The Haunting (1963)

               I’m very torn on this movie. Director Robert Wise was one of the great filmmakers surrounding Val Lewton at RKO Pictures. He made ‘The Curse of the Cat People’ there in 1944, one of the ‘Cat’ movies I haven’t seen yet. Two years after he directed ‘The Haunting’ he made ‘The Sound of Music,' and fourteen years after that he made ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture.’ Guy had range. The script was written by Nelson Gidding, who collaborated with Wise a number of times, although this line from the wiki made my blood run cold: “His long-running course on screenwriting adaptions at the University of Southern California inspired screenwriters of the present generation, including David S. Goyer.” (shakes fist)

              Wise was apparently working on ‘West Side Story’ (like I said, range) when he read Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House. He passed it along to Gidding, and their initial attempt at an adaptation was reinterpreting the book as the collected ravings of the narrator while she’s locked up in a mental hospital, all the haunted house business being her conception of her therapy. Jackson very politely told them that the book was about the supernatural. This does handily explain the slant the movie puts on the material, we basically spend the runtime of the film in the head of a crazy person.

              The screenplay whittled the book down considerably. It pared the cast to the bare minimum, kept the spooky stuff mostly offscreen, and set most of the scenes inside one house to cut down on locations. They had a relatively lean budget of $1,000,000 (a little over $10,000,000 now) and shot it in England for the tax breaks. I was previously unfamiliar with the cast, but reading up on them I really shouldn’t have been. The main focus of the movie, and the character I’ll be spending the bulk of the time looking at, is Eleanor Lance, played by Julie Harris. Over the course of an impressive career she won numerous Tonys, several Emmys, a Grammy, and got an Oscar nomination in 1952 for ‘The Member of the Wedding.’ Claire Bloom played Theodora. She was nominated for two BAFTA’s, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony. She was also made Commander of the British Empire in 2013. Dr. Markway was played by Richard Johnson, who was almost James Bond and was a character actor for decades. The last character, Luke Sannerson, was played by Russ Tamblyn, who people might remember as Dr. Jacoby in “Twin Peaks.” They’re all pretty good here (although Pauline Kael was right, Tambyln’s weak), but the weight of the movie falls squarely on Julie Harris.

              I suppose it’ll have to stop at some point, but once again the little wodge of knowledge about this movie in a back corner of my mind comes from what Stephen King had to say about it in Danse Macabre. Since I didn’t have a subscription to Fangoria growing up I guess that one book I read when I was too young for it is going to keep being my go-to reference point for spooky stuff made before the early 80’s. I even dug out my copy of the book and despite what I remembered he spends most of his time talking about the novel and not the movie, which makes sense. At the time King would’ve had easy access to copies of all of the books he wanted, but when it came to radio serials or movies I don't think there was a way in 1983 to have easy access to, say, specific episodes of “The Twilight Zone.”

              The movie did middling business and received a mixed critical reception at the time of release. Some people found it very effective and scary, some took issue with the plot and character motivations. I have problems with the movie, but not with those aspects. Its reputation has substantially grown since then. It’s been praised as one of the best horror movies of all time by the likes of Martin Scorsese and Stephen Spielberg. It keeps appearing pretty highly in lists of ‘The Best Horror Movies Ever Made.’  Stephen King attempted to collaborate with Spielberg on a remake, which fell through and eventually mutated into the tv mini-series “Rose Red.” It was remade into a terrible movie in 1999, which you better believe is on the list for this month.

              It was genuinely hard for me to get through this movie, and not for any defendable reasons. I’m not even  going to argue that it’s a bad movie, or even a mediocre one. It’s a well-made movie that accomplishes what it sets out to do, I just didn’t really like what it set out to do. I would normally suspect I’d enjoy the book more than the movie, but considering that what I don’t like about the movie is the main character and the book spends even more time in her head I’m not sure that’d be the case. It’s weird to end up in a place where I think I’d rather watch something like ‘Back from the Dead’ again than this.

              Let’s get the premise out of the way: as the opening narration tells us there’s this spooky mansion called Hill House. We get details on the original owners and their descendants and what happened to them. None of it was very good. Various people died by accidents or suicides and eventually everyone decided it was just a bad place and left it alone. It’s been sitting vacant for some time with only two daytime caretakers looking after it while the family tries to decide what to do with the thing. Now a Dr. Markway has decided to rent it out and bring some supernaturally-sensitive assistants there to spend a few days and make some observations. This includes Eleanor, who supposedly experienced a rock-throwing poltergeist as a child, Theodora, who’s good at predicting cards, and the current owner’s nephew, who’s just there to keep an eye on his eventual inheritance. Various spooky things happen, mostly involving Eleanor who’s busy falling in love with the place, until everyone gets freaked out enough to send her away. As she’s driving off either something takes control of the steering wheel or she decides to kill herself and she drives into a tree, the end.

              It’s unclear how much the choice to have the spooky stuff happen off-screen was a creative decision and how much of it was because they didn’t have the money. If the intent was to give events a more psychological slant it doesn’t entirely work, Eleanor is clearly crazy but the house is also clearly haunted. Everyone including the audience sees and hears things that are supernatural and all of the characters are believers by the end. I guess at some point during pre-production they completely abandoned the idea that it could all be in her head. The movie has the form of a suspenseful horror movie but the function of a psychological character study. The house is used by the narrative to probe the contours of Eleanor’s personality to see what she does. She’s a damaged individual who is both attracted to and repelled by the house. The house, meanwhile, seems to be very interested in her specifically. I’m fairly certain the book is about more things, but the movie is about Eleanor. After a few introductory scenes establishing the backstory of the house and introducing Dr. Markway and the premise, Eleanor is onscreen almost the entire rest of the movie. And for me, personally, I did not enjoy spending time with her.

In her defense she's had a rough couple of days.

              The setup for the character is very sympathetic. She’s spent an unspecified number of years looking after her invalid mother, who doesn’t seem to have been a very nice person. After her mother died Eleanor went to live with her sister’s family, which also didn’t go great. A lot of interfamilial trauma is implied through dialogue. We only see a brief scene of her life before she sets off to Hill House but the sister, her husband, and Eleanor herself all come off as various shades of raging asshole. The sister is harsh and judgy, the husband is passive-aggressive and condescending, and Eleanor is prickly and temperamental. She wants to borrow the car (that she helped pay for!) to go attend the investigation at Hill House, and they frankly don’t trust her. They say it with some terrible, borderline abusive language, but by the end of the movie I had to admit they had a point.

              From this family dialogue it’s implied that Eleanor has a history of mental illness. It’s 1963 so good luck getting any kind of useful specifics from their lines. She’s been very sheltered and overshadowed by the rest of her family her whole life. It appears that normally she’s very meek and unassuming, but something about this trip is very important to her, to the point where she sneaks out with her belongings, takes the car without permission, and sets off to Hill House deliberately leaving no contact information behind. It’s at this point, while she’s driving, that her inner monologue starts up on the soundtrack.

              Outside of specific genres, like film noir, I don’t particularly like narration. It implies that the filmmakers couldn’t find a way to convey the information visually. Same with inner monologues being made audible. In this particular instance, however, I can see the point. I have not read the entire original novel but I’ve skimmed parts, and I can recognize an adaptation doing its best when I see it. The novel is full of nuance and ambiguity. It’s deliberately unclear whether Eleanor is imagining or possibly even causing some of the things she and the others experience in the house. The entire point is that everyone is experiencing things subjectively, including the reader, and it’s very hard to do that in film. I think ‘The Innocents’ was doing something along those lines, and it had only one character going nuts.

I need to be clear on this: the reason I didn’t like the inner monologues in this movie was not because they were badly written or performed inadequately or from a stubborn insistence that monologues are always bad, it’s because I didn’t like their contents and the character saying them. The movie is very effective at conveying the thoughts of a character I did not want to understand better. Perhaps it says unkind things about me, but I did not like Eleanor in this movie. She did not seem like someone I’d want to spend much time with, which I suspect is the reason it took me so many sittings to finally watch all the way through this movie. She’s this annoying complicated ball of a character where a sympathetic backstory turns out an unpleasant person. She’s clearly both traumatized and undersocialized, which translates to sudden swings in mood and behavior. She can be pleasant during a conversation until there’s a word or phrase she doesn’t like and then she lashes out. She turns surly and then apologetic by turns. She feels deeply sorry for herself to an unhelpful degree but then again has complete justification for that emotion: her life really has sucked for a very long time. She can also be deeply unpleasant when she doesn’t get her way. There’s this sense that, when you get past the meekness and neediness and hurt, there’s the beginnings of a deeply selfish and greedy person.

Which I think is what the house reacts to. The movie very explicitly names the house itself as a conscious entity. The characters constantly refer to what it thinks or wants, how it feels to them and what they think it’s doing. By about the mid-point Eleanor starts convincing herself that they’re having a conversation, and she’s probably right. The turning point in the movie, and one of the most discussed and interpreted parts, is about halfway through when everyone finds the words ‘help Eleanor come home’ written on a hallway wall in chalk (or, as Dr. Markway intones, “Something like chalk!”). Eleanor freaks out, and from this point on keeps repeating to herself in a near-panic that it knows her name, it knows where she is, it wants her specifically. And despite the intense evil she very much senses, she’s enraptured by the idea that she is wanted, even by something like the house. For the second half of the movie she swings between intense fear of the house and marveling at how much she feels like she’s home. On that final night, amidst all the noise and terror, something breaks in her, leaving her calmly twirling and dancing through the halls of the house amidst the chaos. I think all of this hints that Eleanor has been hurt enough and deprived enough that she’s reached a point where she’s willing to do just about anything to feel like she belongs. In the end that includes either killing herself or letting herself be killed to stay at the house, which by that point means almost the same thing.

              There is so much more to go into with this movie. Such as the Dudley’s, the married caretakers who are so deliberately unpleasant I think the film is trying to use them as comic relief. Or the way the movie carefully scrubs almost every indication from the novel that Theo is at all queer while at the same time keeping in Eleanor’s insults to her about being ‘unnatural’ and one of ‘nature’s mistakes.’ If you’re familiar with the book and you go looking for it you can kind of tease out maybe something you can turn into queer coding up on screen, but it was 1963 and I don’t think the filmmakers were interested in having that conversation. We could get into Dr. Markway totally leading Eleanor on until his wife shows up and then pretending he never did anything of the sort. I could do some research into what the audio was like on set when Julie Harris had to provide the visuals to go along with her inner monologues. Did they record them first and then play the audio on set for her to react to, or did she act first with the lines in mind and then match them up during ADR? There’s all this and so much more, but I don’t really feel like getting into it. This movie was good but no fun, and that includes thinking about it.

              I didn’t get into the actual spookums in the movie because, other than a bulging door and exactly one instance of someone having frosty breath in a cold spot, no spookums were witnessed on screen. There were no specific ghosts in the movie, so maybe one could argue that his doesn’t fit my original conceit for the month, but it’s a haunted house, it fits just fine. The entire movie is one woman and a series of camera angles being slowly driven insane. I will say the pace is a little slow, to the point where Shirley Jackson herself, who was not at all pleased with the adaptation, described it as “a very poor movie, the plot of the book changed radically, and far too much talk.” I think that’s a little harsh but clearly she thought that it wasn’t particularly successful at capturing the essence of her book. I can tick down a list of very good qualities of this movie, from the acting to the cinematography to the set design, and at the exact same time I can also admit that I am almost certainly going to enjoy watching the 1999 schlock remake much more.