to confess that his father’s spirit was the one who possessed the cat and did all those other things, but the ectoplasm dissipates immediately after this statement. After Fischer tells Florence what happened while she was in a trance, she becomes convinced that Belasco’s spirit is so powerful it’s keeping Daniel here, and that she’s the only one who can help him. She also feels vindicated because she says she knew Daniel wouldn’t have done all those terrible things, and that Belasco must be trying to turn her against Daniel. Fischer isn’t sure that’s what’s going on, but seems to concede that it sorta makes sense.

In the book, Edith wakes up with another hankering for some booze, and finds herself feeling very angry and uncharitable about Lionel’s impotence in the steam room, though she then catches herself, wondering where the hell these horrid thoughts are coming from. As she drinks more and gets more inebriated, she also finds the hollow book again, staring lasciviously at a photo of a woman licking another woman’s pussy for a moment before tossing it away, frightened at the feelings welling up inside of her. This bit is not in the movie, but the next part is.

Edith/Ann goes downstairs and finds Fischer (who in the book is prying open the crate containing Barrett’s machine because he knows Barrett couldn’t do it, but in the film he’s just kinda hanging out). Fischer realizes she’s drunk, and she almost immediately starts coming on to him, talking about all the sexual shenanigans that took place around the table back in Belasco’s day, forcing Fischer’s hand onto her tit, and so forth. Fischer tries to snap her out of it, telling her it’s the house, but she insists it’s her doing it. In the book, she gets really angry, accusing Fischer of being impotent as well, then popping open her blouse and asking if he’s ever had a tit before, and to try it, it’s delicious. She also says to Fischer: “Suck them, you fairy bastard, or I’ll get myself a woman who will!” In the movie, she proposes a foursome between all of them, and says a similar line, though she says she’ll find “someone” who will, not specifically a woman. In both mediums, Lionel suddenly comes downstairs and sees her, but in the book she immediately collapses and falls unconscious, whereas in the movie she just sorta wakes up out of her trance and looks mortified, quickly covering herself back up.

The following scene, not in the film, sees Florence having some kind of vision or out of body experience, where she’s dancing in a ballroom with someone she assumes is Daniel. They say they love each other and everything is magical, but then Daniel suddenly yells in alarm, startling her out of the trance. She realizes she’s standing ankle-deep in the freezing waters of the tarn, and as she struggles to turn and get out, she sees a very tall figure dressed in black disappearing into the fog.

Terrified, she makes her way back to the house, where Fischer brings her a drink. She tells him that she saw Emeric Belasco and that he had tried to kill her, but that Daniel had saved her life. She then explains to Fischer that she thinks Hell House is a rare case of a “controlled multiple haunting,” in which Belasco is controlling all the other surviving personalities in the house, “like a general with his army.” This last part of the conversation occurs in the movie as well, but in that case they’re just sitting in Florence’s room, since Florence doesn’t almost walk into the tarn in the film, and nor does she actually see Belasco outside.

In the book, Florence decides that the best strategy for clearing Hell House is to free all the other spirits that are trapped there, which will theoretically drain Belasco of much of his power. She goes into her room and starts talking to Daniel, assuring him that he can leave the house if he truly believes he can. She then takes out a pad and pencil and begins automatic writing. The words on the pad, presumably communicated by Daniel, say, “One way only.” Furious, she says no and rips the paper away. Again, we are not told until later what exactly Daniel is asking her to do, though given the heavy sexual element of the book as a whole, you can probably hazard a guess. This scene is not in the film, and nor is the following one, where Fischer is standing out at the tarn, contemplating how it almost killed both Edith and Florence, when he’s startled by the approach of the couple from the village who bring them their meals but have never been seen up to now.

There’s a bit more of Fischer’s thoughts about Florence’s plan, then Barrett comes downstairs and thanks Fischer for finishing the unpacking of the crate. The movie picks back up here, with Fischer wanting to talk to Barrett about the situation with Edith/Ann, but Barrett shuts him down, clearly uncomfortable discussing it. In the book, Fischer tells Barrett that Edith almost walked into the tarn the previous night, and a shocked Barrett asks why Fischer didn’t tell him this. Fischer says that Edith should have told him, and the fact that she didn’t means that the house is really getting to her, just as it’s getting to all of them. Fischer says this almost exact thing in the movie, but just about the previous incident with Ann, not the thing with the tarn because that didn’t happen in the film. In both mediums, though, a cranky Barrett then accuses Fischer of being shut off and tells him that Deutsch is wasting a third of his money since Fischer isn’t doing what he was being paid to do.

In the book and the movie, Fischer then realizes that Barrett is right, and that he has been closing himself off from the house in order to keep his sanity about him. Feeling guilty, he sits by the fire and opens himself up to the house’s energy. In the film, he almost immediately begins to shriek and contort in agony, while in the book there is more detail about what’s going on inside his head, specifically the sudden sensation of an overwhelming black force that feels as though it’s rending his mind and body asunder. In the movie he just sorta passes out, but in the book, the feeling subsides and he’s left weakly wondering if the house is just toying with him with a view to eventually finishing him off.

In the book, there’s more of an urgency element involving the crippled and injured Barrett being unsure that he will be able to get his machine up and running in time to clear the house before they’re all scheduled to leave. In the movie, the machine is pretty much in working order, with just some minor tinkering necessary, and there isn’t any uncertainty about whether it will be finished in time, since Barret is able-bodied in the film.

Also in the book, there is a flashback scene that takes place at the same time as the earlier one where Edith went downstairs and tried to hump Fischer, but this time it’s from Lionel’s point of view. There’s then a sequence, similar in both mediums, where Barrett and his wife have an awkward conversation about the incident, though the specific words they use are different.

Meanwhile, Florence is in her room, exhausted because she’s been praying for Daniel’s release for hours, but she still senses him there. She goes downstairs to talk to Fischer, and in both book and film, she immediately notices that something is wrong. Fischer doesn’t tell her specifically that he opened himself up to the house and got his ass psychically kicked, but he does tell her that he doesn’t trust anything or anyone in the house and that there’s no way they’re going to be able to handle what’s going on here. He also reiterates that there’s no way Florence can be certain that Daniel is real, and that it’s very possible she’s being tricked. He then admits that he has been shut off, and that he’s going to stay that way for the remainder of the experiment, then he’s going to collect his money and go on his merry way. He advises Florence to do the same or she isn’t going to make it.

This is all in the movie, but there’s a bit afterwards that isn’t. After Fischer storms off, Florence is thinking about what he said about being tricked, and she suddenly realizes that the words Daniel spoke to her during her happy ballroom vision were exactly the same as dialogue from a TV show she had acted in long ago. She also twigs onto the fact that her dying brother David had also said some of the exact same things to her that Daniel had said, and that one of David’s main regrets was never making love to his girlfriend Laura before he died. Florence realizes with horror that “Daniel” has been using the memory of her brother’s death and virginity to manipulate her into helping him and possibly letting him invade her physically. This sequence of Florence waking up to the fact that she may have completely fabricated Daniel does not happen in the film (though in that case, she does realize it eventually, just a bit later on).

In the book, Florence then goes to the chapel after hearing a whisper telling her to go there, and she becomes determined to get inside, despite the powerful evil she senses emanating from it. Using prayer and general psychic fortitude, she is able to enter. She finds a Bible on the altar with a birth record for Daniel Belasco from 1903, thus seemingly vindicating that he really did exist. Neither the Bible nor the birth record appears in the film.

In both mediums, the following scene sees Barrett working on his machine with Edith/Ann when they are approached by Fischer, who has been drinking and insists that he’s going to stay drunk enough to dull his senses for the rest of their stay. He calls the machine a pile of junk that won’t do jack shit, and tells the Barretts that they should just forget about the machine, chill out and do nothing for the next few days, tell Deutsch whatever he wants to hear, then collect their checks, just as he’s planning on doing. When Barrett declines, still confident his machine will work, Fischer basically says that he (Fischer) is going to be the only one to get out of Hell House alive, just like in 1940.

The following sequence sees Florence arguing with Daniel about his request to “free” him by, you guessed it, letting him have sex with Florence. In the book, as I mentioned, she had started to doubt that Daniel existed, but then conveniently found the Bible with his name in it, thus getting her back on board. That didn’t happen in the movie, so Florence is still operating under the assumption that Daniel is real and is who he says he is. In the book, Daniel lays on the charm, talking about how much he loves her, and then he tells her that Barrett’s machine will work, but that it will simply drive him from one hell to another. This line also appears in the film, but it is spoken later by Florence, and there is no conversation where Daniel specifically states that Barrett’s machine will drive him out.

The following bit, also not in the movie, has Barrett and Edith in their room, trying to navigate the awkwardness that has blossomed between them and anticipating having the machine up to snuff by the following day. Barrett uses his tie to fasten Edith’s wrist to the bedpost so she can’t wander around again after he’s fallen asleep. Later that same night, she’s lying awake and sees the rocking chair start moving by itself again.

In the book, Florence is in her room thinking that she should perhaps damage Barrett’s machine to keep it from sending Daniel away, but then thinks better of it, realizing that the house might be placing these thoughts in her head. The phone in her room starts to ring even though it’s disconnected, and she’s reluctant to answer it because she knows who it is. She eventually picks it up anyway and of course it’s Daniel, endlessly pleading with her to do as he asks before the machine is turned on. She resists for a while, but finally his haranguing is too much for her and she agrees to do it, trusting that God and her spirit guides will protect her.

The movie picks up about here, with Florence undressing, lying on her bed, and giving herself to Daniel. In both book and film, Daniel starts having invisible sex with her, and after a moment, Florence opens her eyes. In the movie, she simply screams and we never see what she saw, but in the book it’s made clear that there is a rotting corpse with evil yellow eyes raping her and laughing gleefully as he does so.

In both mediums, Fischer and the Barretts come running at the sound of Florence’s screams, and find her naked and unconscious on the bed, with blood trickling from various wounds. In the book, Fischer leans over her and she whispers the word, “Filled” to him before smiling creepily. This does not happen in the movie.

Both the book and the film have a subsequent scene where Fischer is watching over Florence as she sleeps. When she awakens, she seems to oscillate between being her terrified self and the leering, evil spirit possessing her. While under the influence of the latter, she teasingly asks Fischer if he was the one who had put her nightgown on and if he had enjoyed it, and why he hadn’t slept in the bed with her instead of in the chair. When she comes back to herself, she tells Fischer that she can feel the spirit inside of her; she still believes it’s Daniel, but she now believes that he lied to her about sex being the only way to free him so he could possess her body. Fischer insists he will get Florence out of the house, but Florence laments that Daniel will not let her leave.

This is all in the movie, but in the novel, this scene goes on longer after this point. Fischer tells Florence to pack so they can leave right away, and she heads for the bathroom to pee, but keeps getting intermittently possessed. Fischer tells her not to lock the door so that he can come in to help her if she gets possessed while she’s in there. She comes back out, but she’s naked and basically tells him to strip so they can fuck. Fischer pleads with her to fight the spirit, but she keeps insisting she wants to fuck him until finally he has to smack her, at which point she comes back to herself, ashamed. Fischer begins to doubt his ability to get her out of the house safely.

They go downstairs and tell the Barretts they’re leaving, and Fischer tells Barrett about the possession. He wants to get the hell out as soon as possible, but Florence wants to stay for a cup of coffee, and then she gets Barrett to tell her exactly how the machine is going to work. She seems to be acting like herself, but in both book and film, we’re led to assume that this is the possessing spirit trying to get some scuttlebutt about the machine. The book has a long explanation of how the thing theoretically works, but it’s much more simplified in the film, for obvious reasons.

In both mediums, Florence then breaks away and runs at the machine with a crowbar, breaking a bunch of the dials and knocking Fischer out, before Barrett wrests the crowbar away from her. In the movie, the scene ends about here, but in the book, Barrett falls down due to his disability and drops the crowbar. Florence snatches it up and comes at Edith, calling her a “lesbian bitch” and telling her she’s going to smash her skull in. While Barrett writhes around on the floor, unable to get up, Florence chases Edith up the stairs. Edith tries to lock herself in Florence’s room, but doesn’t make it in time, and Florence comes in, gets undressed, and falls on Edith, sexually assaulting her. She (or rather the possessing spirit) knows that Edith’s father tried to rape her, and knows that Edith has bisexual/lesbian tendencies. The whole incident is interrupted by Barrett, who enters the room, snapping Florence out of her trance. Florence runs into the bathroom, realizing what she’s done, while Edith falls into her husband’s arms, traumatized. None of this is in the film.

In the novel, Barrett then gives Florence a sedative and puts her to bed, and Fischer is likewise recovering from getting beaned with the crowbar. He tries to get up, saying he has to get Florence out before shit gets any worse, but Barrett calms him down, promising he will get Florence out of Hell House ASAP. He tells Edith he’s going to call an ambulance for Florence and Fischer, and tells Edith she should go with them. He also says that it will all be over that afternoon, after his machine does its thing, but he’s going to stay until the very end to make sure his theory is vindicated. There is no intention to call an ambulance in the movie.

Barrett then tells Edith that Florence trying to fuck up his machine is like the ultimate tribute to it; she was so afraid of Barrett being right and her being wrong that she was willing to destroy his life’s work to maintain her delusions. This general conversation is in the film too, though it takes place at the machine itself while Barrett is assessing the (minimal) damage; in the book, they have the discussion in their room, and Barrett also adds that Florence was not possessed by anyone, but was simply manifesting a part of her personality that she usually kept hidden.

A bit later, Barrett is planning on going downstairs to call Deutsch’s man about getting an ambulance, but Edith has fallen asleep and he doesn’t want to wake her, though he’s also reluctant to leave her alone. He decides he will just pop down for a minute and make the call and rush back; what could possibly go wrong in such a short time?

He finally gets through to Deutsch’s guy on the phone, and the man tells him that Deutsch died earlier that morning. Since Deutsch’s son is next in line to take over the estate, and since the son thought the whole Hell House experiment was a ridiculous waste of time, this now means that none of the ghostbusters will be getting the money they were promised. The man, who feels bad about the situation, also tells Barrett that the son straight up told him to just leave the investigators stranded out at the house. This shocking turn of events does not occur in the film; it’s presumed that Deutsch was still alive and paid the hundred grand to the surviving members of the team (though this isn’t stated outright).

The next scene in the novel sees Florence waking up in her room with Daniel’s voice ringing through her head. He makes her pee the bed and then starts mocking her; she can see his leering face superimposed over the lampshade. She runs for the bathroom, but he grabs her ankle and pulls her to the floor. She manages to get back up and stumble into the bathroom, but Daniel essentially possesses her, and she lets him fuck her in the ass, then believes she sees Edith come into the bathroom and start licking her pussy. Florence is enjoying herself quite a bit until she sees her reflection in the mirror and realizes she’s alone, shoving her fingers into herself. She runs back into the bedroom with Daniel laughing at her, and she tries to put her robe on but he keeps snatching it out of her hand. She tries to pray but Daniel makes her say crazy sexual shit, so she basically bites down on her fist until the pain drives him away temporarily.

Florence then leaves her room and heads for the staircase, but she keeps seeing spirits of Belasco’s victims and tableaus of things that happened in the house, like a man cutting off a woman’s head, another guy chewing on a severed hand, that kind of thing. She heads for the chapel, and this is where she finds the dead cat, sliced in two. She marvels at the tremendous power she feels in this room, and vows she’s going to beat Daniel. But as she approaches the altar, the large crucifix comes loose from the wall and falls on her, crushing her. The crucifix also crushes Florence in the movie, but all the stuff leading up to that is book only.

In the novel, a dying Florence manages to crawl out from beneath the crucifix, and she begins cutting at her wrists with the nail sticking out of the wall where the cross had fallen from. On the brink of death, she has realized exactly what is going on with the house, and feels compelled to try to get the message across to the others, drawing what appears to be the letter B inside a circle with her own blood. She does the same thing in the movie, but never crawls out from under the cross and doesn’t cut her wrists with the nail.

In the book, Fischer suddenly wakes up with a bad feeling, and rushes to Florence’s room to find that she’s not there. He then looks into the Barretts’ room and notes with fury that Barrett has left his wife alone. When Barrett returns, Fischer lets him have it, but then he realizes with horror that Florence has probably gone to the chapel. The three of them go there and find Florence dead. Fischer notices the symbol Florence drew in her blood, but at first doesn’t know what it means. The trio also find Florence in a similar way in the movie, but the stuff prior to that didn’t happen.

In the novel, Fischer carries Florence’s body out to the car, and then Barrett turns on his machine. In both mediums, everyone has to wait outside for a few hours while the machine is running because the radiation would kill them if they stayed inside. In the book, Barrett then tells Edith and Fischer that Deutsch is dead and they aren’t getting their money. Both of them are so over this house and the whole situation that they basically just say it doesn’t even matter anymore.

In both book and film, the gang go back into the house after the machine has done its job so they can check and make sure the house is clear. Fischer is initially skeptical and reluctant to open himself back up to the house, but Barrett assures him that everything will be fine. Fischer finally opens up, and is astonished to discover that Barrett is right: the machine worked, and he feels nothing.

After this, there’s a scene in the novel that isn’t in the film, where Fischer drives Florence’s body to town, and as he’s driving back, he ponders on everything that happened with Florence and what the symbol she drew meant. As he gets closer to Hell House, he starts feeling a sense of dread that things in the house are not yet over.

There’s then a scene with Edith and Barrett talking about what a triumph the machine was, how glad they’ll be to get out of this house, and what a shame it was that Florence died before she could see it. A similar conversation happens in the film.

Barrett leaves Edith sleeping and goes downstairs to check on all his stuff. He notices to his disbelief that the needle on the machine starts moving up the dial, as though the evil energy is returning. He thinks this is impossible and that maybe something is wrong with the machine, and he starts freaking out as the tubes and dials start shattering, and the thermometer starts registering a drop in temperature. A bunch of doodads on the machine explode and drive shards of glass into Barrett’s eyes and face. This is similar to what happens in the film, but the two mediums diverge a bit after this.

In the book, Barrett is knocked to the ground and flung about by an unseen force that then bodily drags him into the pool area, banging him against the stairs and injuring him quite severely. The force then flings him into the water and holds him under. As he’s drowning, he sees the figure of a man standing at the edge of the pool before his life winks out.

Barrett dies horribly in the movie too, but he’s actually lured to the chapel and crushed under a chandelier rather than drowned, dying very similarly to how Florence did.

In the novel, after Barrett is dead, Edith wakes up and hears someone come into the room. She thinks it’s Barrett, and he sounds like Barrett, although she can’t quite see him in the darkness. Barrett strokes her hair and says they should have sex because it’s been such a long time, and then he roughly grabs her tit. When she protests, he gets angry, saying that Fischer and Florence were good enough for her, but he isn’t. He starts roughing her up more, and then the lights come on and Edith screams her head off, because the thing grabbing at her is just a severed hand that’s crawling around on its own.

Edith flees the room and all manner of paranormal shenanigans occur; she’s beset by a swarm of moths, she sees a bloody, naked Florence leering at her, tables and shit start flying around, and she sees an apparition of a soaking wet woman in a white dress holding a dead, malformed baby. Much like what happened to Barrett, Edith isn’t in control of her own body, and she keeps falling and hurting herself. She calls out for her husband and he calls back to her; she sees him running toward her and she falls into his arms, but when she looks again, she realizes it’s her father, who is naked and holding his enormous penis in both his hands. Panicked, she tries to climb over the stair railing, but is seemingly rescued by Barrett, though of course it isn’t really him. She is whisked to the theater in the house, where “Barrett” ties her up and rips her clothes off; she sees a bunch of people around her cheering and notices a leopard stalking toward her (a reference to the earlier incident that happened while Belasco was alive). She feels herself being attacked by the leopard, but then suddenly everything disappears and she’s lying on the stage alone. She sees a shadowed figure sitting in the last row of theater seats, presumably Emeric Belasco himself, and he welcomes her to his house.

Edith then scrambles out of the theater, and keeps seeing Barrett popping up mocking her everywhere she turns. She finally gets to the swimming pool and sees her actual husband, very clearly dead in the bloody water. She freaks the hell out and is then grabbed by Fischer, who hits her to knock her out so he can pull her out of the house. None of this occurs in the film.

In both the book and the movie, Fischer tells Edith that he has to go back inside to finish it or die trying. Edith doesn’t want him to go back in, but he says he has to. In the movie, they both go back in together, but in the book, Fischer makes Edith leave in the car and stay in the nearby town, simply asking her to leave food on the porch for him once a day until he gets to the bottom of what’s going on with Hell House.

In the book, there’s an extended sequence where Fischer is in the house alone, amazed that it feels completely dead now. He listens to all Barrett’s tapes of the seances in order to try and figure out what it all meant, and what Florence was trying to tell him, but he can’t make heads or tails of it.

He vows to stay in the house until he’s solved the problem, and at one point, he opens himself fully to the house once again and feels a force pushing him, seemingly trying to lead him somewhere. He doesn’t sense any hostility from this force, however, and he soon realizes to his delight that it’s actually Florence. In the movie there is no suggestion that Florence’s spirit is helping Fischer, but in the book she leads him to the chapel and shows him the Bible with Daniel’s birth record. She also psychically guides him to the Bible quote, “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out,” the significance of which is initially lost on Fischer. I will note that Fischer says this quote in the film as well, but it’s after he’s already figured out what’s going on with the haunting (and he says it to Ann, who remember is with him in this bit of the movie).

Back in the novel, Fischer is standing there confused when a strip of wallpaper tears down by itself behind the altar, and he sees a plaster wall. He then feels the medallion that Florence gave him (there is no medallion in the movie) burning his skin, and it breaks into pieces and falls to the floor. One of the pieces points toward something, and as Fischer looks at it, he’s suddenly hit full-on with the irresistible power of Belasco’s spirit, which knocks him backward and simultaneously reveals everything about what’s happening with Hell House. Fischer, dazed and no longer in control, walks like a zombie out of the house and starts to walk into the tarn, seeing a horrible apparition of Belasco pushing him under the water. He knows he’s going to die, and he’s completely okay with it.

Just in the nick of time, though, Edith returns and is able to pull him out before he drowns. They both sit in the car with the engine running for heat, though Fischer is too messed up to talk for a long while. When he finally recovers, he tells Edith that the entire haunting was only ever Belasco; his spirit was so powerful that he could essentially manipulate reality to bend to whatever someone wanted or needed to see. So Barrett was right; there was no spirit of Daniel, it was only Belasco, pretending to be a vulnerable young man in order to break through Florence’s defenses. Everything that happened in the house was only Emeric Belasco, alone, hence why Florence had drawn the B in the circle. Fischer also tells Edith that Belasco is still in the house; the machine didn’t get him out, and Fischer is now certain that they will never be able to expel him. None of this happens in the film, other than the reveal of Belasco being the only ghost.

In the book, Edith wants to go back inside the house briefly so she can gather her husband’s things, and although Fischer is reluctant, he eventually goes along. As Fischer packs up, he wonders why Belasco didn’t just crush him like he did to Florence, or drown him like he did to Barrett. Why did he just make Fischer wander off to kill himself? Fischer starts to think that maybe Belasco’s power has been diminished by Barrett’s machine, though he and Edith are debating the idea that if the machine did work, why would Belasco have allowed it to be used, knowing it would weaken him? He could have easily destroyed it (or Barrett) before Barrett even turned it on.

As they discuss, Fischer realizes that Belasco might have done it because of ego, the same arrogance that led him to reveal his secrets to both Florence and Barrett right before their deaths. Fischer surmises that Belasco was so egotistical that he would have wanted Barrett to be able to use his machine first, before then killing Barrett and revealing all to him, as a final fuck you. None of this is specifically mentioned in the film, though Fischer does note Belasco’s gigantic ego as his main driving force.

Fischer further theorizes that Belasco might be trapped in the chapel now, and can’t use his powers much in any other parts of the house. In both book and film, Fischer seems to have a revelation, repeating Florence’s words about “terminations and extremities,” and runs into the chapel, screaming at Belasco to destroy him. There are footsteps and the floor starts to shake, then there’s an explosion behind the altar. In the book, Fischer and Edith both see Emeric Belasco, big as life and twice as ugly, appearing as a huge, Rasputin-looking motherfucker who starts walking menacingly toward them as Fischer continues to taunt him about why he never went outside, calling his mother a whore, and saying he was a sawed-off little bastard. He says similar stuff in the movie, but he’s just yelling it into the wind and noise in the chapel; they don’t see an actual apparition as they do in the novel, where the ghost starts getting smaller and smaller as Fischer berates him until he vanishes completely.

All of the stuff Fischer is saying, in both the book and the film, refers to the fact that Belasco was very, VERY sensitive about his illegitimate birth, and also that he was super, super short. It was essentially the power of his raging ego that kept his spirit alive all this time, and now that Fischer has deflated that ego, all of his power is gone. In both mediums, Fischer and Edith/Ann find a secret room behind the altar, which contains Belasco’s preserved body, sitting in a chair. In the movie, he’s sitting there all fancy with a glass of wine in his hand, but in the novel, Fisher notes that he placed a jug of water next to his chair before he sealed himself into the room, and through the force of his will, didn’t drink any of it, eventually dying of thirst.

Fischer then takes a pen-knife and stabs Belasco’s leg, revealing to Edith/Ann that his legs were prosthetic. Belasco had been so ashamed of his short stature that he had his own legs cut off and walked with the tall prosthetic ones so he could look like a giant. To be perfectly honest, I always thought this “secret” behind Belasco’s haunting to be a bit lame, even when I was a kid, but I’ll let it slide because both the book and the movie are so fucking good otherwise.

In both mediums, Fischer realizes that the reason Belasco was still able to operate at a diminished capacity in the secret room behind the chapel was that the walls of it were sheathed with lead, meaning that Belasco had already figured out, decades before, that there was a connection between surviving death and electromagnetic radiation, and had placed his body in a “safe room” to make sure no one could use a machine like Barrett’s to dispel him.

Interestingly, in the movie, Fischer and Ann turn Barrett’s machine back on after they open up the lead room, thereby completely clearing the house of Belasco’s presence. They then leave, presumably to collect their hundred grand and go back to their lives. In the book, because Belasco was essentially defeated by Fischer standing up to him and making fun of shit he was a total snowflake about, this doesn’t happen; they just leave, with Fischer wishing her a merry Christmas. I have to say, I like the movie situation better in this regard; it seemed more definitive, opening up the room and turning on the ghost extermination machine like hosing down the place with Raid. But your mileage may vary.

And that’s all she wrote for The Legend of Hell House. Incidentally, as I was researching this post, I came across a similar book versus movie discussion on YouTube about it, and one of the commenters (I think it was the guy from Rotted Reviews) said that he’d love for someone to write a prequel novel about everything that happened in Hell House when Emeric Belasco was still alive; a Hell House origin story, if you will. I discovered that there actually IS a prequel novel, written by Nancy A. Collins, but it covers the 1940 investigation when Fischer was fifteen, not the original stuff with Emeric Belasco. Not gonna lie, I still want to read it, though.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this ridiculously exhaustive breakdown, and that I haven’t given all of you eyestrain with my excessive wordiness. Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.