Amazon.com Essentials:
Certain to remain one of the greatest
haunted-house movies ever made, Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) is
antithetical to all the gory horror films of subsequent decades,
because its considerable frights remain implicitly rooted in the
viewer's sensitivity to abject fear. A classic spook-fest based on
Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill
House (which also inspired the 1999 remake directed by Jan de
Bont), the film begins with a prologue that concisely establishes the
dark history of Hill House, a massive New England mansion (actually
filmed in England) that will play host to four daring guests
determined to investigate--and hopefully debunk--the legacy of death
and ghostly possession that has given the mansion its terrifying
reputation.
Consumed by guilt and grief over her mother's recent death and driven
to adventure by her belief in the supernatural, Eleanor Vance (Julie
Harris) is the most unstable--and therefore the most
vulnerable--visitor to Hill House. She's invited there by
anthropologist Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), along with the bohemian
lesbian Theodora (Claire Bloom), who has acute extra-sensory
abilities, and glib playboy Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn, from Wise's
West Side Story), who will gladly inherit Hill House if it
proves to be hospitable. Of course, the shadowy mansion is anything
but welcoming to its unwanted intruders. Strange noises, from muffled
wails to deafening pounding, set the stage for even scarier
occurrences, including a door that appears to breathe (with a
slowly turning doorknob that's almost unbearably suspenseful),
unexplained writing on walls, and a delicate spiral staircase that
seems to have a life of its own.
The genius of The Haunting lies in the restraint of Wise and
screenwriter Nelson Gidding, who elicit almost all of the film's mounting
terror from the psychology of its characters--particularly Eleanor, whose
grip on sanity grows increasingly tenuous. The presence of lurking spirits
relies heavily on the power of suggestion (likewise the cautious handling
of Theodora's attraction to Eleanor) and the film's use of sound is more
terrifying than anything Wise could have shown with his camera. Like Jack
Clayton's 1961 chiller, The Innocents, The Haunting knows the
value of planting the seeds of terror in the mind, as opposed to letting
them blossom graphically on the screen. What you don't see is infinitely
more frightening than what you do, and with nary a severed head or bloody
corpse in sight, The Haunting is guaranteed to chill you to the
bone. --Jeff Shannon
