Today’s guest review comes from Pamela K. Kinney, published author of mainly horror, fantasy and science fiction short stories. She also has two nonfiction books about ghost stories in Richmond, Virginia and its surrounding counties, called Haunted Richmond, Virginia and also Haunted Virginia: Legends, Myths and True Tales from Schiffer Books (www.schifferbooks.com).
Review of The Haunting (1963)
“You may not believe in ghosts but you cannot deny terror.
SCREAM…no one will hear you! RUN…and the silent footsteps will follow, for in Hill House the dead are restless!” –blurb for The Haunting.
With films like Paranormal Activity and other modern ghost story movies that have been released in the past few years, all of them with special effects done by computer and more, it’s hard to imagine anyone being frightened by a black and white film that first came out in movie theaters in 1963. But that’s what this movie did back then, and still does—scares the bejesus out of you. Based on the horror novel, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, this book was the only one to scare me during the day time, in a room full of people. The movie is very exact to the book, bringing the fear with it, too.
Director Robert Wise brings to us a black and white film that doesn’t need color to scare us with a good old-fashioned ghost story. He draws on our fears and lets the movie master them well.
There are people picked out by Dr. Markway, all with some psychic abilities currently or in their past. Most of those he contacts bows out when they check up on Hill House and its past, except for two women, Eleanor “Nell” Lance, played by Julie Harris and Theodora “Theo”, played by Claire Bloom. Russ Tamblyn acts out the character, Luke Sanderson, who is not psychic. His mother owns Hill House and he is looking forward to the day when he inherits it and make a lot of money from its sale. A skeptic about the house, his stay there will begin to show him differently. The character of Dr. Markway is played quite ably by Richard Johnson. Dr. John Markway is a man who chose anthropology and parapsychology for his field because he felt it was the closest respectable academic discipline to the study of ghosts or “supernatural manifestations. Discovering Hill House with it’s frightening past proved to be a gold mine for him in his research.
The character Nell is a lonely woman looking for her place in the world after caring for her ailing invalid mother for eleven years. When she was a teenager, her paranormal experience was poltergeist activity. Teenagers are blamed for poltergeists most of the time. With her repressed years with her mother and not long after living with her sister and her sister’s family, watching the film again, this time on the big screen, I suspect a lot of what happens in the house can be attributed to her. Nell is insecure and with a supernatural past. As the film progresses, she becomes increasingly withdrawn from reality, and her fate, though sad, is exactly what she wants. Reviewers in the past have complained about her lost waif becoming annoying and yes, she can be and maybe there’s not much sympathy for her fate when it happens, but still, I think this made her character understandable in why the house possessed her most of all.
Theo is clairvoyant, mysterious and even seductive. Julie Harris, a five-time Tony-award winning actress, ultimately paints a sympathetic picture of a homely woman.
But the central character, the house itself, is the star of this film. It comes alive and begins to play with all of them in terrifying ways. The ghosts are never seen, but yet, things happen. Is it phantoms, the house, or even the mortals locked in the house together? You are drawn subtly into the relationship that grows between it and Nell. Is the house working on her, or is she working on the house with her own growing madness?
And that is what makes The Haunting work. No special effects but you are drawn into the story. Things build and build until you have to scream when something does happen. Don’t open that door! Let whatever is pounding, keep pounding. Until the last moments, like those in Hill House, you can not escape.
Rent the DVD or buy it, pop some popcorn and get comfortable, or if you have the chance like I did to see it on the big screen, do so, and be prepared to be scared.
“An evil old house, the kind some people call haunted, is like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored. Hill House had stood for 90 years and might stand for 90 more. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there… walked alone.” –“The Haunting.”
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