The Haunting

Since Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is considered the best haunted house novel of all time, it follows that the film made of it, The Haunting, from 1963, is considered the best haunted house film (there was a remake, in 1999, which was roundly panned, though). I've seen a lot of ghost movies, and they are almost always bad, because either the ghost isn't real (the Scooby Doo syndrome) or because the makers of the film don't understand where fear comes from. The Haunting is actually somewhat meta in that it discusses where fear comes from: the unknown.

The film is fairly faithful to the book, with one great exception. A studier of the paranormal (Richard Johnson) has rented Hill House, which has a reputation of being haunted. He invites people who have had paranormal experiences to join him, but only two accept. One is Eleanor (Julie Harris), a repressed woman who has spent her entire adult life caring for her invalid mother and is thrilled to be invited anywhere. The other is Theodora (Claire Bloom) the bohemian and possibly lesbian woman who has a knack for clairvoyance. The fourth member of the party is Russ Tamblyn, a representative of the owners, who stands to inherit the property.

The Haunting's director is Robert Wise, who is known for musicals but this is some dandy direction. For one thing, there are no ghosts seen--everything is either heard or, possibly, imagined. Poundings on the walls, cold spots (which are tough to represent visually, but Wise does it), doors closing by themselves, long creepy hallways, all manage to scare the bejeesus out of the viewer. Wise used many tricks, such as wide-angle lenses and dutch angles, to create the feeling of dread. The exterior of the house, which is a placed called Effington Hall, was filmed with infrared to bring out the crevices in the stone.

The screenplay is by Nelson Gidding, who had the idea to turn it into a metaphor. It would actually be Eleanor's breakdown, which is in a hospital, but she creates the haunted house in her mind. Jackson thought that would be a fine idea, but she assured Giddings that the book had real ghosts in it, so they stayed. Insread Harris is slowly consumed by the house--it's the structure itself that is the supernatural entity, hungry for a soul.

There are some minor changes that I scratch my head about: Johnson's character was named Montagu in the book, but is Markway here. Eleanor's last name was changed from Vance to Lance. Tamblyn's character Luke is much more urbane in the book--Tamblyn plays him as a spoiled, unpleasant brat, while Luke is a bon vivant in the book. The biggest change is the character of Johnson's wife, played by Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny, of course). In the book she is a fellow spiritual investigator, but here she is a confirmed skeptic (you wonder how the two ever got married).

The Haunting is a great example of how not showing the threat is better, which was a trick of Val Lewton's (in such movies as Cat People) all the way up to Jaws (when Spielberg, by necessity, didn't show the shark until halfway through the movie).  The result is one of the scariest movies I've ever seen. Fright and gore are two different things, and The Haunting is a fright, with no gore. They don't make them like this any more.