HAVENHURST takes not only its inspiration but it's foundation from the real life historical details surrounding Herman Webster Mudgett, a.k.a. H. H. Holmes, "one of the first documented serial killers in the modern sense of the term".
Taken as a whole, what is so incredible about the original, real, Mudgett story is that, if you were to read it as a novel rather than as an account of recorded historical facts, you simply wouldn't believe it. Mudgett comes across, literally and completely unbelievably, as an antebellum comic book supervillain. Dashingly handsome, obviously a genius, a graduate of the University of Michigan's Department of Medicine and Surgery at age 23, he was possessed of an infinite supply of charm, intelligence, chutzpah and urbanity that allowed him to charm anyone and apparently pull off any con. Turning his collection of deceptive skills to good use, he was seemingly able to generate large sums of money at will.
But what's a supervillain without a lair? By the age of 28, Mudgett had amassed enough fortune to build a massive hotel building, a three- story block-long affair that was nicknamed "The Castle" simply because it was so enormous (for the time). While the street-level floor housed conventional commercial shops, the upper 2 floors " contained his personal office and a labyrinth of rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly angled hallways, stairways leading to nowhere, doors it could only be opened from the outside ", and so on. Like Capt. Nemo, he never allowed any one individual to gain significant knowledge of any large part of the construction project. Reads like a Stan Lee origin story, doesn't it?
Within the walls of The Castle, in the middle of Chicago no less, "somewhere between 9 and 200" people were killed as part of a variety of for-profit schemes involving life insurance scams, skeletal models for medical schools, and model organs. To help with operations, he invented his own alarm systems to monitor people moving about within his building.
The Mudgett story goes on and on in this same vein. If you saw it as a movie, you simply wouldn't believe it. It's just too outlandish. And you need to keep in mind that he accomplished all of this and was dead by execution by the age of 34. Even the account of his own hanging is excessively ghoulish.
As part of the Mudgett story, it's known that it had been his intent to build more than one hotel. This intention provides the foundation for the movie HAVENHURST; HAVENHURST is another one of Mudgett's "specialty hotels". For the purposes of the movie, it's a different family running it and their motivations are different from what Mudgett would understand, but it's pretty much "second verse, same as the first".
The connection to the original Mudgett story serves to highlight two points. Firstly, truth really is stranger than fiction. The original Mudgett story is intrinsically more fantastical and made even more so by the fact that it is entirely real. The writer of HAVENHURST basically goes head-to-head on the story and simply can't create a fictional story that can stand on the same playing field with the historical one.
And secondly, a basic movie through-line composed primarily of slicing and dicing people, for whatever reason, is just not enough to carry a movie. HAVENHURST does draw a little extra spark from its roots in appalling historical facts but then just falls flat. It's all been said and done far better by Mudgett himself in the real world before the movie even begins. The movie literally depends on its audience being completely ignorant of the historical facts surrounding the Mudgett story in order to have anything to serve up to the audience; if you know the Mudgett background, HAVENHURST is simply a tiresome exercise in tiptoeing through the intestines. Having to depend upon audience ignorance in order to have something to give is a bad plot strategy.
While they can't save the movie from its own intrinsically limited playbook, Julie Benz and Fionnula Flanagan, who were also together in the TV series DEFIANCE, do provide some quality acting to help relieve the boredom. Ms. Flanagan has been providing quality acting since 1965, if memory serves, and it's interesting to see how much atmosphere she's able to create in what is otherwise a vacuum of interest.
And lastly a note for the makers of HAVENHURST... You should at least do 10 minutes of research if you're going to make a movie based upon historical facts, people, and events. You want to exploit historical facts, not trip over them. Mudgett took pains to provide soundproofing in his kill rooms. Some of his methods of killing could take days and probably involved lots of screaming. Having eerie screaming from behind walls and echoing up as the victims disappear down hidden chutes as a primary scare effect just conflicts with historical facts. You certainly wouldn't have heard them in a Quality Mudgett Hotel.
Taken as a whole, what is so incredible about the original, real, Mudgett story is that, if you were to read it as a novel rather than as an account of recorded historical facts, you simply wouldn't believe it. Mudgett comes across, literally and completely unbelievably, as an antebellum comic book supervillain. Dashingly handsome, obviously a genius, a graduate of the University of Michigan's Department of Medicine and Surgery at age 23, he was possessed of an infinite supply of charm, intelligence, chutzpah and urbanity that allowed him to charm anyone and apparently pull off any con. Turning his collection of deceptive skills to good use, he was seemingly able to generate large sums of money at will.
But what's a supervillain without a lair? By the age of 28, Mudgett had amassed enough fortune to build a massive hotel building, a three- story block-long affair that was nicknamed "The Castle" simply because it was so enormous (for the time). While the street-level floor housed conventional commercial shops, the upper 2 floors " contained his personal office and a labyrinth of rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly angled hallways, stairways leading to nowhere, doors it could only be opened from the outside ", and so on. Like Capt. Nemo, he never allowed any one individual to gain significant knowledge of any large part of the construction project. Reads like a Stan Lee origin story, doesn't it?
Within the walls of The Castle, in the middle of Chicago no less, "somewhere between 9 and 200" people were killed as part of a variety of for-profit schemes involving life insurance scams, skeletal models for medical schools, and model organs. To help with operations, he invented his own alarm systems to monitor people moving about within his building.
The Mudgett story goes on and on in this same vein. If you saw it as a movie, you simply wouldn't believe it. It's just too outlandish. And you need to keep in mind that he accomplished all of this and was dead by execution by the age of 34. Even the account of his own hanging is excessively ghoulish.
As part of the Mudgett story, it's known that it had been his intent to build more than one hotel. This intention provides the foundation for the movie HAVENHURST; HAVENHURST is another one of Mudgett's "specialty hotels". For the purposes of the movie, it's a different family running it and their motivations are different from what Mudgett would understand, but it's pretty much "second verse, same as the first".
The connection to the original Mudgett story serves to highlight two points. Firstly, truth really is stranger than fiction. The original Mudgett story is intrinsically more fantastical and made even more so by the fact that it is entirely real. The writer of HAVENHURST basically goes head-to-head on the story and simply can't create a fictional story that can stand on the same playing field with the historical one.
And secondly, a basic movie through-line composed primarily of slicing and dicing people, for whatever reason, is just not enough to carry a movie. HAVENHURST does draw a little extra spark from its roots in appalling historical facts but then just falls flat. It's all been said and done far better by Mudgett himself in the real world before the movie even begins. The movie literally depends on its audience being completely ignorant of the historical facts surrounding the Mudgett story in order to have anything to serve up to the audience; if you know the Mudgett background, HAVENHURST is simply a tiresome exercise in tiptoeing through the intestines. Having to depend upon audience ignorance in order to have something to give is a bad plot strategy.
While they can't save the movie from its own intrinsically limited playbook, Julie Benz and Fionnula Flanagan, who were also together in the TV series DEFIANCE, do provide some quality acting to help relieve the boredom. Ms. Flanagan has been providing quality acting since 1965, if memory serves, and it's interesting to see how much atmosphere she's able to create in what is otherwise a vacuum of interest.
And lastly a note for the makers of HAVENHURST... You should at least do 10 minutes of research if you're going to make a movie based upon historical facts, people, and events. You want to exploit historical facts, not trip over them. Mudgett took pains to provide soundproofing in his kill rooms. Some of his methods of killing could take days and probably involved lots of screaming. Having eerie screaming from behind walls and echoing up as the victims disappear down hidden chutes as a primary scare effect just conflicts with historical facts. You certainly wouldn't have heard them in a Quality Mudgett Hotel.