Customer Reviews

The Haunting

5 star:		(89)
4 star:		(60)
3 star:		(53)
2 star:		(70)
1 star:		(114)

 

 

"The Haunting" offers a textbook example of what happens when too much money is thrown at an ill-conceived project in the hopes that it will bear fruit. To terrify an audience, a good director needs no more than the ability to recognize and manipulate the power of the human imagination; the original "Haunting" or "The Blair Witch Project" come to mind. Jan de Bont, the director of this film, seems to have set out to make an aggressively mediocre movie: nothing, but NOTHING, is left to the imagination here. Every single supposed "fright" in the film is served up naked under a spotlight for us, leaving us with nothing but a collection of bland computer renderings. It was as if the advent of computer technology permitted the filmmakers to reveal all that was so cunningly suggested in the original with no thought as to the consequences. All psychological terror is expunged by the lack of faith in the intelligence of the audience. On the lighter side, the audience with whom I saw "The Haunting" had a grand time -- we recognized this contempt the filmmakers had for us and laughed from beginning to end. I never thought a decapitation by a huge stone lion's head flue could be funny...but films can always surprise you, can't they?

When I saw the trailer for The Haunting, I was expecting the film to be a "thrill-a-minute scarefest." When I went to see it, I left the theater feeling pretty disappointed in not feeling scared (in fact, I walked right over and saw Blair Witch for a 2nd time.) Now that The Haunting is on video (DVD specifically,) I wanted to give it another chance. After a 2nd viewing, I felt it was a good "old fashion" ghost story, but it still failed at being scary. This movie is Lili Taylor's movie. Her portrayal of a sweet, hopeless romantic is very convincing. Everyone else in the cast is along for the ride. Owen Wilson has to be one of the worst actors around. I would cringe everytime he was on screen. The story about the hill house was good, if not a little vague at times. There are many good scenes that are slightly scary, but none of it is terrifying. Even though her acting was solid, where was a scene where Lili Taylor was smelling something that was pretty laughable. The good: special effects, sound effects, story, Lili Taylor (most of the time.) The bad: most of the acting, some horrible dialogue. All in all, I can recommend this film because it is fun, has very little graphic violence and next to no profanity. I give the Haunting a B-.

I saw this when it first hit movie theaters in 1999 and actually fell asleep halfway! Now, as a horror movie fanatic (and not someone raised on Freddy and Jason--I'm 53), when a movie heralded as "frightening" and "shocking" knocks me out (literally), I gotta wonder. What was the point of remaking something that's already so perfect? The 1963 version hit all the right notes. It was filmed in black and white, had a truly eerie feel, some spine-numbing frights, and enough ambiance to satisfy anyone interested in the macabre. This "new" version is just terrible on every level. Where to start? The cast. I hated--emphasis on that last word, HATED--Lili Taylor as Nell. The reviewers here say she's "talented," but I gotta ask, where ARE they getting such an impression? Certainly not from this movie, because she's downright awful! When Taylor screams (and she does a LOT of that), it sounds like an angry bull in heat, and the sight of her galloping down the hallways bellowing (again and again, it seems) are sure to either make you cringe or break out in gales of laughter. As for the rest of the cast, they're washed out and blah. Owen Wilson does his stoned surfer boy with the crooked nose schtick, Catherine Zeta-Jones is slumming on her way to an Oscar, and Liam Neeson looks so incredibly uncomfortable, like he's about to have dental surgery. The sets are way overdone, and when the CGI kicks in, the whole kit and kaboodle just collapses. What was suggested in the original is realized in the remake and done up BIG. The "breathing door" morphs into a frickin' house moving and undulating and actually forming faces and claws and whatever. It's all wacked out nonsense, courtesy of a director with absolutely no style whatsoever.

I gotta say, it amazes me that some of you have given this high marks. Either you guys have a low tolerance for horror, or Dreamworks is employing "plants" on Amazon to promote this piece of garbage. If you want true haunted house scares, check out the original Haunting, as well as Legend of Hell House, The Changeling, Suspiria, and the original House on Haunted Hill.

Oh, and I gave this one star because "no stars" isn't an option.

I'll agree with everyone that this movie wasn't really faithfull to the novel and would have fared better if it had relied on a more subtle approach to a good scare (like the '63 version and the Sixth Sense) instead of a special effects exravaganza but folks let's face it, this was a 'summer' movie and summer movies mean one thing... mondo special effects, huge budgets and big sound! I am a lover of all types of movies and summer movies with all their noise and CGI are an American tradition now just like baseball and apple pie and we should just enjoy them for what they are and stop complaining. Let's save the more intellectual films for the winter and spring months. Bring on the popcorn! Can't wait for The Haunting to come out on DVD.

It's really difficult to make a good movie with bad material. But making a bad movie with good material must be easy---Jan DeBont proves it with this turkey. Shirley Jackson's story was a spooky classic. Robert Wise's B & W version was excellent and one of the scariest movies I've ever seen. And HE did it without special effects; just sound, shadows, and camera angles. This movie could have been so much better by relying on the original premise and forgetting all the comic book special effects. Mr. DeBont is proving that he's better as a technician than a director. Liam Neeson must have lost a bet to go along with this.

Recently, Entertainment Weekly published a list of the "25 Scariest Movies of All Time", compiled by the employees of the magazine. Clustered atop the list were the usual horror film suspects, fine films all: "The Exorcist", "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", "Alien", "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Halloween". Perhaps predictably, absent from the Top 25 were the horror films of yesteryear, particularly four films from what I consider to be the "Golden Age" of horror. For in an amazing four year span, 1960-1963, a quartet of films, each released in a different year, emerged to lift the genre to heights it has not been able to reach again. In 1960 came the great British sci-fi thriller, "Village of the Damned"; in 1961, there was Jack Clayton's brilliant ghost story, "The Innocents"; then, in 1962 came the piece de resistance, what, for me, is the greatest horror film of all time, Herk Harvey's low budget masterpiece of eeriness, "Carnival of Souls"; finally, in 1963, Robert Wise directed the classic haunted house spectacular, "The Haunting", based on Shirley Jackson's novel "The Haunting of Hill House". Each of these films share, in addition to their effective use of black-and-white photography and haunting musical scores, an appreciation of the power of suggestion, their realization that true terror lies in the imagination and that a creepy mood counts for more than inane gruesomeness and heavy handed special effects that just end up detracting from the horror. (I would include "Night of the Living Dead" on my list except that it was released in 1968).

Now, with the new version of "The Haunting", each of these films has been subjected to the indignity of a modern day remake. Jan De Bont's version is a travesty on so many levels that it's hard to know where to begin, but each of its many failures stems from a basic problem of modern commercial moviemaking: wretched excess. The first element that makes it inferior to the original is one that probably can't be avoided in this day and age; the simple fact that black-and-white is far more effective a medium in establishing the kind of eerie atmosphere necessary for this type of tale. In color, the picture is simply too clean and bright and one loses the sense of danger hidden in the shadowy corridors and corners of the house. And the house itself creates a problem. For although the art direction is a true miracle of design and decor, it actually detracts from the suspenseful ambience the film so desperately wants to achieve. Even Hill House has to be realized on a scale of some believability. In the original film, the rooms looked as if someone might one day have actually lived in them. Here, the setting is so preposterously ornate that the house looks more like a museum or grand fun house than a center of ghostly activity.

The film fails far more dismally on the level of its screenplay. In the original story and film, the parallels between past and present that connected Eleanor, the protagonist, to Hill House were worked out with such a fine logic that they helped hold the plot together. For instance, an earlier inhabitant of the house was a bed-ridden invalid who had to be looked after just as Eleanor had looked after her ailing mother. Also, the car crash that kills Eleanor in the original is presage by a carriage accident which kills one of the earlier inhabitants and which begins the curse that befalls this house that, as the originals claim, was "born bad". In the remake, the house has no logical reason for choosing Eleanor so the plotting degenerates into arbitrary silliness. Indeed, part of the fun of the original was the atmosphere of anticipation that came from knowing this house had a reputation for evil and the slowly dawning realization that it was searching for a new victim. In the new film, this is never established and, in fact, the characters aren't gathered to hunt for ghosts at all, but have been lulled there by a researcher, ostensibly to help them cope with their insomnia, but actually to function as guinea pigs in a study of the effects of fear on the personality. Yet, this is inexplicable because the doctor has nothing to do with the ghostly phenomena and, in fact, doesn't believe in its existence, so, by what method was this fear to be manifested? This is typical of the illogic that permeates the film. And, surprisingly, in these more permissive times, all the sexual tension between the doctor and Eleanor is completely eliminated from this version.

The ultimate indignity comes in the film's appalling final half hour when any attempt to replicate the subtlety of the original film is abandoned in favor of overblown special effects and lines like "Hugh Crane, I'm not afraid of you!". By this time, the audience has erupted into bursts of incredulous laughter and Hollywood has succeeded in trashing yet another of its classic films.

And not in an acceptable sense of the word!
They took an excellent ghost story and tried to do something with it.
The problem is that they relied way way way too heavily on special effects. Don't believe me? Watch the original. It will have your skin crawling and had very little special effects.
Why do they have to try to rework something that is perfect? I don't get it.
If Hollywood is going to rework a masterpiece, then play it straight. Just because you can do all sorts of things with special effects doesn't mean you have to try to put them in remakes, especially if the original is perfect!

This is another one of these stories in which absolutely nothing can compare to the book. Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" is the most frightening, penetrating ghost story I've ever read. The only movie that begins to do this story justice is the original black-and-white, "The Haunting", starring Julie Harris (1963).

The newer version, which I'm reviewing here, starts off fairly well, actually. The sets are rich and nicely detailed. Catherine Zeta Jones makes a really electric, alluring Theo. Liam Neeson plays a workable Dr. Marrow (not "Dr. Marquay", as named in the 1963 movie). Owen Wilson plays his usual annoying, irritatingly contemporary persona in an obligatory way as Luke, but I've never been able to take any movie seriously that Wilson's been in, and horror stories must be taken seriously or they're undermined to begin with (he reminds me a lot of Bruce Dern, but at least Dern has a modicum of talent). I don't really remember Lili Taylor as being in much of anything before, and sometimes that works well for a movie, but not this one. The part of Eleanor Vance is that of a very complex, tortured, naive person, and it was played to perfection by Julie Harris (the '63 version), whereas I remember less about the Lili Taylor portrayal of this central character than that of any of the other actors.

For all that, the 1st half of this newer version is not bad, but the 2nd half goes downhill rapidly. And in the last 25% of the movie, the director was intent in pulling out every cliched, hackneyed special effects staple used in every movie about ghosts from "Poltergeist" to "Ghost Busters", complete with all the shape-shifting techniques we enjoyed in "Terminator II", and many episodes of "Deep Space 9". By the year 1999, these effects just weren't enough to carry a movie anymore, and a special effects-weary audience isn't going to "drop their popcorn" over them now. As we all know, good special effects can enhance a movie, but it is rare that it can compensate for a movie that has little else going for it.

This will be referred to as a classic horror in the years ahead....a classic horrible example of how Hollywood money can destroy a really good story-line. The plot, what there is of it, bears no resemblance to Shirley Jackson's psychological horror story. It's scraps of plots which make no sense, and dead-ends. There's lots of CGI and special effects, which no doubt were supposed to make up for the missing story. They don't. Nothing here is scary, unless you find the thought of dusting hilariously ugly wooden cherubs frightening.

The sets for the house were the best part, being completely bizarre and unreal and therefore worth seeing. Liam Neeson looks like he was blackmailed into taking the part, and Owen Wilson, with a fixed smirk rather like the afore-mentioned wooden cherubs, acts like he's in a comedy from the get-go. The women, Lili Taylor and Catherine Zeta-Jones, manage a little better considering the material they're given. Zeta-Jones certainly looks good, colorfully tarty and all that, but isn't given anything to do except wander around looking colorfully tarty. Bruce Dern and Marian Seldes look like they're having fun hamming it up in their roles as the caretakers, but they were probably just happy they had such small parts. This doesn't make it as a "good" bad movie, and it wouldn't really worth the trouble hating, except that it butchered a book that was both scary and intelligent.

When I saw the 1963 version of the Haunting, I was 24 and could not sleep well for 3 weeks afterwards. I am now 28, and saw the new version lately, and could not sleep well afterwards. Not because it was scary, but because this is what modern filmmaking has amounted to.

The original is scary, not just because it works more with suggestion and is in black and white, but because we truly feel that the four people in Hill House truly are there..all alone...in the night...in the dark. And it rewards you in the end with a quick flash of (something!) that makes you jump out of your seat.

In this 1999 version, the house is full of eyepopping color, fun house like rooms, and four blithering idiots inside. (If Lili Taylor, whom I usually adore, said one more time that Hugh Crain built this beautiful Hill House for the children to enjoy, I was going to reach into the TV and spook her myself.)

The saving grace of the film are the sets. wonderfully elaborate (until the house grows eyes and growls with the ferocity of a Hanna Barbera cartoon. Also, try not to laugh when the wooden cherubs contort their mouths into round "O"s and say, "NOOO! " You'll be reminded of Mr Bill from Saturday Night Live.) I am biased of course, and watched this movie rather mournfully, getting wistful whilst thinkinng of Julie Harris and Claire Bloom. I was not against the idea of a remake in the least... this has always been a favorite tale of mine since I read Shirley Jackson's novel. I just wish they'd relied more on the psychological scares, than the cartoonish ones.