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And we who walk here, walk alone
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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Hah -- I was just talking to my students about this today.
I remember liking both the book and the film, and particularly the queerness of Jackson's novel.
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Excellent! (What's the class?)
I remember liking both the book and the film, and particularly the queerness of Jackson's novel.
That is something I definitely want to re-read with an eye to.
I liked the film and I hope I have not given the impression that I didn't—I just didn't love it, which I didn't expect I would, but is always a nice thing to be surprised by.
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Indigenous literatures, in which we are reading Monkey Beach -- the novel gets called "Northern Gothic" sometimes, though it seems to be a genre of one, and there are good reasons to think it it something other than that.
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Thank you. I appreciate the reality check!
Indigenous literatures, in which we are reading Monkey Beach -- the novel gets called "Northern Gothic" sometimes, though it seems to be a genre of one, and there are good reasons to think it it something other than that.
I have not read that novel, but the genre-of-one-ness makes me interested.
I saw a movie once that I thought might be a Northern Gothic. It definitely wasn't a noir.
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Confused with, don't you mean?
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To this day, if you Google "New England Gothic," you're likely to find architecture at the top of the list rather than, say, my book.
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Taxonomy does not always matter to me, but it does when it affects how I evaluate a movie; there's no point in running something down for being insufficiently supernatural when it's aiming for soft-spoken psychological horror.
I'm glad you enjoyed the review!
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You get that sense if you read the recent collection Let Me Tell You, which mixes her domestic non-fiction with her domestic and non-domestic fiction in ways which show how intermingled they all are. I gave it to my mother when it came out; I read her copies of Jackson's short fiction first.
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The scene with Mrs. Dudley may be my favorite in the film. There's something uncanny about her glee as she tells Eleanor no one will be able to hear them if they need help.
I'm a big fan of both the book and the film, but I have a hard time comparing them, as I saw the film first and have seen it several times, but only read the book once. (I should really read it again.) I do love films in which, as you say, "the audience's imagination is given just enough rope to hang itself," and I would value The Haunting for that even if it had nothing else to recommend it.
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Her repeating the ominous speech word-for-word with Theo is professional-caliber trolling.
as I saw the film first and have seen it several times, but only read the book once. (I should really read it again.)
It's not my favorite Jackson novel, because that's We Have Always Lived in the Castle—which was also my introduction to her writing beyond "After You, My Dear Alphonse" and "The Lottery" and "The Daemon Lover"—but I loved its language and its ambiguities and its off-kilter sense of humor, which is not really reflected in the film except maybe in Luke. (Russ Tamblyn is great in this movie. Luke is the kind of cocky, disbelieving character where if he were just a little more obnoxious, you would root for something really awful to happen to him, but here you don't. Plus he can do self-deprecating understatement while visibly scared stiff, always a respectable talent: "Doc? I'll let you have the house cheap.") I need to get my copy out of a box now.
I do love films in which, as you say, "the audience's imagination is given just enough rope to hang itself," and I would value The Haunting for that even if it had nothing else to recommend it.
Agreed. I was saying to
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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
//ded from jealous
Ooh I like the comparison with Psycho -- the cramped setting, the black and white kind of echoing a paucity of emotional life for the trapped people, the mother figure both real and in the head, the horror under the mundane....and the endings of both films kind of inevitably go splat. Not badly, but they just can't finish off the buildup. Same thing happens with The Innocents and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte -- film is so 'realistic' a medium (even tho it's much closer to dreams) that it supposedly can't end in that liminality that the book Hill House does, which is where Jackson lived -- is it real, is it a dream, a ghost, a demon, 'just' a crazy person? The point is you can't know, not in her world, which is the real horror. Was the house poisoning Eleanor, was Eleanor possessing the house? the point is, when the others try to separate them, that's when disaster strikes.
If you ever do a Bad Movie Night type thing, the adaptation from 1999 with Lili Taylor AND Catherine Zeta-Jones (Theo!) AND Liam Neeson is still AMAZINGLY bad. Like MST3K-level bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunting_(1999_film)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wiv2zofXsV0
Stephen King was supposed to script it at one point but did the equally AWFUL Rose Red, an HH ripoff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vZlrlTbudw
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There's also an Alias Grace (Atwood psychological thriller) miniseries, which is going to be on Netflix. And an Always Lived in the Castle movie, altho it looks....uh.
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I saw that. I am reluctant to call any book unadaptable, because the good adaptations always surprise you, but that's one that's so dependent on its narrative voice, I'd feel much more confident if it were a play.
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And that's something I didn't know was happening! I have just started hearing good things about Flanagan with Gerald's Game. I am not sure how I feel about the idea of a miniseries; I think one of the points in The Haunting's favor is the compression necessitated by a movie, which tightened the timeline into a three-day fever dream without paring the heart out.
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That's a lovely compliment and please don't give yourself brain freeze!
Ooh I like the comparison with Psycho -- the cramped setting, the black and white kind of echoing a paucity of emotional life for the trapped people, the mother figure both real and in the head, the horror under the mundane....and the endings of both films kind of inevitably go splat.
I really think they would make a great double feature. I find the ending of Psycho to splat harder, but that's partly because (a) that's not how psychology works (b) that's not how psychiatry works (c) I loved the rest of it so much until then.
The ending of The Innocents works for me; I felt it preserved the liminality, the lacunae. I have never seen Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte and actually know very little about it, beyond it being the follow-up to Baby Jane. (Which I have not seen either, but which my family has quoted for years—"But you are, Blanche! You are!")
If you ever do a Bad Movie Night type thing, the adaptation from 1999 with Lili Taylor AND Catherine Zeta-Jones (Theo!) AND Liam Neeson is still AMAZINGLY bad. Like MST3K-level bad.
You know, I have of my own free will sat down and watched Fiend Without a Face (1958) and The Deadly Mantis (1957) and several other movies that weren't any good, but I'm not sure an MST3K-grade remake of The Haunting is something I want to do to myself.
Stephen King was supposed to script it at one point but did the equally AWFUL Rose Red, an HH ripoff
Well, that's something I didn't know had happened.
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*By contrast, the ending of The Haunting is unambiguously supernatural and therefore less horrifying. By its own awful lights, it might even be happy.*
Yes. That. Due a rewatch.
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Thank you.
The breathing door still scares the hell out of me every time, as does the unmoored staircase.
I love the staircase. It's one of the pieces of the film that shouldn't work, in this case because it's obvious and visible and not ambiguous at all, except how the hell does it sway and slither so reelingly that Luke has to leap off it before it comes down around his ears like a rain of fire irons and yet hold steady as stone as soon as Eleanor is climbing? (Luke is one of the other pieces of the film that shouldn't work and does, so they play nicely together.) It's a practical effect, too, which means that it's a little unpredictable.
Yes. That. Due a rewatch.
I hope you can find it for the season. Will you write about it?
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I will if I can find it in time!
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some arcane instrument of medieval torture, a cathedral maybe. This has got me thinking of cathedrals as potential instruments of torture.
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It's doing its best!
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I'd be fooled, or at least, if I thought it wasn't Boston, I wouldn't suspect London--I'd probably think Canada, since so many movies get shot in cities there b/c it's cheaper.
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It's true that London is not the usual substitute! Wise wound up shooting the film in the UK for reasons I am not entirely clear on—finances, basically, but I don't know the details [edit: Tax breaks!]—and so I understand London being the closest thing to Boston for miles, but I am still really amused. It's interesting that the production didn't just relocate the plot from New England to England, as The Legend of Hell House would later do.