For now, this is our last voyage into that weirdly simple pocket of trash, that cadre of movies that manage to be stupendously entertaining while also being so stereotypical that it's hard to place why they're so fun to watch. Ghosts of Hanley House achieves the astounding feat of being even less original than The Screaming Skull, and when you find it lacks the flesh-searing camp of Dungeon of Harrow, you're left to conclude that it compels its audience through something other. There is a genuine atmospheric mystery to Ghosts, achieved through sincere in-context creepiness, but also in the jaw-dropping editing and frank, uncanny slice-of-life acting. Dare ye cross the haunted threshold and enter Hanley House?
The plot is cut clean out of the earliest and laziest issues of Tales from the Crypt or House of Mystery. A group of people in a small town bet each other their cars if they can spend a night in the infamous haunted Hanley House. Then, they proceed to spend the night in the infamous haunted Hanley House. Along the way, we see some spooky occurrences, like a disappearing black widow spider, and some not so spooky occurrences, like doors opening slowly. Of course it turns out someone in the group has a special significance to the brutal murders of the Hanley Family, though I don't seem to recall IMDB's reference to decapitations of the party members ever happening. So it goes.
One tremendous tipoff that we're dealing with a movie that may well be The Screaming Skull for masochists is that the title, theme, and setting aren't particularly exotic. Hanley isn't exactly a Gothic surname, and Hanley House itself looks like it was ordered out of a Sears catalog. These houses are supposed to look like death itself, built on cursed land two hundred years ago. This is almost certainly a product of the fact that this movie is a weekend-with-friends production. The best kind of production! The house is probably the director's, and outside of a bar where the bet is struck, and a forest, there are no other sets. Suburbia in action. It has sort of a hillbilly feel to it, too--the protagonists are shockingly dumb at times, and much excitement and attention is lavished upon six-packs of beer. By dumb, I mean to say that this is said (verbatim), after the proposal of a theory that the ghosts are actually human intruders in the house: "If there is someone in the house, they probably don't intend to harm anybody." Ah, the '60s. Everything was so safe back then that even people spending the night at an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere had nothing to fear from the people who went that far out of their way to stalk them.
Speaking of the '60s, I want to put it in perspective how weird it is that a movie like this exists so far out. 1968 was the release date for Night of the Living Dead. These Old Dark House movies were gone decades before that, and yet for reasons unknown Ghosts of Hanley House insists on inserting itself into the timeline. Now, obviously, the successor to the Old Dark House movie was probably some of Jess Franco's Gothic Eurotrash, as well as a lot of the Hammer Horror canon. But in the wake of George Romero they had gore, and in the wake of fiends like the Findlays they had sexuality too. Most importantly, they had seriousness. Ghosts of Hanley House is not as slapsticky as, say, Sh! The Octopus, but I think the beer stuff was supposed to be funny. Sh! was a parody of Old Dark House films, and so I assume the parody equivalent in Hanley House's era was Hillbillys in a Haunted House. So perhaps it wasn't alone in being behind the times.
Devils hide in the details here. This is one of the worst edited movies I've ever seen, which is saying something. If you've seen Manos, there's a chance you remember that scene with the makeout couple in the car, where the camera runs about ten seconds too long before the actress delivers her line. That is a lot of shots in this movie--five seconds, line, five seconds, cut. Also every character gets the shot to themselves every time they deliver a line, which is a nice trick if you have some scheduling issues with your actors. Except they also have shots together in the same scenes, meaning that the director essentially had no idea what she was doing. That works to our benefit because it is endlessly charming--if anything because at times these closeups are devoid of any sort of flattery to their subjects.
Again, the dialogue is...c'mon, in '68, some of it had to be deliberate. "What does it want?" "It wants...Dick!" Yes, Dick is a character (of course there's a Dick in this movie), but that matters not. Plus, a little Southern Christian magic: "In the name of the LAWD!" Excellent. How about the scene in which the gang is completely unconcerned that one of their friends is outed as a mass murderer? When I called the acting in this movie uncanny, I wasn't kidding. Sometimes the cast breaks free and does their job well--other times, they are clearly struggling. I can't help but point fingers at the script, but the pointing of fingers implies blame, which implies judgment. I am in no position to judge this movie. The choices it made were its own, and I respect that. That's standing up for your rights as a filmmaker, that's what I say. And so on and so forth.
As far as the paranormal activity goes, it's so forgettable that I only remember clocks chiming, doors opening, and some weirdly ADR'd ghost voices. Yet there is a seance that proves itself to be the worst seance this side of The Wild World of Batwoman, a trait which it shares with every seance scene in every movie ever made, including Batwoman. Oddly enough, the conclusion of this film is depressingly similar to the central "conflict" of another movie I hate as much as Batwoman, 1981's Night of Horror. In case you couldn't guess, Ghosts of Hanley House is better than those two movies collectively. I don't know if that's a compliment or not.
In any case, compliment Ghosts of Hanley House. It is tight, creepy, and confusing all at the same time. Mundane it may be, but it's an experience that will haunt you forever.
Next up...something a bit more pulse-pounding!
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