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Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Screen to Scream: Hell House, LLC and A Head Full of Ghosts


This is an experiment I wanted to try. Readers’ advisory is typically through connections between books or authors, the algebraic equation for this something like, “if you like x, you should try y.” But readers’ advisory can also be done with horror movies, not just by matching them with subject matter (ghosts, vampires, etc.) but also with themes. These comparisons won’t be movies made from books and vice versa (no comparisons between the book The Shining and the movie), but comparing a book and a movie that talk about similar ideas and even make similar conclusions. I wanted to try this experiment, analyzing the connective tissue between films and novels, with two stories demonstrate how horror works while also showing that it’s still possible to feel terror when you can see inside the machine’s inner workings. 
Hell House, LLC is shot like an actual documentary about an incident at a haunted house attraction at the Abbadon Hotel. The movie gets some interviews and backstory about the incident, clueing in the audience, but the documentary crew lucks out by finding survivor Sara Havel, who not only appears to tell her side of the story but brings footage the crew of Hell House shot before the incident occurred. This story has two parallel narratives, but one narrative works backwards, providing the dark history of the hotel and the cover-up of the incident, while another focuses on the Hell House crew getting the place ready, encountering spooky goings on that gets progressively worse as they get closer to opening night (the film even counts down the days left until the dreaded opening night). The audience sees all the pieces come together at the opening night climax when Hell literally breaks loose. Unlike found footage movies that can’t get beyond the simple novelty of the genre, the directors of Hell House use the first-person viewpoint to generate some genuine scares that feel like the audience is in the haunted house that will inevitably cause so much destruction of life.
There is no visuals, no pictures, in Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, but the story is a great mediation on how one camera lens can be a limited viewpoint to process tragedy, particularly when so many other things are going on behind the scenes. The lens in question belongs to the show “The Possession,” which focuses on 14-year-old Marjorie Bennett, a girl prescribed an exorcism to deal with her demons and her family pushed to their breaking point. The book reveals, through the blog entries of The Last Final Girl, what the home audience saw of the Bennet family’s nightmare, but younger sister Merrie offers her own personal view, influenced by being eight-years-old and forced to watch her beloved sister’s mental and physical decline as well as the ultimate tragedy that spares no one, living or dead. Like Hell House, readers are given brief sips of foreshadowing before consuming the main course of this family’s pain, culminating in a climax that, while more subdued (less people screaming, less explosions), it still manages to be just as, perhaps even more, horrifying.
From the use of Seward’s phonograph in Dracula to today’s found footage films, horror has been on the cusp of using different media to offer multiple viewpoints, generate frights, and even confuse the viewer as to what’s actually happening. Some key phrases that might interest patrons include “slowly building tension” and “insane climax” (jaws may indeed hit the floor) but there’s also the fourth-wall breaking that both movie and book do, showing how the scream machine works but letting readers and viewers know that those who operate said machine are powerless to stop it once its running at top speed.