The Haunting (1963/I)

Director:

Robert Wise

Writers:

Shirley Jackson (novel)
Nelson Gidding (screenplay)

Release Date:

18 September 1963 (USA)

Genre:

Horror | Thriller

Tagline:

You may not believe in ghosts but you cannot deny terror

Plot:

Dr. Markway, doing research to prove the existence of ghosts, investigates Hill House, a large, eerie...

Plot Keywords:

House | Mansion | Ghost | Research | Psychic

Awards:

Nominated for Golden Globe.

Cast

Julie Harris	...	Eleanor 'Nell' Lance
Claire Bloom	...	Theodora 'Theo'
Richard Johnson	...	Dr. John Markway
Russ Tamblyn	...	Luke Sanderson
Fay Compton	...	Mrs. Sanderson
Rosalie Crutchley	...	Mrs. Dudley
Lois Maxwell	...	Grace Markway
Valentine Dyall	...	Mr. Dudley
Diane Clare	...	Carrie Fredericks
Ronald Adam	...	Eldridge Harper
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Pamela Buckley	...	First Mrs. Crain (uncredited)
Amy Dalby	...	Abigail Crain, at age 80 (uncredited)
Rosemary Dorken	...	Abigail Crain's Nurse-Companion (uncredited)
Verina Greenlaw	...	Dora Fredericks (uncredited)
Claude Jones	...	Garage Attendant (uncredited)
Freda Knorr	...	Second Mrs. Crain (uncredited)
Howard Lang	...	Hugh Crain (uncredited)
Janet Mansell	...	Abigail Crain, at age 6 (uncredited)
Paul Maxwell	...	Bud Fredericks (uncredited)
Susan Richards	...	Nurse (uncredited)

Directed by
Robert Wise

Writing credits
Shirley Jackson		(novel "The Haunting of Hill House")
Nelson Gidding		(screenplay)

Produced by
Denis Johnson	....	associate producer
Robert Wise	....	producer

Original Music by
Humphrey Searle

Cinematography by
Davis Boulton

Film Editing by
Ernest Walter

Casting by
Irene Howard

Production Design by
Elliot Scott

Set Decoration by
John Jarvis

Costume Design by
Mary Quant

Makeup Department
Joan Johnstone	....	hair stylist
Tom Smith	....	makeup artist

Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
David Tomblin	....	assistant director

Art Department
Ivor Beddoes	....	sketch artist
Mickey Lennon	....	chargehand dressing prop (uncredited)

Sound Department
J.B. Smith	....	dubbing mixer
Allan Sones	....	dubbing editor
Gerry Turner	....	sound recordist
A.W. Watkins	....	recording supervisor
Desmond Briscoe	....	special sound effects (uncredited)

Special Effects by
Tom Howard	....	special effects

Camera and Electrical Department
Alan McCabe	....	camera operator

Costume and Wardrobe Department
Maude Churchill	....	wardrobe supervisor

Music Department
Humphrey Searle	....	conductor

Other crew
Hazel Swift	....	continuity

Production Companies

• Argyle Enterprises

Distributors

• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) (1963) (USA) (theatrical)
• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) (1963) (UK) (theatrical)
• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) (1964) (France) (theatrical)
• American Broadcasting Company (ABC) (1967) (USA) (TV) (original airing) (pan/scan)
• Fox Films (1963) (Finland) (theatrical)
• Warner Home Video (1995) (UK) (VHS) (pan/scan)
• Warner Home Video (2003) (UK) (DVD)
• Warner Home Video (2003) (Netherlands) (DVD)
• Warner Home Video (2003) (USA) (DVD)

Runtime:

112 min

Country:

USA | UK

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Certification:

Australia:G (alternate rating) | Australia:M | Canada:G (Quebec) | Canada:PA (Manitoba) | Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15 | UK:12 (re-rating) | UK:X | USA:Approved | USA:G (1972 re-release) | UK:X (original rating)

Filming Locations:

Alderminster, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, UK

Company:

Argyle Enterprises

Trivia:

Director Robert Wise read a review of Shirley Jackson's novel "The Haunting of Hill House" in Time Magazine and decided to get the rights to the novel. He later met the writer herself to talk about ideas for the film. He asked her if she had thought of other titles for the novel, because the title would not work for the film. She told him that the only other title she had considered was simply "The Haunting", so Wise decided to use it for the film.

Goofs:

Continuity: Look closely at Dr. Markway as he folds his paper at the breakfast table and you can see he is holding a cigarette in his left hand. In the very next shot, Markway is holding the cigarette in his right hand instead.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Dr. John Markway: [voice-over] An evil old house, the kind some people call haunted, is like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored. Hill House had stood for 90 years and might stand for 90 more. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there... walked alone.

Movie Connections:

Spoofed in The Haunted Mansion (2003)

Are we talking frightening now?

THE HAUNTING(1963) is an important horror film because it is one of a tiny handful of films within the tradition that genuinely unsettle the viewer. Are the events at Hill House for real, or are they happening on the inside of Eleanor Lance's head? The author of the novel upon which this movie was based, Shirley Jackson, left us to wonder at the end of her story. A constant theme in Jackson's work was the displacement and the destruction of the hopes of women (Most of her work was written in the 1940s and 1950s).

Jackson, in her own intriguingly artful manner, asks us in The Haunting of Hill House to contemplate the domestic prison that many women like Eleanor Lance found themselves in. Eleanor is a spinster, the slightly dotty older sister compelled by restrictive family relationships to care for an ailing mother. She's been nowhere, she has had no experiences, and she barely has social skills. Like anyone else, she wants love, intimacy, friendship, and she doesn't know how to seek them. Naturally, she operates from a place of low-key fury. Julie Harris conveys this so successfully in the film that she actually bounces the viewer between feelings of empathy and feelings of exhaustion. "Why doesn't she make up her mind to go or stay?", we ask ourselves. Eleanor isn't an attractive person, and Julie Harris plays this to the "t". THE HAUNTING explores Jackson's extended metaphor of feminine anger damn near as skillfully as the author presented it on the page. Certainly whatever "walks alone at Hill House" is not such a distant cousin from the Corn Goddess, or other archetypal representations of the understandable rage of women whose lives have been restricted by domestic roles. But how much of it genuinely resonates from that house with its "doors that stay sensibly shut", and how much of it is between the ears of Eleanor Lance, who, even in a crowd, is walking alone, just as is whatever is in Hill House? In creating this book, Shirley Jackson was able to breach the same territory the 19th century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman explored in her remarkable story The Yellow Wallpaper. And it is no small thing that the cast of The Haunting- Julie Harris and Claire Bloom foremost- were able to recreate on the screen and do this complex novel such justice. Director Robert Wise, who fifteen years before gave us the Val Lewton masterpiece THE BODYSNATCHER, labored diligently to establish the same stifling atmosphere found in that earlier film. Patterns in wallpaper that vibrate with voice, doors that breathe, and that steady, horrific hammering on the walls that chills as certainly as did Jackson's description in the book itself.

Certainly Rus Tamblyn and Richard Johnson do more than pull their weight in this piece, and it couldn't have been easy to play second line to talents like Harris and Bloom. The cast, the direction, the set, everything works in this movie, a remarkable work of harmonic convergence on celluloid. THE HAUNTING is an important film to see because it does what horror films rarely do, it freely explores the internal and takes us all along, and babies, we ain't laughing. But it works. And that's more than can be said for three quarters of the over-hyped movie offerings in the horror tradition. Among U.S. horror films of the 1960s, only PSYCHO and ROSEMARY'S BABY touch so boldly on the unspoken terror in the horror film:a common fear among our spieces that we may be unworthy of love. Are we talking frightening now?