Who Haunts the Haunters?

The Haunting (1999) directed by Jan de Bont

Who knew that ghosts could be in conflict with each other? Or that they can make phone calls? These were just a couple of things I learned from The Haunting, a salute to overwrought architecture.

As haunted house movies go, this is a relatively decent one. I don't know why anyone would build a house with so many exterior and interior elements that look like eyes, but then that sort of decrepit Gothic Revival creepiness is what makes haunted house stories possible. There aren't many stories about haunted bungalows or scary log cabins—they just don't have the right architecture to put a fright in a person.

The scenery is probably the best reason to see The Haunting. There were obviously some ridiculous sums of money thrown into this production and that kind of spectacle is worth taking a look at. Hill House, as envisioned here, is really something else: giant fireplace, a greenhouse the size of Denver, a mirrored carousel room, a hallway with standing water and stepping stones that look like books that have fallen into the pond, the requisite ominous looking portrait of the scowling master of the house and, of course giant statues that come to life and try to attack people. This is a truly extravagant haunted house.

Depending on how you want to feel about this film you can call it simple or rudimentary. To be fair, a close look at even some of the best of classics in any genre can prove to be disappointing if you start seeing all the flaws. On the other hand, it's always a bit disappointing when you get the feeling that either the writer forgot to finish a thought that was set up earlier, or the director didn't care about it, or it got edited right out.
Case in point: Theo (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is introduced to us as a ravenous bisexual. Shortly after that she brushes Eleanor's (Lili Taylor) hair provocatively (Hair brushing?! Good heavens, what next?) and when Eleanor flinches at the touch that's the end of that.
Now, there are a lot of horrible horror movies that would have proceeded to turn that moment into a soft-porn debacle, but would it have been so bad to actually develop that thought further into, say, a dramatic subplot? Are audiences so dumb that we can't be trusted with a subplot in a film? Is Desperate Housewives the last bastion of subplots?

I make the above complaint not because this is a terrible movie, but because it seems like a film that wanted to be about an hour longer with much more character development and possibly even a few more frightening incidents. Instead we have a spare/rudimentary movie that is technically impressive and which has a decent storyline but that feels like it could have given us a few more rooms of the house to look at.

Yes, that is Virginia Madsen as Eleanor's sister Jane in the opening scene, and no, although I love Virginia Madsen, I didn't expect to get a well-developed subplot about her and her annoying son. It’s enough to know that Eleanor has no place to go now that her mother’s dead and her sister is kicking her out of the apartment. (This lack of feeling explains why the ghosts of dead children didn’t bother calling Eleanor’s sister to help them.)
But I couldn't shake the feeling that there was a Victorian novel lost in the relationship between Eleanor, Theo and Dr. Marrow (Liam Neeson). And we could definitely have done better with more of the plucky comic relief from Owen Wilson. (Owen's character is named Luke, which means that either they got the wrong Wilson brother or Luke Wilson was otherwise engaged playing a character named Owen.)
And what’s the deal with the creepy caretakers Mr. & Mrs. Dudley (the truly great Bruce Dern and Marian Seldes)? I half expected to find out they were behind the whole thing and I genuinely wanted to see Bruce Dern say “and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”

But back to the big question of the plot: if ghosts can place telephone calls to living people then how come they need Eleanor to show up and go head to head with her evil ancestor? Why don’t they just try to call up an arsonist to burn Hill House down and free them from the evil?
At any rate, the actual struggle of the story—between the ghost of the evil industrialist child-killer Hugh Crane (assisted by his malevolent house) and the ghosts of the dead kids (championed by Eleanor Vance) is actually a good conflict. The aesthetics and symbolism are well thought out (is it a coincidence that Eleanor drives a Gremlin? I think not.)—and there are some really good lines. (e.g. “Did you study art?” “No, I studied Purgatory. I was there for eleven years.”) And it has a mercifully low body count (if you don’t count the ghosts. Luke is beheaded by a giant swinging lion’s head and Eleanor sacrifices her life help the kinderghosts get to heaven. A different kind of haunted house movie would have populated the screen with several more thinly sketched characters to kill them off in clever ways around the house, but not this film. The Haunting seems to strive for a more thoughtful psychological approach, but this is somewhat undercut when we start to actually see the physical manifestations of the house’s malevolence.
Dr. Marrow is trying to study the roots of fear. I would venture to say that we have certain fears and subfears: the fear of the unknown (or unknowable) and the fear of the known (and especially the fear that you cannot defeat the object of your fear whether you know it or not.) Once you have a giant statue try to grab a character and drown him you’ve lost the fear of the unknown and replaced it with the fear of the known, which makes for a fun ride, but doesn’t unsettle you. What makes this movie less chilling is that it gives us an out—the mystery is explained (except for the mystery of the creepy caretakers) and evil (Hugh Crane and the malevolence of Hill House) is vanquished by good and specifically by the sacrifice of a good person.
In short, The Haunting is a moral fable that offers the comfort of salvation, so no matter how scary the unknown horrors are we can be comforted by the thought that all can be known and that good can overcome evil (and that there is such a thing as good and evil, for that matter). Compared to the unremitting unsettling horror of something like Darkness, that makes this a romantic comedy.

Special Features

Theatrical Teaser – Okay, houses that look like faces are frakkin’ scary.

Trailer – I’ll have to admit that I like the little poem about the house:

There once was a house, a bright happy home
Something bad happened
Now it sits all alone.
Its pillars are its bones
Its wall are its skin
Its windows are its eyes,
Won’t you come in?

No, I’m going to the next town over to have a sandwich with Bruce Dern.

Behind the scenes feature

Hosted by Catherine Zeta-Jones, this is better than the average Entertainment tonight promo reel that passes for a making-of feature. You get a nice look at the difference between the computer animation and practical effects, you get a standard set of interviews where the actors talk about what scares them and everyone talks about how spooky the set was and that no one wanted to be around it at night. The first highlight is a look at the horror movie pedigree of the producers of The Haunting. Susan Arnold is the daughter of Jack Arnold, the man responsible for The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Donna Arkoff Roth’s father was the renowned B-movie producer Samuel Z. Arkoff.
But the highlight of this special feature is the extra bit where we get a tour of some real haunted houses like Harlaxton Manor (the actual exterior set of The Haunting), a nearby haunted hotel and the infamous Winchester House which is always worth a scare.