Welcome again to Psychotronic Perspectives, a blog feature brought to you by David & Daniel, which delves into discussion of some of the weird and obscure genre movies that we happen to see! We’re diving to find film trash gold, and will share our thoughts on what we find, strange and glorious. For our second pick we have one of the features found on the Shock-O-Rama Video Party Blu-ray release from American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) in collaboration with Something Weird Video: Ghosts of Hanley House!
Ghosts of Hanley House (1968) Directed by Louise Sherrill
85 minutes
Written by Louise Sherrill
Cinematography by Claude Fullerton
Edited by Frances Durkin
Music by David C. Parsons
Starring: Elsie Baker, Barbara Chase, Wilkie de Martel, Roberta Reeves, Cliff Scott, & Leonard Shoemaker
Synopsis: Friends Hank and Dick make a bet over beers at the local bar. Dick has just come into ownership of the old Hanley House, an isolated mansion outside of town that is rumored to be haunted. One day past, Mr. & Mrs. Hanley mysteriously vanished, and anyone who has stayed overnight in the house since then has reportedly gone mad or otherwise been left traumatized. Dick offers his new sports car to Hank should he successfully stay the night and prove there are no ghosts. Hank recruits some acquaintances from around town to join him for an overnight party at the Hanley House, including both paranormal skeptics and a medium who is interested in researching the truth of what has occurred there.
If you’d like to watch Ghosts of Hanley House before reading on, it’s available streaming for free on Tubi, or can be found on the AGFA Shock-O-Rama Video Party Blu-ray collection from Vinegar Syndrome.
DAVID: This is a film that’s been in my personal library forever, lurking around in one public domain edition or another, but I only finally got around to it with the Shock-O-Rama release, and I did the film an injustice by that inordinate delay. I keep seeing it described as a low-budget version of The Haunting (the 1963 adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, not the misbegotten 1999 version) and while I can see that if I squint a bit — the group investigating the haunted house, the banging on the doors — that comparison does rather sell Ghosts of Hanley House short in making it seem more derivative of another film than it is.
This isn’t to say that the setup here is blazingly original. It isn’t. In fact, it’s a combo of the two most common Reasons for People to Stay in a Haunted House (TM): the bet that they can’t make it through the night, and the ghost investigation. And I wouldn’t say that Ghosts of Hanley House makes any pretense at reinventing the wheel. It knows we know how this works, and so gets on with the business of what happens at the house.
And it is in the execution of the familiar conception that I think writer/director Louise Sherrill achieves something wonderful and eerie on a microscopic budget. This is a regional, independent production through and through. Go in expecting slickness, and you’ll be disappointed, but that’s also like going to 2001: A Space Odyssey for the love scenes. The grainy, moody B&W and the sense that almost anything could happen at any point creates a dreamlike atmosphere that (all proportions maintained) make Ghosts of Hanley House as much a relation of Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) as it is of The Haunting.
DANIEL: The original 1963 version of The Haunting does feature ingenious camera placement and shots to accentuate the unease and terror of its eerie setting and the ghosts that reside there. While Ghosts of Hanley House doesn’t try for the diversity and inventiveness of that higher budget classic, it does masterfully employ a limited set of techniques to enhance its visual enchantments over the audience. Whether a product of director Sherrill, cinematographer/photographer Fullterton, or their combination, they make this movie consistently visually connect. It’s in those camera techniques (rather than the basic plot) where I felt the movie most reminiscent of my times watching The Haunting, experiencing similar visual cues to provide that tremendous atmosphere.
For instance, Ghosts of Hanley House begins with the requisite establishing shots of the haunted house exterior, followed by numerous point-of-view shots (from the audience’s perspective, not any character) of ghostly activity upon doors and other items within the house. These types of mid-shot and close-up point-of-view shots are again used later in the movie as the characters begin to see similar inexplicable movements or activity. As you said, there’s no reinvention of the wheel in this, but it does use the established technique (that The Haunting also employs) superbly well.
Perhaps more unique to Ghosts of Hanley House, is the frequent use of close-up and mid-range shots on characters who are facing the camera. Again, it’s almost like a point of view shot, but never from the view of any character present, or even indicating that it would be the audience looking upon things. In several cases these shots come close to breaking the fourth wall, in that the actor is facing and speaking to the camera. Yet, in all cases the actor is not looking into the camera eye, but slightly off center toward whichever character they’re speaking with or reacting to. The effect of this is that it’s just slightly disorienting, never fully doing what we might expect the shot to be used for. In a few instances, Sherrill (and/or Fullerton) use an extreme close-up to really accentuate this not-quite-meeting-camera gaze, such as during the seance sequence when the psychic Gabby pronounces that fantastic line:
“They were evil in life, so they’re evil in death.”
DAVID: Very much agreed. And it was those opening shots of mysteriously behaving clocks in the house, accompanied by the implied Poe-like murder, that immediately sold me on the film. In retrospect, those shots work even better, as they suggest supernatural events already happening in the house during the murder itself.
That, along with the never-explained-but-clearly-ghostly sinister male silhouette seen outside the house, and the ball of fire in the night (strongly reminiscent of the one that pursues Dana Andrews during his walk in the wounds in Night of the Demon (1957)), opens up the possibility that the forces beyond the two ghosts we know about inhabit the house. This broader sense of the supernatural once again invites comparison to The Haunting. It also reminds me of Edith Wharton’s “Afterward,” which I do feel is one of the greatest ghost stories ever. Though its premise — a house haunted by a ghost that you do not realize you’ve seen until long afterwards — is very different from what we get here, the two works do share a similarity in the belated realization that there is something beyond the ghosts encountered, ghosts that have a specific connection to the people who ill-advisedly enter the house.
SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH. I have to admire the bleakness of the film’s brutally Old Testament form of justice, like an EC Comic amped to 11. The fact that the murder victims are utterly vile, and that their murderer had been their victim for decades, matters not one whit. Truly dark stuff.
DANIEL: Those are some excellent points you make about belated realizations and elements implied or suggested but never quite explained. It’s easy to go into this movie and watch it once while keeping the assumption that it’s a really straight-forward plot with standard haunted house tropes done on a low budget: competent but nothing special.
But paying attention to things and even going back and rewatching with foreknowledge of the murders and where things will go reveal those bits, like the lurking figure in the shadows outside or that phantasmagoric orb, that don’t necessarily fit into a simple plot interpretation. They suggest something more is going on here. Take the supposed choice of the murdered spirits to only communicate with/through a particular individual staying in the house, for instance. Who that person is seems to change, breaking the assumptions of the characters (like the medium) and the audience alike. But it’s also an inconsistency indicating yet again that maybe there isn’t just one group of spirits at play here.
There are also the warnings to Hank from the older lady (was it his mother? I can’t recall…) regarding the house and its effects on those who’ve stayed there. Did the murder victims themselves slowly become such vile humans because of the effects of living in that home and its influence? Even just briefly being in the house, Hank already makes a decision that forces Dick to also stay the night against his original intentions and will. Is that Hank acting on his own? Or is it Hank under the influence of something?
Part of the issue with watching this movie and delving into it for interpretations is that its low budget and passage into relative obscurity means there aren’t resources like director interviews and commentaries and all those things to build on speculations and interpretations. Moreover, Louise Sherrill never made any other film, leaving nothing for comparison. The uncertainty thus extends to vagueness of how much here is intentional, versus how much is just a product of low budget and trying to put in certain horror elements for the sake of having that creepiness alone.
In the end I guess intent doesn’t matter, because here we are talking about what great impact it did have on us, regardless.
DAVID: Exactly. Authorial intent is all very well and interesting when we have information about it, but in the end is only one data point, and not necessarily relevant to what the work actually does. So intentional or not, all these elements add up to a thoroughly eerie experience, one that I believe has many rewards for the sympathetic viewer.
I’ve seen Ghosts of Hanley House mentioned as a double-bill partner to House of Dreams (1963), another B&W haunted house movie made for next-to-nothing. There is a bit more information about the latter out there, though not vast amounts, and when I call the film soporific, I really do mean that in the best sense possible. Both it and Ghosts of Hanley House are dreamlike, uncanny artifacts of low-budget filmmaking, floating out in the ether of public domain like one of their own spectres. These are works that feel genuinely haunted to me, and genuinely haunting, as if watching them were an act very much like spending the night in their titular houses.
I find even the fact that the original film elements of Ghosts of Hanley House have been lost, and that the best we have is a transfer from Something Weird’s S-VHS master, adds to the film’s eeriness — the picture seems to be forever on the edge of dissolving into static, the dream slipping beyond our grasp.
All in all, I’m grateful that Louise Sherrill made this film, and that it survives to haunt us.
DANIEL: This would definitely not have the same impact were it cleaned up and brought out from the haze and shadows. Clarity of sounds or visuals would be incongruous with the pacing and performances. Its regional, dirt-cheap charm and uncanny murkiness are its greatest strengths.
This is also the kind of movie that’s fertile ground for a horror fan’s imagination to go: The only film from the director, a cast and crew who were in little else, if anything. One could take all that we don’t know about this movie and its production in combination with the mysterious unexplained elements of the movie and craft an entire ‘cursed film’ horror scenario.
By largely chance, other regional horror films have been plucked from general obscurity into the limelight and even resurrected into remakes and sequels, decades upon decades after the original. I feel like there could be more lurking within Hanley House, what went into the making of this film, and what keeps it with us.
