'A house that was born bad' (The Haunting (DVD))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	The Haunting (DVD)
Date:	04/02/08 (125 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A really very scary film

Disadvantages: There's very little wrong with this

A review of the DVD. There was a terrible remake of this film made in 1999, which a lot of people have reviewed in this category, but the image and synopsis suggest it's the old film we should be writing about here (I suspect two categories were merged at some point).

This is a real classic from 1963, a very frightening ghost story adapted from Shirley Jackson's celebrated novel The Haunting of Hill House. It was made by M-G-M in Britain, and directed by Robert Wise - he'd cut his teeth on spooky Val Lewton horrors like The Body Snatcher before progressing to more mainstream work. His next film after The Haunting was The Sound of Music.

A parapsychologist, Dr Markway, decides to investigate a notorious haunted house, taking two psychics (Eleanor and Theodora) with him, along with Luke, a sceptic who stands to inherit the house. It isn't long before they run into trouble. Spooky trouble!

As I said, this is exceptionally scary. It made me jump on at least three separate occasions, and creates a feeling of real, queasy dread that left me feeling a bit weirded out. And yet there's no blood, no monsters, no special effects. The sound effects, the use of light and shadow, the acting, and above all the camerawork do it all, in conjunction with the viewer's imagination (assuming the viewer has one). The music is also very good, ramping up the tension without drowning us in crescendos the way Hammer and their imitators do.

The film is shot beautifully (in black and white), and the mobile camerawork is superb, swooping and sweeping and zooming to great effect. Slow pans up a spooky spiral staircase induced a physical feeling of vertigo in me, and so much is achieved just by having the camera tilt on its axis or judder slightly at opportune moments. This will, of course, wear out the patience of people who prefer their horror a bit more in-your-face, but that's their loss. I defy anyone to sit through the 'scary wallpaper' bit without feeling at least *some* unease. The locations and sets are excellent - a haunted house film obviously needs a strong sense of location, and this house manages to seem ominous even before anything's happened. It looms very well.

The four main cast members are exemplary. Julie Harris is superb as Eleanor, the shy, mousy psychic who finds a new sense of purpose in Hill House. Always on the verge of losing it completely, she does fear very well, although there are darker hints about what she's really up to. Richard Johnson is fine as the enthusiastic Markway - tall, dark and handsome enough to be a credible focus of erotic attention from Eleanor (he was being considered for the part of James Bond at about this time). Russ Tamblyn (later in Twin Peaks, among many other things) is great as Luke, doing everything a token cynic needs to do in these kinds of films. Claire Bloom is fantastic as Theo, the rather nasty lesbian psychic, although she seems a bit too self-assured and fashionable (costumes by Mary Quant!) to get so jealous of Eleanor. There are great sinister servant roles from Rosalie Crutchley and Valentine Dyall, too.

The story itself is very clever - it leaves just enough ambiguity that we can't say with *total* confidence what exactly has happened at the end. It borrows from all the best sources. Character names sort of evoke Poe, and the New England location is straight out of Lovecraft. Spooky wallpaper and female neurosis is found in a great short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and one of the phenomena closely resembles something that (allegedly) happened at Borley Rectory. It's taken a lot of great old horror ingredients and thrown them together in the best possible order. The story was later ripped off shamelessly by Stephen King in his woeful miniseries Rose Red and, with slightly more inventiveness, by the BBC's Ghostwatch.

The DVD has a gallery of old posters etc, and a rather good trailer (in which Richard Johnson addresses the audience directly, in character). There's also a commentary from, well, almost everyone - the director, the scriptwriter, and all four of the main cast contribute. It's not too cluttered, though, as they were clearly all recorded separately (Claire Bloom sounds like she isn't even watching the film as she talks). It's not too bad as these things go, but you're left wishing there was more of some people than of others. The only fault with the DVD is that the sound level is a bit too low.

This has a 12 certificate - no nudity or violence, but very scary. Amazon have it for about £5, a bargain. If mysterious knocking sounds and door handles turning by themselves sound like your kind of thing, you need to see this as soon as possible.

Summary: A good DVD of a great ghost story