Day Fourteen: The Haunting (1963)
This week we’re going to look at a few movies that favor dread over any major grotesquerie, and The Haunting is one of the landmark examples of such a film, a psychological ghost story that holds up very well some four decades after release. The Haunting is Robert Wise’s adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and it stands as one of the legendary director’s most purely pleasurable films. Beautiful, creepy, exciting and memorable.
There are two major reasons the film holds up. Firstly, Wise favors exacting, subtle scares that rely more on the unstable mental terrain of the heroes than the usual F/X charged ghosts. The most we get here is a bit of slight movement, or awful, overbearing sound that suggests a group of giants marching up and down Hill House’s immense halls. Or, much worse, of an ancient heart that’s somehow learned how to beat within the house’s walls.
Secondly, the script, by Nelson Gidding, maintains the novel’s subtext of repressed and misdirected sexuality. Our protagonist, Eleanor (Julie Harris), bears an unmistakable resemblance to one of the House’s past victims: the daughter of its builder who holed herself up in the place for her entire life. Both women are probably untouched, shy, and faintly bitter. Both women were involved in a death that may have been purposeful, and both women are happy to channel all of this rage and loneliness into a malignant building that is more than happy to swallow them alive. Their names even have the same amount of syllables. Don’t laugh, nothing means nothing in a haunted house.
Eleanor is attracted to Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), who’s heading the experiment on Hill House, and it’s interesting to note that her obsession with becoming part of the house doesn’t reach fever pitch until she discovers that the doctor, who’s not entirely discouraging of her awkward advances, is married. At this point her true love no longer has a rival. At this point Eleanor, fragile, possibly mentally ill and emotionally broken from a just recently concluded lifetime of servitude, has no chance.
Further confusing Eleanor is the sexual current she also happens to share with Theo (Claire Bloom), one of the others along for the experiment. Theo is obviously meant to be taken as Eleanor’s opposite: free, confident, brash. But Eleanor is denied this potential pleasure also, because she’s too repressed for a man much less a woman, and also because Theo is as much a threat as an attraction. Theo resents the attention the doctor lavishes on the needy Eleanor, further ensuring that everyone has quite a bit to be stewing over as the house slowly works its mojo.
The Haunting is confident and rousing, and Hill House itself, while maybe a touch obvious, has been masterfully realized. The creepiest thing about Hill House isn’t the angles, or the towers, or the stairwell that looks to have been shipped in from Dr. Caligari, its the sheer clutter of the place: a suffocating, nauseating, inescapable clutter of mad furniture, books, mirrors, and tables, etc. Watching it you want the characters to go outside not so much to avoid the ghoulies as to not trip over a damn ottoman.
