Unfailingly, the short stories are much darker and more mysterious than what ended up on TV, and they usually turn on just that lack of information or resolution that he complains about in Hill House. Matheson wrote many episodes of The Twilight Zone, often based on his short stories. I've been a fan of Richard Matheson since I happened upon The Twilight Zone, probably at about the same time I accidentally saw The Legend of Hell House (we were obviously raised by TV). I think that makes this a much less effective and less interesting book. So, this book is partially his response, Matheson very much showing and telling what did it. I finally sought out the book because I'm doing a PhD on Shirley Jackson and looking at some of the overlap between these two authors I came across Matheson commenting on his reaction to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House on pages 187-188 of this book: ''I never liked the idea that you never really knew what did it,'' he says of the supposed haunting, primarily of the adaptation but the same holds true for the novel. So much of the novel made it to the screen, plotwise that is (the murder cannibalism sex stuff not so much). That ending is slightly less silly in the novel, but it's still a bit silly. I was also shocked by the ending, which is.

I was shocked to see it had been written by Matheson. It was interesting to see how faithfully my brain had retained the scary bits. It still freaked me out, though I don't know how scary it would seem to someone without that same experience. today).Īnyway, hooray, eventually, for the internet, and for a vague memory of Roddy McDowall - when I decided to seek it out as an adult those things helped me find it.

To complicate matters, it wasn't the only Saturday Afternoon horror movie that my inattentive father let us accidentally encounter and for a while I thought the scary cat/body in the wall/dazed naked lady stuff had come from one of the many Vincent Price movies that I also happened to see at this time (which actually makes sense because a lot of those movies were based on Poe and the things that I remembered were straight up Poe elements -but I'd only make that connection. Certain imagery was burned into my too-young brain, but I had no idea what movie I had seen. Or rather, I have a weird history with the movie based on this book, The Legend of Hell House, which for some unknown reason was on daytime TV some time when I was around 7 or 8. I have a weird history with this book but I only just read it for the first time.

Hell house matheson