The Haunting (1963)
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under
conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some,
to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding
darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty
more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and
doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of
Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
Shirley
Jackson, “The Haunting of Hill House” (novel, first published in 1959)
Pauline Keal, in a long essay that addressed this and
at least a dozen other films of the early ‘60s, wrote, “In our childhood
imaginings, the unknowable things that have happened in old Houses, and the
whispers that someone may have died in them, make them mysterious, ‘dirty’;
only the new House that has known no life or death is safe and clean.”
“The
Haunting” is often put forward as
the ultimate example of why old-fashioned Horror films are superior to more
recent ones; this theme was only reinforced by the unbearable, heretical,
remake of 1999 (there was also a TV miniseries in 2018 which was praised, but I
never saw it). But there is a falsehood in this, because there was never a time
that Horror films like this were common. Producer Val Lewton made a brilliant
handful of them in the 1940s for RKO, but at the time Horror cinema was defined
by the far blunter Universal Monsters which, though declining in quality by
then, were still far more popular. True, this particular film,
suggestion-driven like Val Lewton’s, came from an era when Horror in general
was getting blunter and more explicit. Movies like “The Haunting” aren’t
artifacts of a lost golden age, but in any era films like this had to “walk
alone.” That was one of the arguments in Kael’s above-mentioned essay, which I
will return to later.
When “The Haunting” was
initially released it received, at best, mixed reviews and modest box-office
returns. But it also became a Cult Classic almost instantaneously because,
though it was out-of-step with most Horror films of the same year (most
American, English, and Italian horror movies were in an unapologetically lurid,
Monster-and-Costume-Drama, mode) it found a loyal audience faster than most
other “rediscovered” classics. Critic Dora Jane Hamblin tells of attending the
film with four female friends who expected a ho-hum film, they took out make-up
during the film's first few minutes with the intention of fixing their faces,
but as the film captivated them the women were jumping out of their seats and
losing their items.
It was Directed by the
great Robert Wise who made so many recognized classics in so many different
genres (his films had been collectively nominated for 67 Academy Awards and won 19 of
these Oscars, he was personally nominated for seven of those, winning four
Oscars, and all four wins were for musicals). It is often forgotten he cut his teeth in Horror, three
of Wise’s first four directorial outings were in the Horror Genre, and two of
those were under Producer Val Lewton’s guidance. (Val Lewton and Wise also made
that one early non-Horror film, the criminally under-rated “Mademoiselle
Fifi” (1941).)
Ultimately,
Val Lewton would influence Film Noir more than Horror, and the best Directors
he mentored would spend more of the rest of their careers in Crime than the Supernatural.
He ideas affected all of them powerfully, and those ideas are all on display in
this film. As Edmund G. Bansak wrote:
“Lewton trademarks—the
reverence for the underdog, the focus upon humanist concerns, the alliance
between danger and darkness, the depiction of fate as an unstoppable force,
and, of course, the preoccupation with things unseen permeate the postwar films
of all three directors. In addition, other Lewton film characteristics, those
of content (negative forces, doomed characters, ambiguity, paranoia, deception,
predestination, nihilism, death) and of form (expressionistic interplay of
light and dark, meticulous multilayered soundtracks, literate scripts, dynamic
compositions, understated performances), seemed to have filtered into the
respective works of Tourneur, Robson, and Wise.”
Though Val Lewton’s
visual esthetic has been dubbed “painting with shadows,” and the greatest power
of his films was their focus on Psychological Horror, not any Supernatural
element (which most of his films didn’t even have). Regarding “The Haunting,” Wise
told an interviewer, “I’ve
had any number of people over the years say to me, ‘You know, Mr. Wise, you
made the scariest picture I’ve ever seen and you never showed anything. How’d
you do it?’ And it goes back to Val Lewton, by the powers of suggestion.”
Wise clearly learned a
lot about the power of shadows, choosing to make a big-ish budget, B&W film
in an era when even low-budget Horror films like those of Roger Corman and
Hammer Studios were exploding with vivid technicolor, but it should be noted
that shadows do not play that huge a role here, the scariest scenes unfold in
well-lit rooms. Even in his first film with Val Lewton, “Curse of the Cat
People” (1944, easily the most eccentric of Val Lewton’s nine Horror movies), it
was the Val Lewton that employed shadows the least. What “Curse of the …” did
have was exceptionally crisp B&W photography, and Wise’s choice to go B&W
here was to mimic that visual style.
Wise’s second greatest
influence visible here was Orson Welles and, as in the case of Val Lewton, Wise
and Welles worked together, though less auspiciously -- One of the most
notorious examples of studio abuse in Hollywood history was when forty minutes were
cut from and then the ending reshot on “The Magnificent Ambersons” (1942) while
Director Welles was in Brazil working on another project. Wise was ordered to
do edits and directed some of the reshoots. But Wise was also Welles’ student,
and Welles’ camera work and sound editing are echoed in “The Haunting,” and the
all-important look of this film’s haunted mansion must have been influenced by Xanadu
in Welles’ great masterpiece, “Citizen Kane” (1941).
The film is based of Shirley Jackson’s novel, “The Haunting of
Hill House.” Wise recalls that he was on the set of “West Side Story” (1961)
reading the book, “I
was reading one of the very scary passages—hackles were going up and down my
neck—when Nelson Gidding [this film’s eventual screenwriter] ... burst through
the door to ask me a question. I literally jumped about three feet out of my
chair. I said, ‘If it can do that to me sitting and reading, it ought to be
something I want to make a picture out of.’”
Jackson’s novel may have been inspired by the real-world
Winchester Mystery House in
San Jose, California, and
the novel was set in then-contemporary USA, “the most isolated part of New England.” It unfolded mostly
inside a building built in the late-19th c, a historical sound
assumption because in
the USA, the grandly excessive mansions that best serve as settings for classic
Haunted House stories started appearing in the north east in the wake of the
Civil War but stopped being built with the coming of the Great Depression.
Meanwhile, in England, with its longer history of older money, there
were many more Houses suitable for these tales, so, though Wise kept the American
setting in the dialogue, he filmed in England (there were also budgetary
reasons for this). The exteriors were of the Ettington Park Hall, an expanding
assemblage of structures that go back to the mid-17th century but
didn’t take on the current, famous, form until 1858 – 62.
Wise and Cinematographer Davis Boulton wanted Ettington Park look more sinister than it
really was and experimented with various lighting effects and camera settings, finally
choosing the unusual idea of using infrared film
for establishing shots of the House. It worked, bringing out the striations of the stone, making the mansion look, as Wise
put it, "more of a monster House." Critic Stuart Heritage adds, “The
Haunting is almost definitely the film with the most unsettling static shot of
masonry in all of cinema history.”
The interior spaces (all these scenes were studio-shot) were
even more elaborate and out-of-place in the Americas than the exterior. Again,
Boulton got creative, not only with odd camera angels but exaggerating the
length of hallways by shooting with a 30mm lens that Panavision initially
refused to give him access to because it was still under development and not
all the distortions had been worked out (to get access, Wise had to sign a
memorandum that he knew the lens was imperfect). Stated Wise, “I want[ed] the House to look
almost alive.” Added critic Pam Keesey, “It is the awareness of this House as a
living, breathing entity that establishes the atmosphere of the rest of the
film.”
The camera was kept in motion with carefully planned-out pans
and tracking shots that moved fluidly though the huge and complex set, another
indication of the influence of Welles and probably the most active camera work
of Wise’s career. This almost certainly inspired Stanley Kubrick’s wild Steady-cam
innovations in “The Shining” (1980).
As impressive as all this was, the real credit for creating such
a believable yet
off-kilter space belongs to Production Designer Elliot Scott. He captured what
the dialogue demanded, or as the character Dr. John Markway
(Richard Johnson) states, “All
of the doors are slightly off-center . . . there’s not a right angle in the
place.” While in the novel it
is written, “It had an unbelievably
faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the
walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could
endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest possible length.”
For a Haunted House film, the sets were unusually brightly lit,
notable for the (mostly) absence of shadowy corners; never-the-less, the Rocco
detailing are full of fiendish swirls, gargoyles abound, and often the
architectural details could, and were, confused as one of the ghosts lurking
behind the Cast members. Since the camera angles were low, all the sets had
ceilings (more than a little unusual, a lot more expensive, and another
indication of the Welles’ influence) and just as obsessively detailed. These
details were especially effective in a scene where an unseen something on the
other side of a locked door terrorizes the two female leads in a bedroom, and
the ceiling details, before that benign, start looking like the faces of
Monsters. Hands-down that’s my favorite scene in the movie.
Though clearly the House is the main Character, the film is
rightly praised for its eccentric Human Characters who were also drawn with unusual
depth.
The above-mentioned Dr. John is interested in the Scientific Exploration
of Supernatural Phenomena. It is notable that he wasn’t a Parapsychologist, that
disdained field it is still an Experimental Science, but had his degree in the Soft-Science
of Anthropology. It’s a subtle point, but an important one, John is eminently
qualified for some work, but utterly unqualified for this specific job. Both
the novel and film were from the era of greatest influence of real-world Anthropologist
Dr. Margert Mead, but even at the time it was obvious to many she had
essentially no research methodology and her field work was inadequate evidence to
support her bold conclusions; though it would be decades before she was
properly discredited (not until after her death) even back then there were
plenty enough people who recognized that she was quack who had single-handedly
made Anthropology a non-Science.
The fictional Dr. John wanted to investigate USA’s best-known Haunted
House, and put invitations to prominent Psychics to spend a few weeks there
wandering around the place. Despite what he tells the House’s owners, he seems
to know very little about those he’s reached out to because of his six invites only
two show-up, and indication that his Professional Stature was somewhat
different from his Self-Image.
John narrates the first minutes, and based on that narration ("Scandal! Murder! Insanity!
Suicide! Hill House has everything!") one would be forgiven for believing that they were going to
get a far campier set of thrills than are actually coming (these first minutes put
me in mind of William Castle’s “House on Haunted Hill” (1958)). This narration
not only gives us a vital history of “a House that was born bad” but also
reveals the shallowness of John’s thinking; he would be easy to dismissed as a
huckster except he clearly has fallen for his own con. When Hill House proves
to be actually Haunted, he is hopelessly unprepared.
The two Psychics who actually show up prove to be equal parts
legit and underqualified. The first introduced, and the film’s main character, is
Eleanor "Nell" Lance (Julie Harris),
an emotionally fragile spinster who was plagued by a Poltergeist as a child and
later spent many years caring for her sick mother. As her mother had recently,
finally, died, and Nell finds herself sleeping on her sister’s couch,
guilt-ridden regarding that death and disgusted that she had let her own life
slip away. As John proves to be unreasonably handsome, Nell is unreasonably
vulnerable.
The second Physic is far brusquer in character, Theodora "Theo" (Claire Bloom),
a sardonic sophisticate and (though the film wasn’t allowed to say so
explicitly) a lesbian. She’s in no way a comic relief character, though she got
most of the wittiest lines ("Nothing cozier than an old gargoyle, except
maybe a whipping post or two."). Her wit is generally her expression her
haute superiority over Nell, whom she may, or may not, have Romantic designs
on.
Our
next “Investigator” is Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn) who admits
he actually isn’t one, he’s the young man who is to inherit the House. He’s not
Psychic nor Believer, is less effected by the House than any of the others, and
the last to recognize to how serious the situation has become. He tells more
jokes than Theo, but none have bite, and he flirts with both women, but without
apparent intent.
The
foursome get both bitchier and chummier, the House gets more threatening, Nell falls
hard for John, Theo can tell and resents it, but John is oblivious.
Then
John’s wife, Grace (Lois Maxwell) arrives, deeply concerned that this Ghost-hunt
will ruin her husband’s career, and Nell is not at all happy with that. Grace
is disruptive to the Investigation (which doesn’t seem well thought-out anyway)
and ignores her husband’s directions. The House seems to up the ante in
response to Grace’s presence, and it focuses on Nell; the House seems to know
where resentment exists and plays with unstated and unconscious conflicts.
In Critic Kael’s above-mentioned essay, she seems unable to decide
if she liked the film or not, at turns mocking both the movie and then its
detractors. But her main argument is sound a perceptive, at the time Art-House Cinema
was bleeding into the Popular venues, a trend which I loved and she didn’t. Films
like “The Haunting” emerged from a new aesthetic where the clumsy but
comfortable “trapped-in-the-old-dark-House genre” was transformed into self-consciously
classy mood pieces, heavy on the abstraction and ambiguity. The examples she
cited as feeding into “The Haunting” were “Last Year at Marienbad,” “La Notte”
(both 1961), “The Exterminating Angel” (1962), and almost all of Ingmar Bergman’s
‘60s films. Most had no Fantastic elements but treated all their Characters as
if their corporal lives were becoming progressively more Spectral. She quotes
Bergman, "Most of the people in these three films are dead, completely
dead. They don't know how to love or to feel any emotions. They are lost
because they can't reach anyone outside of themselves." Kael also adds,
“Their vital juices have been sucked away, but they don't have the revealing
marks on the throat. We get the message: alienation drains the soul without
leaving any marks.”
“Last Year at Marienbad” is a particularly important example to
Kael, and I know of no other film that simultaneously sits on so many “Best
Ever” and “Worst Ever” lists. This is Kael’s most telling paragraph:
“And we can't even leave Marienbad behind because, although it
isn't particularly memorable (it isn't even particularly offensive), a kind of
creeping Marienbadism is the new aesthetics of ‘poetic’ cinema. This can only
sound like pedantry to those interested in ‘pure’ art who tend to consider analysis
as an enemy, anyway (though, many of them are in it). The very same people who
say that a movie shouldn't mean anything, that art is beyond meaning, also say
that it must be seen over and over again because it reveals more meaning with
subsequent viewings.”
But is “The Haunting” really so impenetrable? No. It’s quite
sophisticated and suggestion-, instead of action-driven, but it’s still pretty
straight-forward. The House is Haunted, and the House poisons the Souls of
those within it. It goes after the weakest first and most enthusiastically.
Nell was the most Haunted Soul before she walked into the door, so she the
primary target of the Haunting after entering. Stuart Heritage again, “‘The Haunting’ is essentially
the story of Julie Harris's lonely middle-aged woman being slowly devoured by
her groaning, undulating surroundings.”
Wrote Pam Keesey:
“This sense that the House is watching Nell is reinforced by
Wise’s excellent camera work. As she bends to pick up her suitcase, she sees
her own image reflected in the polished wood floor. As she follows Mrs. Dudley [a
servant, played by Rosalie Crutchley] up
the stairs, she is again startled by her own image, this time reflected in an
unexpected mirror on the wall half-way up the stairs. Eleanor’s reference to
being ‘scared of your own shadow’ is apt as it’s Eleanor who lives in constant
fear of her shadow self, the one who may or may not have chosen to let her
mother die only two months earlier.”
Nell provides her own voice-over, inviting us into her thoughts
and this is essentially a secondary narration, “I’m like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, and the
monster feels my tiny movements inside.”
So, this is the story of the Unseen (characters complain of
mysterious cold-spots throughout the House, something that obviously can’t be
filmed, only conveyed in the actors’ reactions and dialogue) and even when
doors close themselves, it happened when the camera is looking elsewhere. But
what is seen is the characters themselves, there’s a notable scene when Nell is
frightened by noises in the hallway and desperately asks Theo to hold her hand.
She then complains that Theo’s grip is too tight, even painful. But it the
morning, it is obvious that Theo had actually spent the night in an adjoining
room. Nell gasps, “Oh my God, whose hand was I
holding?”
Another famous scene is
when all are gathered the dining room as an unseen presence thunders up the
hallway. The footsteps gradually come nearer. Then something unseen begins to
pound on the locked door. The doorway strains under the pummeling, even bending
inwards towards the cast. It is as scary as heck, but we get no glimpse of what
is on the other side of the door, only the faces of those who really don’t want
to find out.
So, “The Haunting” is only subtle in comparison to Roger Corman
and Hammer studios, so the influence of “Last Year…” is real, but overstated.
Yes, the film leaves the cheekily lurid narration behind quickly, but the music,
composed by Humphrey Searle, is never restrained, and the sound track gets
quite loud, making sure your ears know all the things you can’t see (one critic
pointed out that the film is scary even without the pictures).
Its closest cousin is “The Innocents” (1961), both are tales of Ghosts
moving around our world, but both focus on the deterioration going on inside of
the central female character’s head. In “The Haunting” Harris’ performance was
key, and arguably superior to legendary Debora Kerr in the earlier film and the
more difficult performance as well. Both characters’ walk the razor’s edge of
hysterics, but of the two, Nell was the most broken as the film opened. Hysterics
is tough because it always threatens to slip into camp (think of a good Nicolas
Cage movie vs a bad one) but Harris holds back on the hysteria quite a while
even as she lets you know it’s there; Nell is complex and sympathetic Character
but deliberately somewhat annoying the first moment you meet her.
This fine performance came at a cost to the Actress, not unlike her Character. Harris, herself, was emotionally fragile and suffered from a severe
bout of depression during the shoot. At times, she would cry in
her makeup chair prior to the day's shoot and her mental state strained her
relationship with other cast members, notably Bloom who she was apparently
friendly with beforehand. As the shooting progressed, Bloom stopped speaking to
Harris, which weirdly paralleled the trajectory of their on-screen characters. Afterwards,
Bloom told Harris that the lack of interaction had helped her build her own
performance and the two women eventually reconciled.
Wise
apparently observed this emerging, hostile, personal dynamic, and heightened
the sense of Character conflict by having the characters "step on one
another's lines," allowing one Character to begin talking before the other
had finished a sentence. This did not just apply to Harris and Bloom, Wise
utilized over-lapping dialogue here more than any other film I can think of,
and with almost all Cast members doing that Wise was deliberately confusing the
audience’s understanding of several conversations. (This was imbedded in the
film’s technique, which employed a multi-layered
soundtrack—dialogue over music or multiple tracks of dialogue came into play
over and over. It should also be noted that Wise’s first significant job in
cinema was as a Sound-Editor).
The film ends tragically. What is explicit is the fate of the
people involved but the House remains ambiguous, its Mysteries never solved.
Pulling off that balance is not only where this film succeeds where others
failed, but where this film goes places that others don’t even want to journey.
Jackson’s novel, and this film, inspired generations of Horror Authors
and Filmmakers; they seem to view a “Haunting…” pastiche or homage as a Mount
Everest to be climbed as a right-of-passage. Notable pastiches were presented
to us by Novelists Richard Matheson, and Steven King, and Directors and
producers John Hough, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, and Craig R. Baxley.
Much of the later works were actually quite good, but all were far more
explicit, and with the explicitness, shifted at least some of the drama off the
Prey (the living characters) and onto the Predator (the dead).
Richard Matheson published a very fine, Jackson influenced novel, “Hell
House” (1971). He went out of his way to let the reader know he was borrowing
from Jackson, even the title screams it. It was filmed quite effectively as
“The Legend of Hell House” directed by John Hough (1971 and working from
Matheson’s script). Both novel and film borrowed a host of plot points, and
even evoked a similar tone early on, but shifted towards the more explicit the
deeper one got. The single most important difference between these works and
what had inspired it was not the blunt sexuality, increased violence and body
count, but the fact that, in the end, the Mystery of the Haunted House was
actually solved. This novel and film were, in fact, older-fashioned than
Jackson’s novel or Wise’s film, evoking an era when Supernatural fiction was a
sub-Genre of Mystery/Crime and featured a Detective who got the bottom of it
and restored order to the world.
Novelist Stephen King essentially invented the Horror genre, not
in terms of our understanding of literature, but in terms of the way books were
sold. I started reading King’s work around 1978, and back then, big bookstores
didn’t have Horror sections so his work was still shelved with Mystery/Crime,
even though his place there was increasingly inappropriate with each successive
published work. A Horror section in major book stores was a reaction to his
phenomenal success and the number of authors who followed closely on his heels.
King’s first crack at Mount Everest was the novel “The Shining”
published in 1977, and still considered one of his finest works. It was filmed,
with the same title, by Stanley Kubrick in 1980 (mentioned above), and despite
an early, hostile, response, this movie is on many “Best Ever” lists both in-and-outside
the Horror genre. King’s take did explore the interior worlds of the Characters
more than Matheson’s, and even ditched the idea that the Characters were Investigators,
but like Matheson, King solved the Mystery of the House in a way that Jackson
and Wise refused to do. Critics of Kubrick often complain his brutally explicit
film (higher body count than the novel) didn’t solve the Mystery, but I’m of
the camp that says he did.
King has always been uncomfortable with the Kubrick version, and
had it remade in 1997, directed by Mick Garris, and it wasn’t bad, but doesn’t
hold a candle.
King’s second crack at Mount Everest was the screenplay for “Rose
Red,” not merely inspired by Jackson, but intended as a loose remake of the
Wise film. That film was Directed by Craig R. Baxley; Garris and Baxley
probably have adapted more King work than any other Directors but to my mind neither
have done a really good job even once. In this case though, I don’t blame
Baxley, but King, who had complained about the Wise film lacking a Monster,
“Something is scratching at that ornate, paneled door, something horrible...but
it is a door Wise elects never to open…” the decision to “let the door bulge
but...never open it [was] playing to tie rather than to win.”
The best that can be said for “Rose Red” is that it wasn’t quite
as awful as the Steven Spielberg remake.
Spielberg is among the greatest of all living Directors, but in
this case was the Producer of the 1999 version of “The Haunting” (mentioned repeatedly
above). It was blessed with a huge budget, a big-name cast, and directed by Jan
de Bont, a man of substantive gifts, though generally best demonstrated in Action
and Exploitation movies. It was an unmitigated disaster, over-dependent on CGI
special effects, solving the Mystery, losing track of the Characters, and the
greatest heresy of all, had a heavily-sentimentalized, happy, ending. The
fundamental idea behind the production was a travesty, as Spielberg (who
actually began his career in Horror TV and film before earning his
family-friendly reputation) explained in an interview, he felt the need “travel
the road not taken by Wise” and “deliver the goods for modern audiences.” My
take that as (like King) he intending to betray the Masterpiece even before he started
working on this project.
One thing that can be said about the last four films, no matter
how bad, was they all had exceptional Production Design. Only the Kubrick film,
whose Production Designer was Roy Walker) was in the same league as “The
Haunting’s” Elliot Scott, but they were still all gorgeous-looking.
And this probably was “The Haunting’s” greatest gift to cinema. It
is a film with so many virtues, but in cinema, the look is all. Prose is more naturally
an intellectual medium while cinema is visual both first and last; the intellectual
only as a secondary consideration (demonstrated in the novel version of “The
Shining” having deeper Characterization than the film version). “The Haunting”
taught the world what a Haunted House was really supposed to look like, and
that look, more than Jackson’s story, is the Mount Everest that so many have tried
to climb since.
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeAzGxWlEcg
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