This Classic Haunted House Novel That Stephen King Declared The Scariest Ever Needs A Faithful Adaptation

On one hand, Richard Matheson's "Hell House" was published at precisely the right time. It hit shelves the same year Ken Russell's "The Devils" scandalized moviegoers, but wasn't as aggressively sacrilegious in its portrayal of orgiastic behavior. Given how hard horror was going, and how much harder it was about to go, at that moment (via "The Last House on the Left," "The Exorcist" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"), a faithful adaptation of Matheson's novel would've been shredding the outside of the same sordid envelope.

The decision was made to mostly allude to the hardcore sexual elements of the novel, which left us with John Hough's creepy "The Legend of Hell House" in 1974 (though rated PG at the time, it would no doubt receive an R today, if only for its adult material and intense scares). It's a spooky movie, but it doesn't quite measure up to Stephen King's declaration that "'Hell House' is the scariest haunted house novel ever written. It looms over the rest the way a mountain looms over foothills."

Scarier than Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House," you ask? I'll throw in with King and say it's a far more viscerally unsettling experience. The debauched behavior is one thing, but really it's the pervasive sense of dread that sinks into your bones. Belasco House aka "Hell House" is awash in evil. The malevolent presence it contains is so powerful that few have survived a stay there. Nevertheless, four people have accepted a large sum from a peculiar millionaire (he'd be a billionaire today) to stay for a week in the mansion in an attempt to return with hard evidence of the spiritual realm.

It's a terrifying read that could surpass "Poltergeist" and "The Haunting" if given a more immersive interpretation on film.

The four supernormal adventurers (Matheson prefers this terminology to "supernatural," because, as he told me in 2011, "It's all natural") endeavoring to summit the Mount Everest of haunted houses are parapsychologist Dr. Lionel Bennett, his wife Edith, spiritualist Florence Tanner, and Benjamin Franklin Fischer, the sole survivor of a previous Belasco visit. Bennett plans to cleanse the atmosphere of the Belasco house with a device called a Reversor, but with no electricity upon arrival, they'll have to ride out a candlelit night or two.

Matheson wastes no time in assaulting our imaginations with the profane decor of the house. The chapel is particularly disturbing. The walls are adorned with pornographic murals depicting nuns and priests engaged in animalistic sex, while the centerpiece of the room is a life-size Jesus Christ hanging on the cross equipped with a gargantuan phallus pointing straight to the heavens. Belasco was a hedonistic millionaire who drove his houseguests into a libidinal frenzy, and it's only a matter of time before one of these four characters catches some seriously vile vapors. Then the house, seemingly under Belasco's command, comes alive (and if there's one place you don't want to go in a haunted house, it's the steam room).

Matheson's prose is clear and terse; he's an economical writer who doesn't need long, florid paragraphs to set a blood-curdling mood. This doesn't mean a film of "Hell House" should proceed at a breakneck pacem but it needn't be distended into a miniseries either. There's a brilliant feature to be made out of "Hell House," but it's got to have serious production value and push that R rating to the limit. And currently the box office is telling us that now is the time to go big and bloody.

R-rated horror is all the rage. "Sinners," "Weapons," "Obsession," and "Backrooms" are global phenomena, which means Hollywood is going to ride the genre until the wheels fall off. A haunted house movie bedecked with provocative imagery and dripping with ectoplasm would honor the late Matheson (whose "Little Girl Lost" episode of "The Twilight Zone" clearly spawned "Poltergeist"). In the right hands, it'd be the ne plus ultra of the subgenre.

Back in 2002, Guillermo del Toro began developing an adaptation of "Hell House," but I feel like he scratched that itch with "Crimson Peak." Mike Flanagan had planned to tackle Matheson's novel for the third season of his "Haunting" anthology, but that got kiboshed. Now that Flanagan has thousands of projects in production or active development, I'm not sure he'll ever return to "Hell House."

The rights are evidently tied up at the moment, but Matheson told me back in the day he wanted to put the "raunchy stuff" back into the movie. Prior to the Hough movie, he'd envisioned Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom as the leads, which could've turned this into the horror version of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" That's the right, abrasive emotional temperature for the material, which makes me wonder what Mike Leigh's "Hell House" would look like.

The last time we had a truly extravagant, big-budget haunted house movie, we got Jan de Bont's "The Haunting." James Wan had fun on a responsible budget with the "Insidious" and "The Conjuring" movies, and Steven Soderbergh deserves more praise for "Presence," but we're due for another "Poltergeist." "Hell House" could be that. And with the scares, the scale, and the kink, perhaps Brian De Palma is the best fit to direct it.