When asked to name the scariest films ever made in 2013, Martin Scorsese chose Robert Wise’s 1963 film The Haunting as his top selection — “absolutely terrifying,” Scorsese proclaimed. The now-61-year-old haunted house story, adapted from Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, was perhaps an unexpected pick, as no supernatural entities or violent acts are seen on screen. While the rest of Scorsese’s list does indicate a personal preference for classic Gothic chillers over more viscerally intense horror, he is not alone in declaring Wise’s film essential in the horror canon. The Haunting still has the power to unease, pressing its viewers with a steady crescendo of subtle menace, just as Hill House patiently and methodically preys on its unwitting guests.
Wise was a longtime studio director whose technical acuity and ability to direct across genres — musicals, noir, horror, sci-fi, “women’s pictures” — afforded him a long and respected career, though he was dinged by auteurist critics like Andrew Sarris for his lack of a personal stamp. The Haunting, soon after an Oscar-winning turn directing West Side Story, saw Wise returning to his roots: two of his first directorial credits were for low-budget horror movies, The Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher, produced by Val Lewton, who created space for literary, atmospheric work in the genre, and advocated for the idea that the unseen creates more terror than visible monsters. Wise worked with a wider canvas and with more developed skills on The Haunting than in his work for Lewton, yet hewed close to the producer’s philosophy of inspiring fear by never fully revealing the supernatural threat.
In The Haunting, adapted relatively faithfully from Jackson’s novel by Nelson Giddings, anthropologist Dr. John Markaway (Richard Johnson) brings together three subjects for an experiment to prove the existence of the supernatural. They will live in Hill House, a notorious haunted house where four women had experienced horrifying and premature deaths, and document whatever ghostly occurrences befall them. Two participants were selected for their supernatural gifts — Theodora (Claire Bloom), nicknamed Theo, a chic bohemian with ESP, and Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris), who experienced an episode of poltergeist activity in childhood — and the third, Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn), is the nephew of the current owner and heir to the house. Almost immediately, nighttime hauntings rattle their nerves, and interpersonal tension increases as they feel progressively less safe. The house itself begins to seem predatory, with one resident being its primary target: Eleanor, the most vulnerable among them.
Eleanor, the film’s protagonist, is a lonely woman who spent her entire adult life as the caretaker to her cruel mother, who recently died. Ill-used by her family and isolated for years, she enters Hill House like an angst-ridden teenager on her first day at a new school: overeager to craft a new identity yet terrified by her new environs. Harris, a five-time Tony Award-winner, plays the mentally fragile Eleanor with swings between theatrical intensity and uneasy withdrawal, so that Eleanor’s uncertain ability to withstand the pressures of Hill House creates as much tension as the expectation of hauntings.
The house itself is a true feat of production design by Elliot Scott, shot with technical ingenuity by Davis Boulton. When Eleanor enters for the first time, the score cuts out, leaving the viewer to silently examine the house’s front room as the Panavision camera slowly sweeps its length. The room is dark and ornate, with an imposing staircase at its center and eye-rattling décor: every object and surface is decorated with clashing patterns; furniture is carved, gilded, and filigreed; taxidermy hangs; heavy curtains droop. Compounding the effects of the house’s overcrowding is its sheer size — Wise and Boulton use widescreen cinematography, deep focus, and strategically deployed low- and high-angle shots to create a sense of vast rooms and long hallways. For some shots, Wise used an unfinished model of a 30mm Panavision camera because its distortions contributed to the visual sense of endless depth. As emphasized in both the film and Jackson’s novel, Hill House was “built wrong,” its menace inherent to its structure, and through Wise, Scott, and Boulton’s crafting of a distinct aesthetic, the viewer is plunged into its uncanny architecture alongside Eleanor.
Just as the house instantly impresses itself onto Eleanor, so do her fellow subjects; she bonds to Theo and develops a crush on Dr. Markaway. Theo, who flirts with Eleanor from their first meeting, prods at Eleanor’s weak spots out of jealousy once she realizes Eleanor’s attraction to Markaway. Their relationship reaches a nadir when, in their first open argument about Markaway, Eleanor vituperatively deems Theo “one of nature’s mistakes.” As contemporary critics have noted, Theo is a distinct example of a queer-coded character five years before the lifting of the Production Code which restricted onscreen depictions of homosexuality. Years after the film’s production, her queerness was acknowledged by the filmmakers, with Wise having stated retroactively that “it’s obvious in the story and what we put on the screen that Claire Bloom’s character is a lesbian.” Theo’s sexual openness puts Eleanor’s repression in stark relief, as she is quick to condemn Theo and directs her own desires toward the perceived safety of a male authority figure. Looming over her, though, is Hill House, which, as the film progresses, holds more influence over Eleanor’s psyche than any individual.
Though the house inspires immediate discomfort in its guests, the extent to which it is actually haunted remains unclear until their first night. Eleanor and Theo, huddled in Theo’s bedroom, listen at the door to an unaccountable thumping in the hallway which periodically cuts out and comes back louder than before. The sound eventually reaches their door, tapping along the doorframe and jiggling the knob. A mark of the haunting is left the following morning: a wall downstairs is scrawled with the message “ELEANOR, COME HOME.” The following night brings a haunting that seems to be only experienced by Eleanor. She hears a baby crying and an ominous, deeper voice through the wall, and clutches Theo’s hand in fear. When she shouts for the voices to stop, Theo turns on the light, and Eleanor realizes her and Theo are on opposite sides of the room. Looking down at her own hand, she asks herself, tormented, whose hand she was holding. Both scenes are Lewton-esque accomplishments: evocative sound design, paired with shots of terrified faces and walls and doors so densely patterned they seem to be in constant motion, creates terror without the presence of a materialized ghost.
The film, effective as it is, has hiccups along the way: an opening scene of narration bowdlerizes the chilling opening paragraph of Jackson’s novel; the score tends to be overbearing; and Johnson and Tamblyn give flat performances for characters flatly written by Giddings. Wise’s distinct accomplishment in The Haunting, though, is depicting a haunted house that is not just a benign building haunted by unsettled spirits, but itself imbued with sentience and malice, an alien intelligence capable of ensnaring those who venture inside. Harris’ nervy, intense performance reaches operatic peaks of emotion in the film’s final minutes, when Eleanor begins to fully submit to the house (“whatever it wants of me it can have,” she intones in voiceover), while her extant rational mind fights futilely against it. Though on the surface a traditional ghost story adorned with Gothic trappings, The Haunting, like its peerless source material, reveals depths of psychological turmoil in its central character, and shows a haunting that not only scares, but warps and consumes its target.
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