The Haunting (1963)

Many years ago little nutshell asked Mommy and Daddy for permission to stay up and watch this movie. He soon regretted it, as this bone-chilling ghost story nearly caused the young lad to soil his shorts, and it would be several more days until he could fall asleep with the lights out. Even today, I can't watch this movie in an empty house with the lights off. It's just too damn scary. Robert Wise had one of the most varied and distinguished directorial careers in Hollywood history, and he understood very well that psychologically speaking, what you can't see can hurt you. An imaginative viewer will almost always fill in a blank with something far more horrible than what the director could show on screen. This is a formula that has been largely abandoned, and is a highly contributing reason why most of today's horror movies absolutely suck. Give this one a go. Wait until nightfall. Wait until nobody else is home. Turn off the lights and watch. I dare you...

And whatever walked there, walked alone. The Haunting is directed by Robert Wise and adapted to screenplay by Nelson Gidding from the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House. It stars Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn and Lois Maxwell. Music is by Humphrey Searle and cinematography by David Boulton. Hill House has a troubled history, death, either by accident or by suicide, has occurred there over the years. Today, Dr. Markway, an anthropologist and investigator of paranormal activity, leads a team of four for a stay at Hill House, where they will stay for a period of time in the hope that Markway can prove something paranormal resides there The haunted house premise has been a staple for horror film makers since forever. To place the viewer in a murky house, alongside some character unfortunates, and then scare the tar out of them has always been the aim. It hasn't often worked to great effect, in fact the number of genuine scary haunted house movies barely trouble the fingers of both hands. How strange, then, that the best of the bunch chose a simple formula that has never been replicated since with the same great effect. The Haunting thrives not on what it throws at you by way of jumps and peek-a-boo visceral shocks, it deals firmly in the realm of what you can't see scares you the most. Where we have to use our own fretful imaginations to fill in the blanks for us, which is never a good thing in psychological horror parlance. Robert Wise, a most gifted and versatile director, uses oblique camera angles, thundering sound effects and angled close ups of his actors to get the maximum amount of atmosphere from the premise. Distortion is very much a key component here. We are told the history of the house and some of its structural quirks, the camera angles heighten this for ethereal impact whilst simultaneously marrying up to the distortion of a key character's mental health. The story in essence sounds simple, yet there is much bubbling away in Hill House, both on the page and up there on the screen. This is not simply a case of a group of people being haunted by a spectre or otherwise, the mind is a key player here, very much so. Along the way are some truly breath holding scenes; a bending door, pounding in the corridor, a face on the wall (the lighting here genius), Nell's hand holding incident, a rickety spiral staircase that we fear from the off, and the ghostly finale as Hill House reveals its hand and what we thought was a simple and true narrative is actually more clever, more chilling than we first imagined. Suggestion is a very big thing in The Haunting, it's what drives it to greatness, but it also has scenes that really bring the gooseflesh jumping up on your arms. The acting is mostly great, with Tamblyn and Johnson correctly underplaying their roles to let the two girls take centre stage. Both Harris and Bloom are excellent. As Nell, Harris is nervous, introverted and caught up in the atmosphere of the house, it's the pivotal role and Harris instills a heart aching fragility into the character. Bloom as Theodora has mystical qualities, a sexiness and a devilishly playful disposition, things that play off of Harris' egg shell walking quite brilliantly. While the house itself (exterior is Ettington Park Hotel in Stratford-Upon-Avon) is an ominous character all of its own. As Nell first spies the monolithic frontage she muses that it's a monster waiting to swallow her, a small creature, whole; we know exactly how she feels. Still the template haunted house movie, accept no substitutes and ignore stupid claims of homophobia, this is intelligent, scary and crafted with great skill. 10/10

**A simple film with a basic script, but which scares us in such a way that it still has an influence on horror productions today.** Movies about haunted houses? Whoever saw one of them, saw them all… right? I like to think not. And this film is probably the grandfather of a good number of them! Currently forgotten due to the passage of time, the film had a much weaker remake in 1999, and I believe that it is itself a rewrite of “House on Haunted Hill”, released three years earlier, in 1959, and which also has already deserved a new production in recent years. The impact of this film on the industry and horror genre was notable and continues to have some echoes. The story begins by introducing us to Hill House, a fateful mansion shrouded in a cloak of mystery and a past of death. Unlike the modern remake, this film never explores the origins of that evil, it simply accepts it and places the characters inside the house, under the pretext of a paranormal investigation clumsily led by a parapsychologist obsessed with proving the veracity of haunting phenomena and the afterlife. As a story told, the film is frankly poor and leaves us with more questions than answers. We are presented with a psychological experiment conducted without criteria and which, if it had been true, would have shocked the scientific community and led to a variety of legal consequences. Do I need to say that the study would have to stop at the first sign of danger to the mental health of one of the participants? Issues that seem logical, such as the fact that the subjects volunteer in writing, after fully knowing what will be done and the risks, are put aside, as are the hostile attitudes of the caretakers, who are not satisfied with the additional work, or the passivity of Eleanor's family, which only appears to show how uprooted the character would feel. The cast is not very well known but makes a commendable effort. Lois Maxwell is perhaps the most easily known name, but she appears for a very short time and doesn't add much with her participation. She gives life, moreover, to the most apparently sane person in the midst of that madness. And I'm not saying that I don't believe in the supernatural: in fact I do, but I'm more afraid of the living than the dead and I don't accept any nonsense. It's Julie Harris who dominates the screen with an inspired and crazy interpretation of someone living on the brink of a mental breakdown. She is friendly, and we agonize with her scares and fear. Claire Bloom also does an interesting, more restrained and sarcastic job. If the audience is expecting fluttering sheets or skeletons animated by nylon strings, it's best to forget: the film does not use carnival tricks, preferring to intelligently use sound, image, shadows and camera angles to create an atmosphere of tension and threat. The result is frankly positive: when we don't see what scares us, we don't know what to expect, and that intimidates us. Knocks on wood, heavy footsteps, punches against doors, muffled laughter, the range of sound effects is rich and was used in a creative and very credible way. The filming location, a huge English neo-Gothic mansion, is wonderful and was put to great use. All interior settings are exquisitely crafted and look authentic. The house itself is a dense, rich and mysterious character, a villain worthy of an anthology.

The wealthy "Crain" builds a gothic mansion in a remote part of New England where he plans to house his new wife and daughter. Mysteriously, she doesn't survive long enough to ever move in and as we skip forward almost a century, we find the house bleak and run-down and now inherited by a distant relative of the daughter. It's this house that "Dr. Markway" (Richard Johnson) is determined to investigate. He has convinced the new owner "Mrs Sannerson" (Fay Compton) to allow him and his team to try to prove or disprove for once and for all whether there are such things as ghosts! This house will be the ideal venue for his work and assisted by her rather feckless nephew "Luke" (Russ Tamblyn) as well as the spiritual medium "Theodora" (Clare Bloom) and the young "Nell" (Julie Harris) who seems nervously plugged-in to the house and it's secrets. As night falls, and for the next few days we discover that there are indeed some horrific tales surrounding this edifice involving abuse both physical and psychological amongst it's occupants. Needless to say, these shenanigans profoundly affect the young "Nell" and as she struggles, those fears seem to become contagious as pretty soon everyone is equally spooked by numerous terrifyingly inexplicable activities going on in this house. The question is, though, is this really activity from another dimension or might cold and calculating minds be trying a bit of manipulation. This is a genuinely quite scary adaptation of the book that uses some dimly lit and rather brutal photography, a fair degree of skilfully produced audio and two strong performances from Bloom and Harris to help create an escalating sense of the menacing as panic sets in and rational thinking jumps out of the window. This isn't an horror film that relies on ketchup and jellied eyes, it's a good deal more sophisticated and unlike many of it's contemporaries, it really does cultivate a sense of jeopardy until very near a conclusion that I certainly didn't really anticipate until pretty near the end. On a dark night winter's night with the wind blowing outside, this is a great watch - perhaps not for the anxious.