Hell House, Hill House, What the...?

I recently discovered a movie called The Haunting of Hell House (1999). The title alone was enough to get my attention. Was it related to the 1973 film The Legend of Hell House, which was based on the Richard Matheson novel Hell House? Or was it a derivation of The Haunting of Hill House, a novel by Shirley Jackson, which was adapted as The Haunting in 1963 and 1999?

The answer is no. It turns out The Haunting of Hell House was based on a short story by Henry James called the "The Ghostly Rental." James, of course, wrote one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, The Turn of the Screw, which was adapted as a feature film in 1961 as The Innocents, and which has been produced for television numerous times and even adapted as an opera by Benjamin Britten. "The Ghostly Rental" is about an old man who kills his daughter and must rent her ghost the family home for the rest of his life. The Haunting of Hell House stars Michael York as the old man, but makes the main character a college student haunted by his girlfriend, who dies following a botched abortion the college student paid for.

So why is this ghostly rental property called "Hell House" in the movie's title? I don't remember anyone using that term in the movie itself, so my guess it that it's just another attempt to confuse us about Hill Houses, Hell Houses and Haunted Hills.

Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House was published in 1959. It's about a group of paranormal enthusiasts brought together to investigate the haunted house of the title. As I said, it spawned The Haunting, one of my favorite movies about ghosts, made in 1963. (I would have guessed that William Castle's similarly titled The House on Haunted Hill  was a rip-off of Jackson's novel, since it also includes a group of people spending the night in a haunted house, but Castle's film was apparently released just months before Jackson's book hit the stands, so I guess it's just a weird coincidence that further confuses the titling.)

Matheson's book Hell House was published in 1971 and has a similar story about a group of people brought together to investigate the world's most haunted place. The Legend of Hell House was brought to the screen in 1973.

Everything got real confusing in 1999 when remakes of The Haunting and The House on Haunted Hill were released. Even the filmmakers themselves got confused as this blogger points out that the director of the 1999 version of The Haunting must have pulled as much inspiration from Matheson's book as he did from Jackson's: http://www.braineater.com/haunting99.html . And within this swirling milieu of haunted hills and hill houses comes The Haunting of Hell House, released the same year. Sadly, none of the more recent movies are close to having the same eerie atmosphere or ghostly production values as their older counterparts.

To lay it out for you, with four fries representing the best a movie gets:

The Haunting (1963) - 4 fries (Possibly THE masterpiece of the haunted horror movie subgenre.)
The Innocents (1961) - 3.5 fries (No Hills or Hells, but worth mentioning anyway.)
The House on Haunted Hill (1959) - 3 fries (A little corny but still fun - featured on Home Fry-ed Movies)
The Legend of Hell House (1973) - 2.5 fries (The movie starts well, but gets laborious as it goes on.)
The House on Haunted Hill (1999) - 2 fries (The house is the real star of this movie. It's hard to trust any film that features both Geoffrey Rush AND Chris Kattan.)
The Haunting (1999) - 2 fries (Special effects are no replacement for good ol' fashioned creepiness.)
The Haunting of Hell House (1999) - 1.5 fries (Besides not being at all what I expected, it just wasn't that interesting.)