Richard Matheson’s Hell House vol. 1
Adaptation: Ian Edginton
Art: Simon Fraser
Before Stephen King, there was Richard Matheson. This man is single-handedly responsible for some of the most memorable horror conventions in the American psyche. From The Incredible Shrinking Man to Shatner/Lithgow’s gremlin on the wing to the Voodoo Doll, Matheson’s creations dominate the horror landscape. Many of Stephen King’s earlier works are obviously tributes to Matheson, and the comparison here is apt, since Hell House is Matheson’s tribute to Shirley Jackson.
Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Matheson’s Hell House are responsible for a bunch of movies, mostly pretty bad. That’s a shame, since the novels are both pretty good. The stories begin the same: a group of psychics and skeptics are hired to establish the facts of “survival” (as applied to ghosts) in a haunted house. Where Jackson’s novel is a creepy gothic tale of an subtle, insidious possession, Matheson gives us a technicolor terrorfest of Exorcist proportions. I thought the 1973 movie starring Roddy MacDowell and Pamela Franklin was the perfect adaptation, but IDW’s graphic novel miniseries may be even better.
Matheson’s team consists of a skeptical paraphysicist, his wife, a spiritual medium, and a mental medium, the last being the only survivor of a distratrous previous attempt to scale the “Mount Everest of haunted houses.” The house they enter was owned by the infamous Belasco, a sort of modern-day de Sade fanboy. Belasco, amongst other things, re-enacted 120 Days in Sodom and created a cannabalistic, drug-addled, orgiastic, necrophiliac society within the walls of Hell House before disappearing. Since then, Hell House has killed or driven insane paranormal investigators. The team is in the house for less than a day before the spookiness begins, and the first book ends when the spiritual medium meets the first ghost (and pisses it off, apparently).
In scripting the book into a comic, Edginton has remained faithful to his source material. The characters act and dialogue in the same manner of the book, and one must attribute the personalities and quirks to the source author. Matheson’s characters are strongly built, and Edginton doesn’t dilute them in this reworking.
Where the book shines is the artwork. Fraser’s black & white work ranges from subdued to outrageous, perfectly capturing quiet moments, explosive ones, the buildup between. It’s perfectly baroque with its exagerrated expressiveness, enhancing the story in a way that might be amateurish in another scenario.
