If the Gothic is the genre also known as "Girl Meets House," then Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) is even more of a Gothic than it is a ghost story. I am still sorting how I feel about the differences between Nelson Gidding's screenplay and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959), but one thing the film does indisputably right is to close the action in on the house until it's easy for even the audience to forget there's a world beyond the padlocked iron gates of Hill House and the tricks it plays with time and architecture, a house that the opening narration tells us was "born bad." We open with its silhouette blocking out most of the mackerel sky, a neo-Gothic folly with nothing quaint or olde-worlde about its turrets and spires; it cranes over the camera like an Expressionist set or some arcane instrument of medieval torture, a cathedral maybe. The end titles will come up over the same sky-snuffing angle, the same monologue with one crucial difference. The intervening hours pass almost entirely within the rococo corridors and curiously disconnected galleries of Hill House, the farthest mise-en-scène imaginable from the kind of spook-house shabbiness, cobwebs and dust and cracks at all the windows, that would suit this house's haunt-accumulating reputation. Instead we get clouded mirrors that confuse the eye, baroque statues that crowd the rooms, paneling carved to the point of pareidolia and a suffocating profusion of rugs and curtains and paintings and knick-knacks all swept and polished and faithfully maintained by the scornful caretaker and his slyly foreboding wife as if there were parties every night instead of the silent inhabitance of—we never find out, exactly. It's worse that we don't. Ghosts, even ghosts as unquiet as the cruel, controlling man who built the house and the wives and child and companion who died on its grounds because he did, would be a more pleasant answer than the never-human idea of the house itself, a malign genius, "diseased, sick, crazy . . . deranged." The uncertainty becomes its own horror, the terrible, infinite potential of that which you can't put a name to. The sound that prowls the corridors. The thing they thought was a dog. "God, God—whose hand was I holding?"
The girl is Julie Harris' Eleanor Lance, a fragile, furious wallflower whose destructive family past eerily echoes the tragedies of Hill House. She has spent the last eleven years taking care of her bedridden, thankless mother, the last two months sleeping on the couch of her married sister whose conversation is as cool and deft and cruel as her needlepoint; she leaps at an open-ended, recklessly dangerous parapsychological experiment with the painful keenness of her "first vacation in years." She refers to herself as homeless, berates herself constantly for her reactions. When she was ten years old, a rain of stones fell on her house for three days. The film is higher-keyed than I remember the novel; it plays more explicitly with Eleanor's mental state, starting her nerves at piano wire and twisting them tighter not only with every supernatural occurrence, but with every human interaction that makes her feel clumsy, unwanted, wrong. She is daunted and attracted by Claire Bloom's Theo, the dark-haired, modish psychic with a barbed sense of humor and an undisguised interest in Eleanor; attracted and confused by Richard Johnson's Dr. John Markway, who doesn't seem able to make up his mind whether he wants to play the paternal scientist or the philandering husband. I'm not sure she feels much for Russ Tamblyn's Luke Sanderson personally beyond impatience with his skeptical, irresponsible wisecracking—he's the heir to Hill House, as privileged as Eleanor is dispossessed—but he's human, part of this strange little family group coalescing like the portrait statues in the conservatory, and she wants him to like her, too. She wants to be liked. She wants to be wanted, which is different from being made use of. She wants to belong. Driving out to the remote, patrician corner of New England where Hugh Crain built his house "ninety-odd—very odd—years ago," she gazes hungrily at every gate and stoop and picket fence she passes: "I might just stop anywhere and never leave again." From a house that did nothing but frighten and reject her, Eleanor would have been safe. Against a house that increasingly seems to seek her out, to seduce as well as scare her, she has no defenses.
I saw this movie last night at the Somerville Theatre, on 35 mm as its widescreen, wide-angle, Dutch-angled black-and-white cinematography deserved, and I was glad to; I also know it did not affect me as Jackson's original novel did. Part of the difference is personal: there's more space between words to scare me than between images in a film. I have never been haunted by anything I saw on a screen as I have been by lines of prose. It's one of the reasons I watch horror movies for other purposes than being kept up at night. But the rest, I think, is the adaptation, which introduces ambiguities of its own and then trades them for resolution elsewhere. The Haunting of Hill House doesn't end so much as it falls apart on a final act as bleak and inevitable and unnerving as any of the manifestations of the house itself; it would be comforting to interpret it as supernatural, but the reader can't be sure it wasn't a dreadful, ordinary tragedy after all. The house isn't telling and neither is Jackson's prose. By contrast, the ending of The Haunting is unambiguously supernatural and therefore less horrifying. By its own awful lights, it might even be happy. "Journeys end in lovers meeting." Eleanor gets what she wants. So does the house. Most importantly, the audience knows what happened—perhaps not the exact mechanism, ghosts or the house or Eleanor's long-dormant poltergeist, the clashing personalities of Markway's team and/or some toxic interaction of all of the above, but the general lineaments, sealed with the same dreaming voiceover with which we have been intermittently privileged to eavesdrop on Eleanor's thoughts. Fortunately, if the ending is definite, the haunting itself is anything but. The most effective moments in The Haunting, as Wise must have learned from his early work directing for Val Lewton, are the ones where the audience's imagination is given just enough rope to hang itself, like a guilt-stricken woman from a library tower who is never seen directly—a bare foot, a camera jolt, a plunging point of view from which Eleanor cowers and shields herself as if that body is still falling, decades and decades later, out of an empty sky. The noise that drives Eleanor and a freezing cold Theo into one another's arms booms like a vast heartbeat, unrelenting as machinery; it cannot be the tread of anything that was even once alive and yet it moves past their door, bone-jarring loud. It is impossible to imagine what makes it. Perhaps there is nothing but the sound itself. Wouldn't that be worse, to throw the door open and see a bare hallway and still hear that maddening, monstrous noise going on? The doorknob twists and rattles and in a moment Luke and Dr. Markway enter, having heard nothing at all, neither dark satanic mills nor two women screaming. Statues don't move in Hill House; the light changes across them when you look away, as though the time of day were altering around you. There are cold spots. There are voices. A hand in the dark, like the shortest ghost story in the world. A door breathes. It is a simple, practical effect and it is horrible. As Eleanor walks away from her companions, behind her the lights go out.
It is a little strange to have seen this film after John Hough's The Legend of Hell House (1973) and William Castle's House on Haunted Hill (1959), both of which are sexier and splashier than Jackson, also in the second case shlockier; The Haunting's comparative monochrome restraint puts it more in line with other high-strung, ambiguous Gothics like Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961). That film got its horror from daylight apparitions and the inexorable unraveling of Deborah Kerr's Miss Giddens; it makes expert use of sound in service of the uncanny and as a ghost story I prefer it. As a story of a haunted house, which is not the same thing, I may have to concede that The Haunting has the edge, even if I'm still not sure how I'd rate it against its book. It made me think more of Psycho (1960) than of Robert Aickman. Your call which way that's a recommendation. Lastly, I am afraid that on local grounds I have to dock the film a few points for its Boston being obviously London, although it is at least a part of London that could be confused for Scollay Square or the North End. The exteriors of Hill House were played by Ettington Park in Warwickshire, itself unsurprisingly reputed to be haunted. I didn't realize until after I'd gotten out of the theater that Wise and his cinematographer Davis Boulton used infrared film for the establishing shots: they look like spirit photography. And here we are staring up at that sky-swallowing silhouette again. This journey's end brought to you by my belonging backers at Patreon.
The girl is Julie Harris' Eleanor Lance, a fragile, furious wallflower whose destructive family past eerily echoes the tragedies of Hill House. She has spent the last eleven years taking care of her bedridden, thankless mother, the last two months sleeping on the couch of her married sister whose conversation is as cool and deft and cruel as her needlepoint; she leaps at an open-ended, recklessly dangerous parapsychological experiment with the painful keenness of her "first vacation in years." She refers to herself as homeless, berates herself constantly for her reactions. When she was ten years old, a rain of stones fell on her house for three days. The film is higher-keyed than I remember the novel; it plays more explicitly with Eleanor's mental state, starting her nerves at piano wire and twisting them tighter not only with every supernatural occurrence, but with every human interaction that makes her feel clumsy, unwanted, wrong. She is daunted and attracted by Claire Bloom's Theo, the dark-haired, modish psychic with a barbed sense of humor and an undisguised interest in Eleanor; attracted and confused by Richard Johnson's Dr. John Markway, who doesn't seem able to make up his mind whether he wants to play the paternal scientist or the philandering husband. I'm not sure she feels much for Russ Tamblyn's Luke Sanderson personally beyond impatience with his skeptical, irresponsible wisecracking—he's the heir to Hill House, as privileged as Eleanor is dispossessed—but he's human, part of this strange little family group coalescing like the portrait statues in the conservatory, and she wants him to like her, too. She wants to be liked. She wants to be wanted, which is different from being made use of. She wants to belong. Driving out to the remote, patrician corner of New England where Hugh Crain built his house "ninety-odd—very odd—years ago," she gazes hungrily at every gate and stoop and picket fence she passes: "I might just stop anywhere and never leave again." From a house that did nothing but frighten and reject her, Eleanor would have been safe. Against a house that increasingly seems to seek her out, to seduce as well as scare her, she has no defenses.
I saw this movie last night at the Somerville Theatre, on 35 mm as its widescreen, wide-angle, Dutch-angled black-and-white cinematography deserved, and I was glad to; I also know it did not affect me as Jackson's original novel did. Part of the difference is personal: there's more space between words to scare me than between images in a film. I have never been haunted by anything I saw on a screen as I have been by lines of prose. It's one of the reasons I watch horror movies for other purposes than being kept up at night. But the rest, I think, is the adaptation, which introduces ambiguities of its own and then trades them for resolution elsewhere. The Haunting of Hill House doesn't end so much as it falls apart on a final act as bleak and inevitable and unnerving as any of the manifestations of the house itself; it would be comforting to interpret it as supernatural, but the reader can't be sure it wasn't a dreadful, ordinary tragedy after all. The house isn't telling and neither is Jackson's prose. By contrast, the ending of The Haunting is unambiguously supernatural and therefore less horrifying. By its own awful lights, it might even be happy. "Journeys end in lovers meeting." Eleanor gets what she wants. So does the house. Most importantly, the audience knows what happened—perhaps not the exact mechanism, ghosts or the house or Eleanor's long-dormant poltergeist, the clashing personalities of Markway's team and/or some toxic interaction of all of the above, but the general lineaments, sealed with the same dreaming voiceover with which we have been intermittently privileged to eavesdrop on Eleanor's thoughts. Fortunately, if the ending is definite, the haunting itself is anything but. The most effective moments in The Haunting, as Wise must have learned from his early work directing for Val Lewton, are the ones where the audience's imagination is given just enough rope to hang itself, like a guilt-stricken woman from a library tower who is never seen directly—a bare foot, a camera jolt, a plunging point of view from which Eleanor cowers and shields herself as if that body is still falling, decades and decades later, out of an empty sky. The noise that drives Eleanor and a freezing cold Theo into one another's arms booms like a vast heartbeat, unrelenting as machinery; it cannot be the tread of anything that was even once alive and yet it moves past their door, bone-jarring loud. It is impossible to imagine what makes it. Perhaps there is nothing but the sound itself. Wouldn't that be worse, to throw the door open and see a bare hallway and still hear that maddening, monstrous noise going on? The doorknob twists and rattles and in a moment Luke and Dr. Markway enter, having heard nothing at all, neither dark satanic mills nor two women screaming. Statues don't move in Hill House; the light changes across them when you look away, as though the time of day were altering around you. There are cold spots. There are voices. A hand in the dark, like the shortest ghost story in the world. A door breathes. It is a simple, practical effect and it is horrible. As Eleanor walks away from her companions, behind her the lights go out.
It is a little strange to have seen this film after John Hough's The Legend of Hell House (1973) and William Castle's House on Haunted Hill (1959), both of which are sexier and splashier than Jackson, also in the second case shlockier; The Haunting's comparative monochrome restraint puts it more in line with other high-strung, ambiguous Gothics like Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961). That film got its horror from daylight apparitions and the inexorable unraveling of Deborah Kerr's Miss Giddens; it makes expert use of sound in service of the uncanny and as a ghost story I prefer it. As a story of a haunted house, which is not the same thing, I may have to concede that The Haunting has the edge, even if I'm still not sure how I'd rate it against its book. It made me think more of Psycho (1960) than of Robert Aickman. Your call which way that's a recommendation. Lastly, I am afraid that on local grounds I have to dock the film a few points for its Boston being obviously London, although it is at least a part of London that could be confused for Scollay Square or the North End. The exteriors of Hill House were played by Ettington Park in Warwickshire, itself unsurprisingly reputed to be haunted. I didn't realize until after I'd gotten out of the theater that Wise and his cinematographer Davis Boulton used infrared film for the establishing shots: they look like spirit photography. And here we are staring up at that sky-swallowing silhouette again. This journey's end brought to you by my belonging backers at Patreon.
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