The Legend of Hell House

Richard Matheson adapting his own novel, and it is colder and nastier than The Haunting while being nowhere near as subtle.

A physicist, a medium, a mentalist and the physicist's wife spend a week in the Belasco house, which killed the last team that tried this. The physicist has a machine he believes will drain the house of residual energy.

The Matheson idea is that a haunting is a physical phenomenon with a mechanism, and the film commits to it completely, right through to a actually absurd and satisfying explanation.

Roddy McDowall gives the best performance, playing the only survivor of the previous expedition as a man who has decided the correct strategy is to say nothing to anybody.

The score is by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and it sounds like nothing else in a 1973 horror film.