“There were two attempts to investigate it. Both were disasters. Eight people died. Fischer was the only one who survived, and when he crawled out he was a mental wreck.”

What do you do when someone offers you £100,000 to stay for a week in "The mount Everest of haunted houses"? 

Number one, you tell them it is a stupid way to describe it. Is it the tallest haunted house in the world? I don't think so. Is it in Tibet? No, it's in the home counties. 

Number two, you take the money, say you've stayed there, tell the person nothing happened and book a holiday in the Caribbean. Unless you're scientist Lionel Barratt, that is… 

Jokes about Barratt Homes could abound on this page, if I was so minded. But I'm better than that.

Hell House requires on shocks and gore to get its point across, something to which the similar The Haunting never had to lower itself. Hell House is frightening the first time you watch it, but on a second viewing the cracks start to appear. The Haunting remains genuinely unsettling. 

However, Hell House isn't a bad film.

It starts off in true Gothic style, with spooky music, fog shrouded moors, hearse-like cars and Peter "To The Manor Born" Bowles. 

There follows several murmurings of things like "The house… it knows we're here" and somesuch, before medium Florence Tanner sits down for her first spooky séance. 

That one's such a hit that she agrees to do another one under "scientific conditions" - which involves Dr Barratt speaking into a tape recorder and demanding that ectoplasm "leaves a sample in the jar, please".

As the furniture gets angry and Dr Barratt's wife becomes a sex crazed harlot, he decides to bring in the big guns - or in other words, part of the set from Space 1999. Apparently, the house is "a giant battery… full of mindless, directionless power" and the enormous box he's brought in will suck it all out, leaving the place un-haunted. Will it work? What do you think?