The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries: The House on Possessed Hill

I've never read any of the Hardy Boys books. The reason for this is that our headmistress subjected Enid Blyton's books to the same unfounded criticism levelled at the Hardy Boys books in the US: that they weren't proper literature and would stop the kids reading any proper literature. On this basis she banned the books completely from school premises and systematically shamed anyone caught with them. Of course the result was that Famous Five and Secret Seven books were passed around surreptitiously like the contraband they were and nobody at my school read the wildly successful Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew because they weren't banned.

I did, however, manage to watch the TV adaptations later, in my teens. Perhaps I should clarify that this post is about the 1977 to 1979 ABC series starring Parker Stevenson, Shaun Cassidy and Pamela Sue Martin or Janet Louise Johnson. I loved the mysterious theme tune and the plots. It's a show of the genre that I like to think of as aspirational for early teens: the kids are definitely kids but just older enough that they have a freedom the viewers don't have so that it can prompt dreaming, hero worship, or even crushes. This was never the effect of the Famous Five, which was clearly set in a world which didn't exist and where the kids had a freedom that no kids in human history have ever had. In the books Frank and Joe are permanently 16 and 17 respectively, which is probably just the right age to get this effect, They're probably a bit older in this series but still apparently free of the adult responsibilities of earning a living, studying, family, and so on.

The House on Possesed Hill is an absolute superb episode which basically takes the plot of a horror film and twists it slightly to fit in into the mould of the show. Joe and Frank come across Stacey, a young woman who is running away from a baying crowd who are after her. She wants to shelter from them in a mysterious house and she says the townspeople are after her because they think she is a witch: their evidence for this is that she foresaw an accident a friend had.

The show plays her psychic abilities very straight, at no point questioning what she says. In fact it seems uncanny.

Rightly, I think, at the beginning the townspeople just keep their distance from the house and don't give any excuse to Joe for being after her. This is somehow much more scary than the classic horror film tropes where she's either excaped from the local Nursing Home for the Insane Daughters of Gentlefolk (Matron: Jessica Fletcher) or she is the ward in court of the town sheriff who for no apparent reason doesn't want to go back to his house. We hear them talking amongst themselves and they do believe the house is cursed.

In fact the local sheriff doesn't help at all, saying that there's nothing he can do because it's not illegal to want to speak to someone and demanding that a crime be committed or else the Hardy boys had better shut up or leave his town. But then, ACAB.

In fact I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that on first viewing I completely missed that the house Stacey and Joe escape into is of course the house from Psycho. Since realising its identity I have seen that it's been used endlessly in film and TV since obviously a boy's best friend is his mother. I was going to make a quip that the only show it hasn't appeared in is Murder, She Wrote, but of course it's even made an appearance in that. Damnit this show follows the old dark house trope to the extent of having a mysterious hand pull out the telephone wire just as Joe tries to make a call.

The show returns to the world of the classic horror film when Joe and Frank take Stacey home and she's met by the family doctor, who is utterly creepy. Despite Stacey having been seen by specialists in New York who couldn't make head nor tail of her, Dr Creepy then does some kind of regression in the show which mysteriously reveals everything that has happened in her life. Medical ethics, anyone?

If you want a criticism of this episode you might possibly feel that it's got an embarras des richesses in the multiple possible explanations for what's going on in the house leading to a conclusion where it turns out it's several at once. However since the point of this episode is to draw from about every old dark house film ever, that's the point. There's also my enduring query about this show that Parker Stevenson was too old for the role he plays.

This is an excellent episode drawing on the rich horror film tradition.

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