The Legend of Hell House (1973)

I love writer Richard Matheson, he wrote I Am Legend, What Dreams May Come, Duel, 16 of the most famous episodes from the original Twilight Zone, he also wrote the material that became Kolchak: The Night Stalker (the movies and the show). So when I heard about this haunted house story I immediately put to the top of my "must see" list. The story is eerily similar to the movie The Haunting, and its source material The Haunting of Hill House, both stories are about a group of four or five paranormal investigators going to study the activity in the stories' titular houses (their names are only different by one letter). Hell house is characterized in the novel as "the Mount Everest" of haunted houses. The main difference in the two stories is that Legend of Hell House is set in England, and the entire cast is British (even though the novel is originally set on the U.S. east coast just like The Haunting). Both 

the films' source material was released in the same year, 1959. The film is also pretty similar to another British film, The Stone Tape (1972) that was a BBC made for TV movie about a record company based out of an old mansion encountering ghosts and eventually doing experiments on/with the ghosts. Where Hell House really stands out among the rest however is in some of the things it was the first to do in horror movies; All the ghost movies before it focused on subtlety, even though The Haunting still one of the scariest films ever made to this day, with the exception of one character dying at the end of the film, nobody was noticeably attacked on-screen, that's not the case in Hell House. The Haunting's ghosts did bother and mess with and potentially try to hurt its guests, Hell House has a team of investigators go in knowing that a previous attempt to "cleanse" the house had been made, and only one person survived that attempt. Also the house makes no mistake about its intentions to its "guests," it posesses one of the mediums and warns them all very clearly "I will kill you all!" and then attacks the person in charge and very nearly does kill him. This film came out the same year as The Exorcist, but Hell House came out that summer as opposed to the winter when The Exorcist was released, thus making Hell House one of the first times a character was very noticeably demonically possessed on film. The film also marks the first time (as far as I know) that a character has sex with a ghost. The acting is superb with a cast led by Roddy McDowall (Planet of the Apes, Fright Night), and the film is directed by John Hough the same guy who would go on to direct other supernatural classic Sci-fis Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), and Watcher in the Woods (1980), that being said the film has a similar feel and will not be a dissappointment to fans of those films. The film is not as scary as I expected, but in its own innovative way it was pretty badass. I recommend it and give it a 4.5/5, you can view the trailer below: