The Haunting (1999)

               I’m going to have to take back a lot of the kind things I said about Steven Spielberg in my look at ‘Poltergeist,’ aren’t I? I was already feeling a bit remorseful about my impassioned defense after ‘Lady in White,’ since that movie was just doing a very bad job of what Spielberg does very well. I briefly mentioned during my discussion of 1963’s ‘The Haunting’ that he and Stephen King had tried to collaborate on a remake that fell apart. King’s half became the tv miniseries “Rose Red,” Spielberg’s half became this. It was a relatively early Dreamworks production and thus he was intensely involved at every stage of development. This movie is partially responsible for Spielberg taking over direction on ‘Minority Report,’ as Jan de Bont was deep into post-production on ‘Twister’ when Spielberg offered to do that movie in exchange for de Bont taking over this one. If I’m going to praise Spielberg for his positive artistic effects on the industry I have to acknowledge the swill he’s responsible for as well.

It really bothers me that it's not vertically centered.

              I was going to blame the explosion in ghost cinema at the end of the 90’s on the success of ‘The Sixth Sense,’ but then I bothered to check and that movie was simply part of the same surge in popularity as this one as it also came out in 1999. Fully a third of the movies on this entire list are going to come from just the next five years. Then I looked at the movies coming up again and realized what a lot of them had in common: cheap CGI. How much of a pain in the ass it was to produce somewhat believable special effects had recently plummeted and apparently everyone just couldn’t wait to use it put a bunch of ghosts on screen. The effects people who worked on this also worked on ‘Jurassic Park,’ albeit much less successfully here. Some of the best movies on the list are coming up but also some of the absolute worst. I think my complaints about boring movies with boring stories have come to an end.

              This is the most mainstream movie on this list since ‘Poltergeist.’ It was Jan de Bont’s first movie after the misfire of ‘Speed 2.’ The budget was an inflation-adjusted $151 million and earned back around $340 million worldwide. Even the minor roles are played by actors you recognize and the four main cast members are all various shades of movie star. I didn’t see this in the theater but I sure rented it with friends shortly thereafter. As I recall I didn’t like it any more twenty-five years ago.

              They had a complicated production to go along with that budget. The exterior of what we’re going to allow them to call Hill House was provided by Harlaxton Manor in England, which is now the British campus for the University of Evansville. Yes, the one in Indiana, and I refuse to look into the matter any further. Some scenes were shot in Belvoir Castle in Scotland, and most of the interiors were filmed on a vast set built in an old aircraft hanger in Long Beach, California. The special effects were overseen by the esteemed Phil Tippett, and I’m going to pretend that his frustrations with this project are what inspired his fever-dream of a stop-motion opus ‘Mad God.’ Direction was by the aforementioned de Bont and the script was a first-time effort by David Self, who would go on to pen ‘Road to Perdition’ and the Benicio del Toro ‘The Wolfman.’ I haven’t seen those movies so I don’t know if he ever got any better.

              The cast is just as top-shelf. The characters are mostly the same as the original with slightly different names, so here the doctor is named David Marrow and played by Liam Neeson. He wasn’t in his ‘action-dad’ phase yet and shot his ‘Star Wars’ stuff the same year. This time it’s Eleanor Vance instead of Lance and played by Lili Taylor. During the 90’s she was still doing mostly independent films and I think this might have been her first big-budget movie. Once again Theo doesn’t get a last name but she does get a Catherine Zeta Jones to play her. Her career was as hot as it was ever going to be as she’d just come off of ‘The Mask of Zorro’ and ‘Entrapment.’ Instead of the owner’s nephew here we have another patient enrolled in the study named Luke Sanderson. He’s played by Owen Wilson and I’m fairly certain he was acting sarcastically throughout. Either that or he was just high the entire time because he overly mugs his way through some admittedly terrible dialogue. He’d already had some decent-sized roles in ‘Anaconda’ and ‘Armageddon’ but it wasn’t until the next couple of years that he really hit the mainstream with ‘Shanghai Noon’ and ‘Zoolander.’ Even the actors playing the cantankerous couple that looks after the estate are played by Bruce Dern and Marian Seldes.

              The only change from the original movie that isn’t an obvious mistake is the lack of narration. I’m no fan of narration in general, but looking back on the 1963 adaptation I do think it worked for that film. This is because the entire story really exists inside Eleanor’s head and hearing her thoughts helps make that explicit. You’d think this would be an argument for the lack of narration in the remake being a bad thing, but instead they’ve dumbed down the script so much that Eleanor no longer really has a personality to eavesdrop on. The special effects in this movie have certainly not aged well, but what struck me as even worse was just how much they cut any kind of complexity or ambiguity off at the knees. I wrote that ‘Poltergeist’ wasn’t interested in any of your stupid implications or themes either but at least it had decently complex characters. This has characters informing the audience about what they’re thinking by saying it directly out loud to each other. The patron saint of this movie is Garth Marenghi.

              In addition to making everyone and everything stupid, the script makes a choice very early on that pretty much would have doomed it even if the climax didn’t descend into soupy CGI madness. In the original the premise is very straightforward: a doctor interested in proving the existence of ghosts takes a couple of people with psychic abilities to a known haunted house. In this version not only is Dr. Marrow not a parapsychologist, he lies to the patients that they’re doing a study on insomnia when they’re actually performing a study on group fear dynamics. Thus the reason for staying in the house moves from investigating spookums to investigating people to see if they invent their own spookums. This has the initial effect of robbing Theo of one of her most interesting characteristics, the way she slightly unnerves everyone around her with her perceptiveness that may or may not come from being psychic. It also makes the movie work harder to get the characters to a point where they can start believing in ghosts, because none of them have that initial belief in psychic powers. The reason there are only two test subjects in the original is that it’s hard to come up with a big list of potential psychics. There are way more insomniacs in the world and if the object is to study fear the more the merrier. That house should have been packed. It also makes every scare in the movie a potential red herring. Every time there’s a spooky sound or something odd in the background you’re not sure if it’s the ghosts doing it or something Dr. Marrow set up to fool the patients. I don’t think he actually does set anything up over the course of the movie but after the idea is introduced it stomps all over the tension they’re trying to establish.

              Let’s address the CGI elephant in the room. The first thing everyone points at as to why the movie ends up being a black hole of artistry is the computer effects smeared over the runtime. Which is legitimately unfair to the effects artists, the technology they were using was state of the art at the time, it’s not their fault that it’s aged so poorly. They were also only doing what they were asked to do, it’s just unfortunate that what they were asked to do was so dumb. I’m waving off the dated aspects of the technology as unimportant because what is important is what that technology was used to do. Any individual use of CGI here can certainly be justified: bending the architecture of the house to attack people in bed, fluttering curtains briefly outlining the shapes of spirits, statues coming to threatening life, these are effects that are legitimately hard to pull off without computer intervention. But there’s so much of it that eventually that’s all you’re watching. It’s not hard to draw a straight line from the visual nonsense that takes up the last half hour of the movie to the chaos that ends so many superhero films.

              If that’s all that was wrong with the film, overuse of CGI, then this would just get listed alongside other movies like ‘The Mummy’ which have held up just fine despite dodgy effects. We look past the dated visuals for that movie because the rest of it is so fun. One of the first notes I made to myself after starting ‘The Haunting’ is the question “stylish or stupid?” This movie establishes locations and visual cues with such thudding obviousness that I wondered whether it was an aesthetic choice or whether it completely distrusted the audience to follow along. Eventually it’s revealed to be the latter as this movie assumes that anyone who would choose to watch it is a moron.

Seriously, what the fuck is this room?

              Let’s take the setup for Eleanor’s situation. In the original we get a fairly short argument between her and her family that sketches in her background. It establishes that she was her mother’s caregiver until recently and that living with her sister’s family is now causing tension. Whole thing is maybe four minutes. In the remake it’s carefully laid out that Eleanor is still living in her dead mother’s apartment which was left to her sister in the will. She and her husband want to sell it and while they offer to allow Elanor to stay with them as a nanny to their repulsive child it’s made clear they don’t really care what happens to her. She yells at them to leave and they do. We don’t have to infer any of this information, characters do everything but look into the camera as they simply intone a set of facts. None of that sneaking out and stealing the car business, forcing us to draw our own conclusions. She also gets a phone call directing her to look up an ad for the study in the newspaper, which in addition to never being explained (“the house did it” isn’t an explanation) also removes any initial interest the doctor took in her. Instead of being a lynchpin to his research she’s just another random insomniac to him.

              The plot of the movie is roughly the same as the original. They all show up at the house and spookums start to happen. They do add a couple of research assistants at the beginning, one of whom is psychic and really scared of the house. Before she can actually do anything relevant to the plot a piano wire mysteriosly breaks and cuts her across the face. She has to get taken to the hospital, thus removing her and the other assistant from the rest of the movie. I guess her role in the script was to establish that the house is full of bad vibes, but if you’re going to see a movie called ‘The Haunting’ I’m going to assume you expected that.

              Any complexity to the characters has been completely stripped out. It’s not so bad with Dr. Maddow, his counterpart in the original was pretty flat too, but it performs atrocities on the character of Theo. Her characterization in this is maybe the worst aspect of the remake. In the original novel it’s heavily implied that she’s queer, in the 1963 original they stripped that out entirely, here one of her first lines explicitly identifies her as bisexual. If I’m remembering correctly that was even part of the marketing for the movie, that the sexy Catherine Zeta Jones mentions she has a girlfriend! This was considered remarkable and even daring in 1999, and while I can’t really get mad at the movie for including her sexuality, I can get mad at the over-the-top and sensationalist way they did so. This version of Theo is some kind of trust fund kid since she has massive and expensive suitcases full of designer clothes, mentions the fashion events she attends, and struts around with the unearned confidence of rich people who didn’t earn a cent of it themselves. She’s also overtly flirtatious with every other cast member and every other line Owen Wilson addresses to her has some kind of sexual tilt to it. The tension between Eleanor and Theo is supposed to come at least partly from an implied mutual attraction, but this Theo is so brazen and the film so uninterested in subtlety that any implications along those lines get bulldozed by the other dialogue.

              Owen Wilson’s character of Luke is confusing. One of the questions I had over the course of this movie is who currently owns the house. Are they renting it, and if so from who? They mention the person who originally built the house, a mill owner named Hugh Crain, and that certainly becomes important later, but what happened to the house after he died? Someone is paying for upkeep on the place, but they never state who. This would make it awkward to include the owner’s nephew as a character, so they swap that backstory for just another insomnia sufferer. Other than being another person to wander around at night and get spooked Luke doesn’t offer anything to the movie except someone who can get killed while not disrupting the plot. It doesn’t help that his lines are all obvious and insipid. This is why I’m halfway convinced that Wilson’s entire performance was making fun of the script.

              And boy do they do a number on Eleanor’s character. In the original she was such a ball of contradictory impulses that we needed narration to keep track of what she was thinking and feeling, but here she never has a moment more complicated than ‘scared’ or ‘angry.’ She’s such a blank slate that I bet half of her dialogue is just explaining the backstory of the ghosts to the other characters. She doesn’t start investigating the house because of any innate sense of curiosity or sense of compulsion but because the ghosts basically grab her hand and physically lead her to the clues. She’s also able to look at something as complicated as a company ledger with some names crossed out and instantly intuit the nefarious plans of the original owner and the horrible things he was doing to children. There are a lot of leaps in logic in this movie that everyone instantly accepts because they need to get to the complicated and expensive CGI scares.

              In the original the house is large but recognizable as a structure that could exist in the real world. Here the place has a cavernous main hall at least three stories tall, hallways that go on so long they start to bend towards infinity, and bedrooms large enough to get lost in. There’s even a room with a floor made up of water with uneven steps leading across it and one with some kind of spinning contraption built into the floor and surrounded by mirrors. What was originally a large greenhouse now looks like the centerpiece of a large city’s botanical garden. In the 1963 version they deliberately left the geography of the house vague to complement the overall feeling of unease, here they just didn’t bother to explain visually how the various soundstages connected to each other.

Ok, maybe the 90's were a little stupid.

              The movie originally had a different ending that required reshoots to turn into the version they ended up with. A cursory internet search didn’t immediately turn up what changed between the first and final versions but at a guess the point of the reshoots was to remove any remaining ambiguity left because this movie is not interested in leaving the audience with any questions. They do this badly, but that’s clearly what they’re attempting. In the book and the original version, we’re meant to be far more interested in Eleanor and the effect the house has on her than in unravelling what specifically happened in Hill House to make it such a source of malevolence. Here most of the second half of the movie is detailing exactly what Hugh Crain did that was so bad and the steps needed to fix it, which makes it even more remarkable that they don’t even do that properly. They establish that Hugh Crain wanted to have kids and his first wife wasn’t able to give him any as they all died in childbirth. He also ran a mill that employed child labor and many of them died. It’s implied that rather than dying in the mill he brought them to his house to play hide and seek and eventually kill them? There are certainly human remains in the fireplace, though why they’re there and not buried somewhere is a question that never occurs to anyone.

              A good way to illustrate just how much dumber this version is than the original is the changes they made to the phrase written by the ghosts about or maybe to Eleanor. In the original adaptation the phrase ‘help Eleanor come home’ was scrawled on a random wall in chalk. This could have conceivably been done by one of the other characters and its meaning is unclear. Is it asking for Eleanor to come home and help whoever wrote the message or is a request that the others assist her in coming home? In this version the phrase changes to ‘welcome home Eleanor’ and is painted in huge letters far too high for a single person to have done it. It gets even worse when near the climax Eleanor suddenly declares that Hugh Crain had a second wife who was her great-great grandmother or something and so she’s a Crain and really it was all about family and she’s going to help these ghosts! Instead of her death being sad and tragic here she’s a hero who punishes the evil ghost in the house and frees the good ones, and instead of dying because she rammed a car into a tree she apparently passed from being such a good person.

              I was expecting fun schlocky effects from this movie and since I didn’t really enjoy the original I wasn’t too worried about getting offended by any changes to the story, but this managed to offend me anyways. I can’t even do my usual ‘oh, but at least the actors were good in it’ dodge because they weren’t. The material they were given was bad and they didn’t elevate it in the least. I’m not sure why de Bont’s director card was revoked after his next film, the 2003 Lara Croft sequel, but based on this I’m not exactly sad about it. I will say that if you’re unfamiliar with the original and just want to watch a dumb 90’s CGI-fest with your friends this will certainly fit the bill. It’s retroactively made me much fonder of the original, so it did at least one decent thing.