The Haunting

THE HAUNTING
(1963)
Dir - Robert Wise
Overall: ALMOST THE BEST

Another Halloween season means another truly remarkable horror film to go into deeper analysis on.  Working from the top down from my own initial 100 Favorite Horror Films list I did in 2012, I went into much detail about why The Shining is the greatest of all horror film's last year and this time it is Robert Wise's seminal The Haunting from 1963.  It is easily the finest black and white haunted house movie ever made and arguable to others besides me, the finest black and white horror film period.

Looking at The Haunting as an early 60s, British horror vehicle no different on a surface level than many others, it is in fact easy to claim it as the pinnacle of the medium.  If you consider that a mere five years later George A. Romero would unintentionally revolutionize the horror movie with Night of the Living Dead, The Haunting appears to be even more of a crowning achievement for its era.  Yet I for one would like to persuade that this is just as extraordinary of a movie now as ever.  There are so many meticulously crafted elements to its success that showcase a care and craftsmanship that any film made at anytime could not only take notes from, but also wholeheartedly admire.

What Night of the Living Dead had in grasping zombie hands, The Haunting had in holding them.

The Haunting is based of course of Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House.  American filmmaker Robert Wise caught wind of the book from a Time magazine review around the time that he was doing post-production on West Side Story.  Wise contacted his previous and continued collaborator Nelson Gidding to work on the script and by the time West Side Story was wrapped up, said script was finished.  This though was after both Wise and Gidding visited Jackson in person to discuss the novel and its intended adaptation and Gidding put together a full, detailed story treatment before spending no less than six months on the finished script.  So already from the film's infancy, there was very much a level of dedication in play to making it work.

Initially, Gidding wanted to interpret the novel as a woman's, (lead protagonist Eleanore Vance), descent into a nervous breakdown, having imagined all of the experiences in the story as she was actually suffering in a mental institution.  Of course taking this angle to a horror plot was nothing new and nothing that would not be done a liberal amount of times later.  Yet after the screenwriter and director's meetings with Jackson, the author confirmed that the story very much was about the supernatural and throwing such an "all in her head" twist on it may not be the most honorable route.  In the end, Jackson's feelings about her own material would indeed appear more reasonable, but one of the most successful things about the finished film is how it still toys with this mental instability angle to a beautiful, captivating degree.

Horror movies set in insane asylums; as tried and true of a motif as any, going all the way back to 1920s Germany.

For nearly the entire film or at least once Eleanore is introduced to us, we are deliberately mislead as to what may or may not be actually going on.  Eleanore, (played by Julie Harris who "conveniently" one could say was suffering from depression in real life at the time), is a full-blown eccentric; a disturbed, lonely woman who spent by her own accord, "her entire adult life" caring for her "invalid mother".  Yet even as a child, there was something very special and very off about her.  In the book, Eleanore's backstory is naturally more fleshed out, but in the film, we are wonderfully given just a verbal snippet of her childhood episode where a sporadic shower of rocks fell on her house for three days with no explanation still.  This scene is staged excellently as Eleanore is clearly upset by Dr. Markway casually bringing it up in an early meeting, both denying and deflecting it in a tantrum-like manner, as she frequently does throughout the film.

What this means is that it definitely was a dark secret that she never wished to talk about and most likely has done everything in her power to deny even happened at all as she desperately continues to fantasize about being a normal person with a normal apartment with two stone lions sitting atop her mantelpiece.  Eleanor's obsessive narration of her own life and extreme defending of her idiosyncrasies says so much about why Hill House "wants her".  In her damaged mine, the house most definitely would favor her over any of the other occupants because something is at last "really, really happening" to her.  On the other angle, if the house really IS alive in a supernatural fashion, of course it would want the most emotionally wounded and viable person it could find to join it and walk amongst its walls.

Dancing with "nobody", she is a quirky one that Nell.

This is a brilliant move for any psychological horror overall; to constantly place the viewer in a seat where they are never crystal clear as to what's fabricated and what's real in the story they are presented with.  What Wise and cinematographer Davis Boulton and set designer Elliot Scott then contribute to this agenda is of the utmost importance as well.

The exteriors to Hill House are Ettington Park, (now a luxury hotel), in Ettington, Warwickshire, a sprawling mansion so creepy and ideal looking that even lead actors Julie Harris and Claire Bloom were hesitant to step foot in it in real life.  Everything else in the film was shot on a set at MGM British Studios that was consciously built in a Rococo style, with ceilings constructed to help make the movie more claustrophobic in nature.  To further emphasis this, the interiors were heavily lit without dark, stereotypical corners and an imperfect, 30 mm lens was used that literally stretched the finished frame in a distorted manner.  Other tricks are applied such as infrared film for establishing shots, unconventional pans and tracking shots, (when Eleanore runs into a mirror that the camera is fixated on and when she nearly falls backwards off a veranda as the camera dives towards her, per example), and sped up and reversed shots such as the ascension to the top of the library's bookcase.  Characters routinely get lost in the movie trying to navigate the enormous mansion's passageways and Wise also filmed actors leaving rooms from one side of the frame only to emerge from the same one, when the opposite technique is usually the standard case.  Shown from the inside, it is difficult to gauge what time of day or night it is and in one of the library scenes, both day and moonlight appear to be shining in at different angles.

Mind the falling camera...and your vertigo.

While the sense that the house is sentient and controlling or manipulated things could not be better expressed, it is nearly miraculous how very, very little The Haunting technically shows us.  We hear sounds, we see a few doorknobs move, and in the film's standout scene, a wooden door bends inward like a piece of foam.  Yet we see no ghosts anywhere.  Statures are continually shown clearly in frame and even lingered upon at particular times, every exterior shot of the house makes it look like the windows are watching us watch them, and the way every room is loudly decorated do everything they can to make us feel anything but at home in the place.  The characters are rarely comfortable and even when they are, they seem to be putting on a face as to not let the house know what they are really thinking.

This brings us to Theodore, one of the small cast of characters yet a hugely important one.  As Eleanore seems delusional and dancing around in her head, Theo is presented to us as a psychic and at various times she seems to be reading and messing with Eleanore's cracked psyche.  She easily preys on her emotions, (sometimes playfully and sometimes not), be it Eleanor'es guilt surrounding her mother's death, her fabricated story of her own apartment which Theo appears to be just humoring her to listen to in the first place, her growing infatuation with Dr. Markway, and even Markway's own increasing concern for Eleanor's well-being which Theo sees as a threat to herself, being an unspoken lesbian character.  All of these feelings are playing off of each other and again, whether the house itself is eating them up to achieve its diabolical goal or Eleanore is making them all happen the way she likely made those rocks fall from the sky on her dysfunctional home as a child, the viewer is left to wonder and be equally on-edge.

That "Seriously?" face you make when the doors randomly turn into rubber.

Speaking of on-edge, The Haunting's sound design is another of its perfect ingredients.  The music was done by English composer Humphrey Searle and the way that it is almost deafening at times is on the long list of ways the film makes us feel distressed.  Eleanore's narrations are virtually always accompanied by a variation of the same piece of somber, nervous violin music as if to say that just as she cannot help speaking to herself in her own voice, the distressing music cannot help to be there with it so we know that this is a constant, uncomfortable strain in her life.  It does far more than just establish that "something scary is going on".

Wise uses the music so consistently that it becomes another living and breathing element to Hill House, making the movie's occasional, completely silent segments that much more frightening.  The music often stops when Eleanore is actually asleep, yet again this is a brilliant move to subliminally tell us that everything could actually be revolving around her active imagination.  Like any good horror movie moment though, deafening silence is far more terrifying than anything else and all of the film's scariest scenes are played to no dramatic music.  This is incredibly important because we truly see what the house and/or Eleanore's supernatural abilities are trying to do; when the noise stops, the evil forces can really hone in and find what they are looking for.  Eleanore frequently says and thinks that the house is trying to locate her and just wants to bring her home, so as Mrs. Dudley humorously says like a broken record, "in the night...in the dark" is when the search really begins and all of the suffocating doom around everyone really attunes itself.  While assuredly creeping us out in the process.

"Creeps us the fuck out" to be more specific.

So again, WISEly, (yuck, yuck), Robert Wise and his whole creative team never let on explicitly what is indeed happening in The Haunting and the film is infinitely more amazing for doing so.  I have lost count long ago how many times I have watched this movie and never once have I viewed it where I do not began to question more things.  For a film over five-decades old that was made near the tail-end of horror's golden age, it is beyond impressive how much it perfected everything the film medium was capable of at the time and still continues to impress.  So many innovations for both better and worse have come from the genre since this movie was unleashed to the public and plenty of exceptional movies in it continue to be made.  Yet The Haunting stands as an absolute peak, doing everything a spooky haunted mansion movie can possible do and more.  I will hold it in this regrade presumably for the rest of my days and during all of the inevitable further viewings I partake of, it will unlock more and more doors and remain the masterpiece it always was.

Now, who wants to plan a fun vacation?