The Others (2001)

               I’m trying to remember why I saw this movie in the theater when it was first released. I don’t generally see horror movies and I especially don’t see them in theaters. I’ve never been a particular fan of Nicole Kidman, I enjoy her performances just fine but I don’t think her presence has ever tipped me over the edge into seeing anything. The film hung around in theaters for a while and was getting good reviews, but those by themselves wouldn’t have gotten me to grab a ticket. Maybe I don’t remember that far back and I used to go to movies all the time just to see something. Regardless of why I have seen this movie before, which you’d think would disqualify it from being included in the month, but since I’m the one making the rules I decided to watch it anyways. It’s been over twenty years and I was curious to see how it holds up.

              In a direct endorsement of my complaints about 1995’s ‘Haunted,’ this movie works absolutely fine even if you know the ending twist from the very beginning. There are some things were watching from the beginning with the ending in mind helps you catch things you might have missed before. Watching it again just now I get the sense that the movie employs a kind of step-down canal system for audience members: there are about three distinct moments in the movie where it feels like it gives us another big chunk of the solution to its mystery and more and more of the audience twigs to what’s really going on before it’s finally revealed at the end. I kinda want to know the percentage of people who didn’t figure out before it explicitly lays it all out. It was also clearly written with a second or even third viewing in mind as everything makes sense both with and without knowledge of the twist and all of the clues work in the context of the eventual answer. I’m going to end up recommending this movie very highly, so if you’d like to experience the movie for the first time without spoiling anything I’ll nutshell what I’m going to say: Nicole Kidman is very good, the kids are better than you’d expect, the movie plays fair with its mystery, and I feel that the ending is very satisfying.

              This was only writer slash director Alejandro Amenábar’s third feature after ‘Tesis’ in 1996 and ‘Abre los ojos’ in 1997. The latter was remade in 2001 by Cameron Crowe under the name ‘Vanilla Sky,’ starring Tom Cruise. That whole process seems to have brought Amenábar into the orbits of Cruise and Kidman, as the former is listed as a producer on the movie and the latter is the star. It was a huge international success, earning roughly $374 million against a $30 million dollar budget, adjusted for inflation. A decent chunk of that came from Amenábar’s home country of Spain, and for a while it was the highest-grossing movie there of all time.

              For her part Kidman was doing just fine in 2001. She was just coming off of the one-two punch that was ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ and ‘Moulin Rouge!’ Her marriage to Tom Cruise had fallen apart earlier in the year and the constant tabloid attention certainly didn’t hurt as a source of free publicity for this. The only other actor who a lot of people might recognize is Christopher Eccleston in a small role, then already well-known to the British tv-watching public but still four years away from his apparently unpleasant stint as the ninth Doctor. I know I recognize Fionnula Flanagan from somewhere, but she has so many credits I’m genuinely unable to narrow it down. She’s been acting since the mid 60’s so I can’t tell if it’s from a role she had in an old episode of “Bonanza” or if it’s one from “American Gods.” The actors playing the kids, Alakina Mann and James Bentley, only have a handful of credits between them. They’re pretty good.

              There’s a fundamental part of the background to the setting that I’m not entirely sure about. The story could have taken place just about anywhere or anywhen, but Amenábar deliberately chose the island of Jersey in the latter half of 1945. For those unfamiliar, The Bailiwick of Jersey is a small island situated in the Channel between England and France. It was occupied by German forces in June of 1940 and remained under their control until the end of the war, at which point the soldiers stationed there peacefully surrendered. During those five years a very tense peace prevailed on the island under German occupation, with some amount of self-rule and most of the civilian population left to their own devices. Near the end of the war supplies and food were running low and many of the residents lacked electricity and depended on Red Cross food parcels to survive. After the war there was some recrimination and accusations of collaboration among the residents, although there were very few prosecutions.

              This does come up in the movie a few different times, albeit obliquely. Grace Stewart, Nicole Kidman’s character, mentions near the beginning that she and her children have learned to live without electricity. When Grace believes intruders have entered her home she loads a shotgun and fiercely mutters to herself that she managed to keep any Nazis from entering her home during the occupation, she’s not going to let people break in now. For most of the movie the family avoids talking about their father because they haven’t heard anything about his fate during the war but are very worried now that peace has been declared and there’s still no news.

              But most of those beats would work just as well anywhere else in the UK, why specifically Jersey? Why pick an island that is specifically not part of the UK and is, in effect, owned directly by the monarchy? The huge house they live in is fairly isolated, but there are plenty of remote estates in England. It might have something to do with Grace’s devout faith in Catholicism, which had a significant presence on the island at the time. Waves of Catholic migrants both from France and Ireland had settled there in the 19^th century. This then raises the question of why Grace being a Catholic is important to the story. It’s woven all the way through, from the opening narration as she gives a children’s version of the story of creation to the conversations on religious doctrine between Grace and her children. I have a couple of guesses. First is that Spain is still a pretty darn Catholic country and perhaps Alejandro Amenábar just wrote what he was familiar with. Another possibility is that Catholicism has acquired a vast number of odd beliefs over the years as it’s absorbed other religions. It also locked up a lot of its best thinkers in monasteries with nothing much better to do that really dig into some metaphysics. There’s a genuine “oh snap” moment in the movie when Grace’s daughter Anne corrects her mother on the official Church doctrine of Limbo. I don’t know the official Church of England position on the existence of ghosts, but if you want a religious character to really have a hard time interacting with spirits I can’t really argue with a Catholic.

              This overt religiosity coupled with the way Kidman plays her with steely control barely concealing an undercurrent of hysteria and a lot of the tension in the movie comes from Grace herself. Near the beginning of the movie she explains to the new staff members and thus the audience the rigid rules that the house operates by: all doors are to always be locked and you must never move from one room to another without the necessary set of keys. This is due to the fact that her children break out in open sores in the presence of too much light. She compares bright light to water on a ship, something that must be kept strictly contained. As she details all this she pauses for a moment and you can almost feel her body bend under the enormous strain she’s under. Over the course of the movie she keeps forgetting the rule about keeping the doors locked under stress, which kind of encapsulates the contradiction in her character. It’s completely understandable that she panics a little when she thinks she hears one of her children in distress, but she’s also the kind of person who would absolutely tear into anyone else who did the same time. I’m surprised that her children turned out as seemingly normal as they did, considering they had such a high-strung mother.

              One thing that the movie could have easily done that I’m very glad it didn’t do is get just a bit too clever with its central conceit. Because it’s a real doozy, if not one hundred percent original: what if you told a ghost story from the ghost’s perspective? This one simple shift turns all of the old cliches on their heads and makes them interesting again. This movie contains a lot of elements I’ve seen before: doors that open and shut on their own, whispers and voices barely on the outside of hearing, objects or furniture moving the moment you look away from them. This also feels like something of a direct response to ‘The Innocents’ as the makeup of the cast is almost identical: two kids, the woman looking after them, and one main servant that she interacts with. Just like in that movie the woman ends up as something like the antagonist by the end. When it’s revealed that she’s perceiving the very much alive people trying to move into the house in much the same way that they’re perceiving her, piecemeal and only partially, a whole lot that’s happened so far in the film make complete sense.

              When you watch it knowing that everyone you’re seeing is already dead you can admire the intelligence of the script. It needs to always be dark and spooky, so give the kids the very-real condition of phototoxicity, that way there’s a reason everyone has to stay inside the house during the day and every curtain and set of drapes become threatening. We’re distracted by the new staff hires getting shown around the manor that Grace’s offhand remark that she woke up one day and the servants were just mysteriously gone gets lost in the conversation. They complain about never having anyone visit and being out of communication with the outside world, but it was right after the war, a lot of things were going on. Of course once the truth is revealed everything gets recontextualized, but they did a very good job of making it seem reasonable that the ghosts might not be ghosts.

              I really like what they did with the servants. It’s eventually revealed that the three of them all died in an outbreak of tuberculosis on the island back in 1891. It’s never explicitly stated but it’s clear from the context that Grace and her children are relatively new ghosts and the older ones took a little time to observe them. They realized that none of them understood that they were dead, so they decided to be nice about it and ease them into it. The main servant, Bertha Mils as played by Fionnula Flanagan, is polite and deferential to Grace for most of the movie, and it’s only in the side looks she gives her or the way she gives comforting asides to the children that indicates something more is going on with her. A lot of the more overt clues about the true nature of the story are dropped by the servants speaking to each other. Eventually she visibly starts losing patience with Grace and starts leaving little clues around. They leave the conversations between the staff members vague enough that they can easily be read as sinister, but on the second time through they read as unexpectedly kind. I also got the sense that there were other ghosts around who hadn’t introduced themselves yet, and it’s almost a comforting idea of the afterlife, that there’s some sense of community among the dead.

              I’m glad they avoided making it explicit that this movie is, in effect, the backstory for the evil spirit in a another movie set in the same house a few decades later. What’s left of Grace, given decades to stew in that estate with only other ghosts to keep her company, could very easily devolve into the kind of murderous ghost seen in movies like ‘Full Circle’ or ‘The Legend of Hell House.’ The final reveal that Grace smothered her children and then blew her head off with a shotgun in a fugue state, coupled with her fierce last line of the movie, “No one can make us leave this house,” really makes me worried about what she’s capable of justifying to herself given enough time. The last image we see is Grace staring out of an upper-floor window, clutching her children to herself, clearly willing to keep them with her for all eternity. She’s just driven out one family, she seems completely capable of driving out any number of others.

              I remember the film as being beautiful and very disconcerting and I’m glad that my memory was correct. It’s never very scary, but it’s not really trying to be. The movie builds up to the reveal that Grace killed her kids and then herself by showing us the kind of woman who would feel driven to that point. She’s a woman placed under so much pressure that she eventually snapped, and all that death has really changed for her is that the children don’t have to be scared of the light anymore. She’s still all alone, still the only person she trusts to take care of her children, and now there’s not even the possibility that they might grow up and move out of their own. She’s still in the exact same position as she was before she blew the top of her head off, except now it’s for forever. This might be the bleakest ending to a movie I’ve seen in quite some time, but I’d still very much recommend it.

What Lies Beneath (2000)

               Robert Zemeckis directed ‘What Lies Beneath’ while he was waiting for Tom Hanks to lose fifty pounds for the time-skipping edit in ‘Cast Away.’ This movie was made to essentially kill time while he starved himself. It’s hard to overstate the insane run of films Zemeckis had been on for a decade and a half which functionally ended shortly after this movie. Starting in 1984 the list goes: ‘Romancing the Stone,’ ‘Back to the Future,’ ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit,’ BttF 2 and 3, ‘Death Becomes Her,’ ‘Forrest Gump,’ ‘Contact,’ this, then ‘Cast Away,’ also released in 2000. People talk about Coppola’s 70’s output or the masterpieces Carpenter turned out in the 80’s, but from a box office and technological standpoint it’s hard to beat that sixteen years of great to near-great movies. Then the fascination with pushing the boundaries of film technology you could see creeping into his films ever since ‘Back to the Future 2’ kind of took over. He spent the next twelve years turning out creepy motion capture CGI movies, and when he went back to normal filmmaking with ‘Flight’ it wasn’t quite the same. He still had a few good movies in him, like ‘The Walk’ and ‘Allied,’ but nobody really paid attention to them. His last film was a direct-to-streaming remake of ‘Pinocchio’ which was universally ignored.

              Documentarian Sarah Kernochan, who’s won a couple of Oscars, wrote up a script treatment based on some personal spooky experiences that she then submitted to Dreamworks. The treatment was assigned to actor Clark Gregg to turn into a screenplay. Yes, the guy from ‘The Avengers.’ This script was in turn given to Zemeckis at the direction of Steven Spielberg, who was no doubt familiar with the fact that Zemeckis had been wanting to make an homage to Alfred Hitchcock for some time. The combination of the script and the opportunity to work with Zemeckis drew in Harrison Ford, and Michelle Pfeiffer was cast soon after. Apparently they were both the first choices for Zemeckis, because when you’re at that level of commercial success I guess you just get to pick and choose your actors from anyone in the world. Considering that the movie made an inflation-adjusted $534 million off of a $183 million budget, I find it hard to disagree with this amount of deference.

              Ford and Pfieffer play a married couple, Norman and Claire Spencer. She’s a widow with a daughter that only appears at the very beginning of the movie. The rest of the cast is made up of mostly character actors, none of whom have much to do in the movie as it really is a two-hander between Ford and Pfeiffer. About the only one who gets a decent amount of screentime is Diana Scarwid as Jody, Claire’s best friend and thus the person she can talk to for the audience’s benefit. The only other actor in the cast I’m familiar with is James Remar as their neighbor Warren Feur, but he has such a heavy beard in this movie I didn’t recognize him at all.

              Robert Zemeckis is a very technical filmmaker in at least two distinct ways. The first and more obvious way is how he really did push filmmaking technology forward. ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ is still unmatched with its blend of cartoon and live action. It’s still astonishing today from a production standpoint. Movies have tried to ape its look with CGI and other gimmicks but nobody’s been willing to put in the sheer grinding effort that it took. I would suggest watching at least one of the making-off specials for that movie because they’re almost as entertaining as the film itself. Then with the ‘Back to the Future’ movies he demonstrated the use of motion-controlled cameras as developed by Industrial Light and Magic, allowing an actor to be in the same frame multiple times while still allowing for camera movement. In ‘Death Becomes Her’ he started developing better ways to incorporate CGI effects into movies (that film holds up way better than a lot of its contemporaries), and even a relatively straightforward movie like ‘Contact’ has that famous sequence of the young Ellie running towards the camera only to have it revealed to be the reflection in a mirror. There are even a couple of sequences near the end of this movie that are more technically proficient than is strictly necessary.

              The other way he’s a technical filmmaker is his insistence on proper film construction, especially planting and paying off. His scripts have been compared to clockwork devices. This is to say that anything important in one of his movies was for sure set up beforehand, which is why the climaxes of so many of his movies feel so satisfying. Take the opening of the first ‘Back to the Future,’ where the camera manages to establish most of the story elements in one continuous movement: it dollies from clocks to pictures of scientists to some of Doc’s contraptions, past a newsreader reading out a story on some stolen nuclear materials, on to the dog’s overflowing food bowl indicating he and Doc have been gone for some time, then we see Marty enter and we establish his skateboard, and it ends with the reveal of the box of plutonium. When you realize that Zemeckis loves to set up his pieces early on you can keep a list of things that are going to be important later in the film by what seemingly unnecessary details are focused on by the camera or the characters. Here’s some of my notes from the first fifteen minutes or so: “set ups – mirror, blow drier, electrical socket, argument outside, … regrets @ what she gave up … Ford very dismissive of legitimate concerns / of the time or plot point?” Those do all in fact come up again. I also noted a dog and her daughter going off to college, neither of which have much to do with the plot but get mentioned near the end.

              At two hours and ten minutes, it’s the longest movie I’ve watched so far for this series and unfortunately it feels like it. You could easily tighten up this movie by at least fifteen minutes and the last twenty-five minutes especially seem like they go on for at least twice that long. Almost the entire first hour is a colossal misdirect from what’s actually going on. This movie is an overt Hitchcock homage, with some direct visual lifts and a lot of attempts at the kind of suspense he specialized in, and while a lot of it is effective there ends up being so much movie that it all kind of mixes together. I don’t want to talk too much trash about the movie, it’s well-constructed and the acting is solid, it just wears out its welcome by the end.

              We’re also back in the territory of ‘ghost as metaphor,’ somewhat. The underlying theme of the movie is the abuse of women by the men around them. The ghost in the film spends her time seeking revenge, sure, but at least part of it is warning Pfeiffer’s character about what kind of man she married. Spoilers, turns out Harrison Ford is a sociopathic killer, and he plays a pretty good one. That’s why I included my notes, because as early as the fifteen-minute mark I was getting asshole vibes from him and they just compound over the course of the movie. Twenty-four years both is and is not a long time ago from a cultural standpoint, I wonder how many people at the original time of release flagged him as a bad husband and a bad guy before the big ending reveal? Kids these days would have put him down as borderline-abusive by the half hour mark.

              Ford and Pfieffer star as married couple Norman and Claire Spencer. He’s a scientist doing genetic research of some kind at a local university, she’s a former professional cellist who gave it up after they got married. She has a daughter from a previous marriage who gets packed off to school at the beginning of the film. For the first several scenes everything is portrayed as fairly harmonious, if a little sad as Claire’s missing her daughter. This gets disrupted a little by their new neighbors, who have a habit of holding screaming arguments out on their front lawn. One day Claire overhears the wife, Mary Feur, crying on the other side of their dividing fence. She asks if she’s all right and gets a jumble of words in response. When she tells Norman he blows off her concerns, saying people fight all the time and more importantly it’s none of their business. This is when I raised a little question mark above his character’s head that never did go away.

              Spookums officially start at the twenty-one minute mark when the ghost starts repeated openining the front door. It’s never really established what triggers the start of the ghostly visitations, they’ve been living in the house for about a year at this point and the ghost’s been dead for six months. Maybe it was being polite and waiting for the daughter to go away to college? The property is right next to a big ol’ lake and they have their own little dock jutting out onto it. After she fails to get their dog to fetch a ball she threw into the water (she wanted wet dog?), she starts fishing it out and glimpses a spooky face in the water! She later sees the face again in her bathtub. She tells all of this to Norman and the scene cuts with comedic timing to a therapy session. She clarifies she’s there are Norman’s insistence.

              While all of this is going on we get more setups for later payoffs: she visits Norman at work and some inserted dialogue and camera angles informs the audience that Norman has access to a short-term dissociative drug, their house is remote enough that there’s no cell phone reception until the middle of a bridge over the lake, and Claire was in a car accident about a year ago that caused her some memory loss. This all plays into the climax.

              During these spooky shenanigans Zemeckis is doing his best ‘Rear Window’ impression. The wife next door doesn’t show for a few days and Claire becomes convinced that her husband murdered her and it’s her ghost trying to make contact. Her friend comes over and they hold a little séance in the bathroom, after which the ghost writes the words ‘you know’ in the steam condensation on a mirror and types the initial MEF over and over again on her computer. The lady next door is named Mary Feur, and I’d like to take this opportunity to call bullshit on this coincidence. The murdered girl ends up being named Madison Elizabeth Frank and she typed out her initials at least fifteen times. Is it a rule that ghosts only get to use three of the letters on a keyboard when they’re reaching out from beyond the grave? Why not type “your husband killed me, check the lake?” Anyway Claire confronts the husband publicly and accuses him of killing his wife, whereupon he instantly produces her safe and sound.

              Pretty soon Claire is back obsessing over the ghost, much to Norman’s annoyance. It is to the movie’s credit that at no point did I get the sense that it was on Norman’s side. This film is very much from Claire’s perspective with Norman as a supporting character who eventually turns into the antagonist. Except for the very beginning, her husband is not portrayed as a particularly nice guy. It’s still Harrison Ford so he coasts on charm for a little while, but it soon becomes hard to ignore how much he undermines Claire just a little bit every time they have a conversation. There’s a nice understated runner where almost everyone mistakes Norman for his far more famous father. We even hear his side of phone conversations where he pauses then wearily corrects the person with, “No, that was my father.” It’s never directly addressed, but his need to feel important and special and his increasing annoyance at how Claire has needs and desires of her own, always taking his attention away from his important scientific work, makes his eventual reveal as a murderer click neatly into place. In a lot of ways his entire arc in the movie is grinding away at your nice-guy expectations of Ford until his turn to deadly sociopathy feels like it was inevitable.

              Other than some dated special effects there’s not a whole lot of specific criticisms I can give of the set pieces that make up the climax. Each one considered independently of the others is well-constructed and very effective. There are just so many of them. At a certain point I was sure we were moments from the credits, instead we had a good thirteen minutes to go. After possibly the scariest scene of someone checking call history ever, Norman doses Claire with that dissociative drug from early. That inserted dialogue was very careful to establish that 1: effects only last about five minutes and 2: the patient is fully awake the entire time. This allows Norman to monologue at her without any fear of interruption. It’s a good speech as he starts unburdening himself to her, finally dropping the act and casually justifying the murder he’s currently committing. Near the end he even implies he’s going to pursue her daughter romantically by using Claire’s death to get close to her. What I thought was the climax of the film is a very gripping sequence where Norman plops Claire down into the empty bathtub and starts filling it with water. He idly chats to her while it fills up and even leaves briefly to let the dog out. Pfeiffer does a lot of eye acting in this scene. When Norman leans down over her to remove a piece of evidence the ghost makes Claire’s face look all dead and zombie-like and he stumbles back in shock. He trips and nearly breaks his neck on the sink, leaving him bloody and unconscious on the floor. The next couple of minutes is spent watching Claire slowly getting her movement back while the water creeps ever upwards. We see Norman’s hand twitching every once in a while. It’s a very suspenseful scene and the closest the movie gets to coming close to Hitchcock.

              But apparently all ghosts movies need to end with the ghost taking direct revenge. Claire drains the tub and finally gets enough feeling back to crawl out of the tub, whereupon it’s revealed that Norman is gone! There’s this long sequence of a very wet Claire sneaking around the house. She manages to grab the wrong set of car keys and thus has to flee in a pickup truck with a boat attached on a trailer. There’s this sequence where Norman climbs over the boat to the back window of the truck and tries to get at her through the glass. Then we have all of these long, impossible single-take shots that were clearly stitched together digitally but which I’m sure were still a pain in the ass to shoot. The camera circles the truck, going in and out of the smashed windows, it’s very distracting and pulls you out of the scene as you wonder technically how they did that. The effect draws attention to itself in a way that deflates the tension. There’s a sudden stop that causes a board to jump forward and smash through the windscreen from behind, then they’re driving over that bridge and Claire manages to hit 911 moments before the whole thing goes into the lake. Norman starts to drown Claire but then the corpse of the woman he killed comes to life and gets him! Final shot of Claire at a grave in winter, the end.

              I don’t want to give the wrong impression, this is very much a three out of four stars movie. It’s too long with too many misdirects and it lacks a solid supporting cast, but Ford and Pfeiffer are very good in it. I’m not sure if this is the first time I’ve seen him play a bad guy, but by the end I bought it. Pfeiffer gets put through the ringer, and she’s soaked often enough in scenes that there were times when I was really hoping they kept the set warm for her. It’s hard to say how much my knowledge of the movies he was about to make colors my impression that Zemeckis was starting to lose that human touch that had added an extra spark to so many of his previous movies. I can’t fault the film on a technical level, every frame is pretty much immaculate with some amazing blocking and shot composition in the second half. Genuinely got me a couple of times with the whole ‘you close the door and there’s a person behind it’ bit. Not as much CGI as I feared and at least a couple of decent scares, almost none of which involved the ghost. I disagree with those contemporary reviewers who castigated Zemeckis for including the supernatural in his Hitchcock homage, Alfred would never, but I must admit I really would have liked seeing what kind of thriller he would have made at his peak.

House on Haunted Hill (1999)

               In 1998 industry heavyweights Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler combined their powers and formed Dark Castle Entertainment. The purpose of the venture was initially to remake old William Castle movies for modern audiences. Their first two films were remakes of ‘House on Haunted Hill’ and ‘Thirteen Ghosts,’ but then they started turning out original material with ‘Ghost Ship’ in 2002 and ‘Gothika’ in 2004. All four of these movies are going to be included in my write-ups for this month so I might as well get familiar with the people doing this to me. They turned out some decently high-profile films over the years including Guy Ritchie’s ‘RocknRolla’ in 2008 and Shane Black’s ‘The Nice Guys’ in 2016. The company originally had a distribution deal through Warner Brothers but starting in 2017 they began working with other groups like Paramount Pictures and Shudder. In 2015 the company was acquired by OEG Inc. (formerly Oilers Entertainment Group, which owns the hockey team of the same name). They’re still in operation, premiering the Christoph Walz and Lucy Lui starring ‘Old Guy’ just a few days ago (as of the time of writing) and readying ‘Last Breath’ starring Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu for next year.

Not a Tool video, honest.

              Since this was the first movie from a fledgling production company, one that was created specifically with William Castle remakes in mind, they set up a promotional gimmick in a direct nod to his old antics. They handed out scratch-off tickets in the theaters for a chance to win a prize to match the one offered to the characters in the film. This was the only time they attempted something like this for their Castle remakes as they thought about releasing the ‘Thirteen Ghosts’ remake in 3-D with special themed glasses but ended up scrapping those plans.

              The cast is a case where one prominent hire kind of leads to the rest. First to be signed was Geoffrey Rush as Steven Price, the name a clear nod to the original movie’s Frederick Loren as played by Vincent Price. Aside from a pencil-mustache Rush doesn’t really ape any of Vincent Price’s looks or mannerisms, but he’s generally pretty good in this. He was in this weird place as an actor where fans of independent and art-house movies knew who he was but he wasn’t yet a household name. His wife Evelyn is played by Famke Janssen, fresh off of ‘The Faculty’ and still a few years from the X-Men movies. Her character is very one-dimensional, but she plays that one dimension well. The guests lured to the murderous birthday party include Taye Diggs as Eddie, Peter Gallagher as Dr. Blackburn, Bridgette Wilson as Melissa Marr, and Ali Larter as Jennifer / Sara. Taye Diggs is on record as only signing on because Rush did, the rest were likely just happy to be working. There’s also Chris Kattan as the owner of the ghost house Watson Pritchett, and my deepest shame about this movie is that I think he’s pretty good here. He’s ostensibly comic relief but per the director they just kind of let him perform however he wanted and while he’s occasionally over the top the note he hits most often is a sarcastic resignation to his doom.

              This movie keeps the same basic premise as the original: a rich husband and wife hate each other and invite a group of guests to a haunted house for a party with a cash prize if they can stay the night. In the original it’s $10,000, here it’s $1,000,000. The occasion is Evelyn’s birthday, which Steven is bound and determined to ruin. She gives him a list of people to invite which he promptly throws out. After he types up another list we’re shown as the haunted house itself apparently hacks his computer and replaces the original names with five different ones. It’s soon established as a plot point that the house doesn’t have a phone line, so of course later when the partygoers are wondering where the list came from they decide that the house must have accessed Steven’s computer through the phone line. So this is not a very tight script. It doesn’t help that huge chunks of the movie were torn out to get it down to an hour and a half, causing a ton of continuity errors and plot points that come out of nowhere or dribble off into nothing. This issue will come up again.

              The house is worth discussing. It’s odd in the original but here it’s just preposterous. It’s supposedly a former hospital that’s been remodeled into a private residence. Between ‘The Haunted’ and this nobody wants believable haunted houses anymore, they want architecturally impossible edifices. The movie establishes both the backstory of the house and it’s hard-R rating right at the beginning with badly-faked newsreel footage from 1931 showing a mad doctor performing heinous experiments at the insane asylum he runs. We see fully-awake patients being cut into, hordes of dirty inmates pressed up against windows, surly staff members, then it all goes bad and they riot. We see orderlies being murdered, nurses being stripped and sexually assaulted, then the footage ends and it’s revealed that it’s being shown as part of a low-rent true-crime tv show hosted by Peter Graves. There’s no way any of that footage would either exist or be released to the public so minus one point for that. But then plus one for including Peter Graves, so I guess I’m officially neutral on this part of the movie.

              One of the functions of Kattan’s character Pritchett is to drop lore about the house, which he starts doing fairly early on. He’s the grandson of the architect who designed the original hospital, which means he somehow inherited it. That’s not how it works, but we’re moving on. The hospital was abandoned and then partially converted into a residence. Given the dimensions of the building both in the establishing shots and with the interiors we’re shown the house would be about the size of a hospital, because that’s what it fucking is. They also didn’t bother to do any maintenance or repairs on anything below the main floor for the past sixty-eight years, nor did any of the medical instruments or displays used in the documented medial atrocities get taken into custody for evidence or disposal. It’s eventually revealed that all of the electroshock machines are still plugged in and the various torture implements are just scattered around the rooms, easily accessible to anyone. The original has a big pit of acid just sitting around the basement with a simple wooden lid on top, which is also stupid, but it pales in comparison to the amount of jagged machinery and mossy rubble scattered around everywhere.

              The first ten minutes or so are spent introducing us to the characters of Steven and Evelyn, and while neither of them are particularly nice people they’re not portrayed as monsters quite yet. We learn they’re rich, they hate each other, and for some reason Evelyn wants her birthday party to be at this haunted house. Since she was watching the Peter Graves program and calls Steven to tell him to book that place specifically, I guess technically they both have time to scope the place out. Certainly someone had to have access to decorate the place and set out the party favors, I guess the ghosts just didn’t end up having any beefs with them. I should mention that the party favors consist of five guns, and I’d complain about the difficulty in getting those but there are rich assholes involved so it’s fine.

              Soon enough we’re introduced to our five guests. The script is almost clever here. Since they were invited by the house for reasons that get revealed later neither Steven nor Evelyn know who any of them are and suspect the other of inviting them. In the case of Dr. Blackburn that’s almost certainly true as he’s later revealed to be her secret lover and thus he wasn’t invited by the house. Which raises some immediate questions, since presumably he was on Evelyn’s original list of guests which should be confusing for her since her husband tossed it, and if he wasn’t on the ghost’s list and thus didn’t get the same invitation as everyone else how was he going to explain his presence if Steven demanded to know why he was there? About halfway through some of the guests work out that the house invited the descendants of the five survivors of the massacre in 1931, but since it didn’t invite Blackburn that’s only four people. Did someone not have any kids? Did the others only have one descendant each? As hopefully becomes clear in this write up not a lot of careful thought was put into any plot points.

I'd party there.

              Within fifteen minutes everyone has arrived inside the house. By eighteen minutes Evelyn’s shrugged off very nearly getting killed by a spontaneously broken overhead window. By twenty-five we’ve established everyone’s personalities, we learn that the Prices really do hate each other and genuinely want each other dead, and that Steven has one of his tech guys in the basement monitoring the security cameras (he will factor into the movie in exactly one way, and that’s by the shock reveal of his corpse). Then at minute twenty-six something triggers the hospital’s old shutdown protocol and everyone is stuck inside overnight with no ability to leave. This is where they establish there’s no outside phone lines and there’s no cell reception. Roughly the next hour is taken up by people running around, yelling at each other, and occasionally dying.

              What seems to be the main character is Ali Larter as supposedly Jennifer Jenzen but secretly her former assistant Sara Wolfe. The way the film treats her ends up accidentally being a good illustration about how the inclusion or exclusion of scenes can drastically change a movie. Originally the movie had an additional scene before everyone arrives at the house featuring Debi Mazar as the real Jennifer Jenzen. She’s shown as a comically abusive film producer who receives the invitation and immediately afterwards fires Sara. Stung by her sudden unemployment, Sara reads the invitation detailing a chance to win a million bucks and decides to pretend to be her former boss. This is supposed to be an important plot point because that means that her character isn’t really a descendant of one of the original hospital survivors. You’d think this would keep the house from attacking her, but nope. Including this early scene would’ve primed the audience to see her as our viewpoint character as she’s not a member of the rich and famous. Instead, in the final version she just shows up along with everyone else and seems to randomly get more screen time. This cut also forced them to wrestle some b-roll and ADR lines into the form of a scene between Sara and Taye Digg’s Eddie where they can establish her real name. As far as I can tell he’s the only person she ever admits this to but don’t worry, everyone calls her Sara for the rest of the movie. Since that early scene with the producer was cut they also had to cut the post-credits stinger featuring a ghost luring the real Jennifer Jenzen to the house as it would no longer make sense, which is why Debi Mazar is just out of the film entirely.

              The last two-thirds of the movie is just people running around in various combinations and every once in a while people die. First Sara, Eddie, Steven, and Pritchard go down into the basement to look for a way to end the lockdown. This gives the production a chance to show off the spooky basement they built. There are all sorts of dead bodies on display, wires running over walls, dripping faucets, faulty lights, it’s a regular haunted house down there. Sara and Eddie get separated from the other two and she gets tricked by a ghost pretending to be Eddie into almost falling into a big vat of blood. Nobody’s that surprised that there’s an open vat of uncongealed blood. After a sudden cut everyone’s back upstairs and comparing notes. I’m not kidding when I say this film feels like it was severely hacked apart to get the time down far enough to squeeze in another showing per night. In fact, while discussing another cut scene involving Sara the director admits that the only reason it’s not in the final movie was that they had to get the length down. It would not surprise me that a full fifteen minutes at least was shaved off to get it closer to 90 minutes.

              Meanwhile Melissa is wandering through the basement looking for spooky footage. Either she went down there after everyone came back up or they just missed each other, it’s not important. The late 90’s really didn’t like ambitious women, so Melissa is portrayed as some kind of grasping fame whore for trying to scrounge up some footage to restart her tv career. Boy, the last twenty years have really done a number on what people do and don’t consider selling out, haven’t they? She’s got this bulky consumer grade camera that she has to hold at a weird angle because the entire back is a display screen. Looking through said screen she sees some doctors performing surgery on a screaming patient, but when she lowers the camera and looks herself they’re gone! She takes another look and we see the ghosts notice her and turn their heads to look right down the camera lens. It might be the only genuinely creepy moment in the film. Anywho she’s dead now and the rest find her camera in a pool of blood. Sara intones that the house must have taken her.

              Then a bunch more nonsense happens. Everyone has guns at this point and they start pointing them at each other. Steven goes down to check with his tech guy and finds that the front of his head has been scooped out. He never tells anyone this, by the way, so nobody but him is aware that anyone’s died for another few scenes. He spots the ghost of the evil doctor from 1931 on the security monitors and decides that his wife has hired someone to run around and kill people. I’m actually guessing about that, his actions don’t make a whole lot of sense from this point forward. The lights flicker and everyone makes it to the old electroshock therapy room at the same time to witness Evelyn’s supposed electrocution. Poor Famke Janssen really has to whip herself around in those restraints. After they manage to switch it off Blackburn confirms she’s dead. Steven whips out his gun and demands to know who killed his wife. Everyone else subdues him and sticks him in an old chamber for overstimulating patients.

You think actors ever just feel silly?

              It’s soon revealed that Blackburn and Evelyn faked her death in an effort to sow enough panic among the party guests that one of them would shoot Steven. Since they didn’t know about the death of the teach guy and therefore couldn’t predict that Steven would already be on edge enough to pull out a gun, did they just hope really hard that everyone would not only blame him for the death of the wife he publicly hated but also instantly execute him? This plan isn’t a whole lot more developed in the original film, to be fair. Evelyn decides they’re not scaring people enough and instantly stabs Blackburn. She cuts off his head, releases an unconscious Steven from his containment, and plants Backburns’ severed head nearby. Which I must admit is a much better plan to get Steven killed.

              Soon enough Sara shoots Steven and Evelyn gloats over his dead body, but surprise Steven had a bulletproof vest on! Turns out he knew all about their plans as he’d been spying on them and their conversation for months. I went back and checked, Blackburn’s name wasn’t on the invitation list that Steven wrote up. So when Blackburn showed up did he think it was proof that Evelyn was the one who’d invited everyone? Seems like something the script should have maybe addressed? The married couple wrassle a bit and end up barging into the room that a couple of shots earlier in the movie had established as the really spooky place. There’s a black amorphous blob of some sort waiting inside that Pritchard had helpfully referred to as ‘The Darkness’ and it eats Evelyn. Steven stumbles back in shock as the blackness spills out of the room into the rest of the house.

              The last ten minutes of the movie are spent with the remaining cast running away from and being eaten by The Darkness until there’s only Sara and Eddie left. Prichard’s spirit lets them out of an attic window and they crawl out onto an outside ledge. It’s daytime and the safety shutter thuds shut behind them, so I guess that means they’re safe. It’d be weird if the movie had shown us on screen earlier in the movie that the house was able to affect the world far outside itself, much less people who are actively sitting on top of it. They find the envelope containing five checks for $1,000,000 each made out to cash wedged beneath the safety shutter, because why not. As the movie ends as the camera pulls back to reveal they’re perched high above the ocean with no way down.

              The actual ending stinger of the movie is more newsreel footage of Steven and Evelyn being tortured by the old-timey medical ghosts, presumably for all eternity. Which seems a bit unfair in the case of Steven. He certainly wasn’t a nice guy and it’s admittedly implied that he killed some of his previous wives, but Evelyn mercilessly stabbed a man to death and cut off his head, maybe save your eternal torture for the ones who really deserve it, house.

              The movie cost $36 million and brought in $81 million, adjusted, proving the entire conceit behind Dark Castle Entertainment worked. It earned ferociously bad reviews, and I do think it earned them. If ‘The Haunting’ failed by being too big and bombastic to be as stupid as it was, this fails by being too mean and tawdry to be as stupid as it is. It’s not particularly scary or even gory, the guy without a face is probably the only relatively gross visual. The film feels like it’s been edited too close to the bone, like the scenes crowd into each other in an effort to get themselves over with. Edits seem to cut in the middle of actions and there’s very little continuity of either direction or motion. The script leaves tons of plot threads dangling and never pursued, but that could also be the fault of the hatchet job it took to get the length down. I didn’t enjoy it, but it didn’t offend me as a waste of resources like ‘The Haunting’ did. And we get Jeffrey Combs as the evil Dr. Richard Benjamin Vannacutt, it’s hard to be entirely mad at a movie including him.

 

Late Addendum: I also watched the original, so here’s a super quick review: Vincent Price is great, the age gap between his wife and the doctor she was having an affair with made me somewhat uncomfortable, I call complete bullshit on that scene with the spooky length of rope, the puppet skeleton was too wacky no matter how hard they tried to sell it, and even though it’s less than 75 minutes it still had way too much padding and far too little plot. Still better than the remake.

Stir of Echoes (1999)

               This is another movie with some tenuous ties to a film I’ve already covered. In this case the movie is based on a novel by Richard Matheson, as was ‘The Legend of Hell House.’ This made me finally take a good look at his credits and apparently I’ve seen already a bunch of movies he’s been involved with one way or another, including ‘House of Usher,’ ‘Night of the Eagle,’ ‘What Dreams May Come,’ and, uh, ‘Jaws 3-D.’ He wrote a bunch of classic Twilight Zone episodes, as well 1971’s ‘Duel’ and ‘The Night Strangler,’ the sequel movie to ‘The Night Stalker.’ Considering how much of a seminal figure in mid-20^th century genre literature he is I’m starting to get a little embarrassed I wasn’t familiar with him before.

              This movie came about because director and writer David Koep was a fan of Matheson and wanted to do a horror movie. Koep had only recently made the turn to directing, having been a decently successful screenwriter since the late 80’s. He’d written or co-written movies such as ‘Death Becomes Her,’ ‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘Carito’s Way,’ and ‘Snake Eyes.’ His first full-length directorial effort was ‘The Trigger Effect’ in 1996, a thriller about chaos in southern California following a power outage. He still a very successful figure in Hollywood with something of a mixed record: on the one hand he wrote the screenplay for the first Sam Raimi ‘Spider-Man,’ on the other he directed the Johnny Depp vehicle ‘Mortdecai.’ In box office terms this movie made back roughly double its production budget of $12 million, which by Hollywood accounting practice means it just about broke even.

              I’m happy to say the cast in the movie is great across the board. The lead is Tom Witzky as played by Kevin Bacon, at the time unaware that in a scant fourteen years he’d be forced to appear in a whole 45 episodes of “The Following.” His wife Maggie is played by Kathryn Erbe, two years away from starting her run of 144 episodes of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” so if nothing else she’s set for life now. Their son Jake is played by Zachary David Cope, who pulls off a pretty solid performance for a five-year-old. This was his last credited performance, so hopefully he’s doing ok. Minor characters are played by some great character actors including Kevin Dunn as their neighbor Frank and Illeana Douglas as Maggie’s amateur hypnotist sister Lisa.

              Going from ‘The Haunting’ to this was like coming up for air. Despite having a budget fully 85% smaller this film has so much more life to it. Instead of a series of cavernous soundstages assembled into a single house through editing we have some brownstones in a middle-class neighborhood in Chicago. Instead of a bunch of strangers with sketched-in backstories we have two specifically drawn main characters and the people that surround them. Instead of CGI goop dripping everywhere we have classic in-camera effects along with some simple compositing. The plot is always heading somewhere and every payoff was carefully planted before. It’s a very grounded story about characters we care about.

              It also has a spooky kid that’s not the entire focus of the movie, which might be a first. As the movie opens it seems like it’s going to be about Jake as it’s established pretty quickly that he’s been talking to ghosts. The movie does something that’s equal parts clever and discomforting as the kid directly addresses the camera during the opening credits, both asking questions and responding to answers while looking straight down the lens. All of the imagery puts us on edge: he’s taking a bath, his dad’s in the next room plinking on his guitar and not paying enough attention, you’re braced for a zombie hand to come out of the tub and pull him under, but instead he just weirds out his parents as they put him to bed.

              The next couple of scenes do a great job nutshelling their domestic situation. Maggie’s friend Lisa is visiting and lets slip to Tom that his wife is pregnant. This is news to him and he’s very conflicted about it. He tells his wife that he’s happy about it, but then admits that he’s a little ashamed of his current job as a telephone lineman, that he wasn’t lying early in their relationship when he said he’d amount to more in life. This is a slender thread that winds through the movie and has a slight payoff. Maggie stresses to him that she’s fine with who he is and it’s made clear that their relationship is pretty solid but under some stress.

              Soon they leave Jake upstairs with a baby monitor and head over to the house across the street to attend a neighborhood party. This puts the audience on edge as both the characters and the camera are always glancing at the baby monitor and across the street to make sure the kid’s still all right. At the party we meet some minor characters who get involved in the plot later and the film also establishes that Lisa fancies herself a hypnotist. A drunk and edgy Tom insists she try it out on him and, as they say, he gets more than he bargained for. During the hypnosis scenes the movie uses a neat device where we see the visualizations suggested to him by Lisa. He’s in a theater, reads the word ‘sleep’ up on the screen, and gets some visual flashes of his house and some implied violence and then he starts awake. He has tears on his face and everyone around hm is laughing and having a good time. The party gets deeply uncomfortable when everyone realizes just how deeply he was hypnotized and that he doesn’t remember anything. He apparently talked about a guy who used to beat him up in high school and even stuck a safety pin through the skin between his thumb and forefinger. He demands they go home, clearly shaken.

Sure, I'd be worried too.

              Over the next few days he starts to see and hear things, which is where our ghost story comes in. Even when he’s having sex with Maggie he keeps getting flashes of plastic wrapping and a house under renovation and it’s starting to freak him out. He’s also always thirsty and over the course of the movie just keeps constantly necking water and orange juice. This is never really explained, by the way, but in a way that seems deliberate. I guess I just accept ambiguity more when the script is obviously well-written and thought out, I can accept no explanation if its clear that the characters never get one either. He wanders downstairs to calm himself down and while he’s sitting on the couch suddenly there’s a teenage ghost girl sitting next to him. She vanishes and after he looks around, confused, Jake comes down to see how he is. The kid feels his temple and tells him not to be afraid, he’s awake now. The next day he angrily calls Lisa to ask what else she did to him, and she protests that all she did was tell him to be open to new experiences, to tear down any internal walls he’d been hiding behind.

              The rest of the movie turns into a decently put-together mystery as Tom tries to figure out what’s going on with him and what the scary ghost girl wants. The ghost is played by a very young Jennifer Morrison, by the way, still a good five years from her stint on “House.” I like the way the story keeps itself restricted to this one ghost. It doesn’t expand to some crazy conspiracy, it doesn’t rope in serial killers or historical atrocities, there happens to be a ghost in the house that Tom lives in and when she realizes that he can see her she starts haunting him. Her death ends up being just as small and mean as most actual murders and her desire for revenge isn’t painted as noble.

              One thing about the movie that I really enjoyed is that it’s as interested about how what’s going on supernaturally affects both Tom and Maggie and their marriage as it is the spooks themselves. It doesn’t really focus on Jake as he’s pretty static throughout the movie. He’s off to the side being vaguely creepy sometimes, but for the most part he’s just trying to be helpful. The movie is much more interested in how suddenly having vague psychic abilities upends Tom’s entire life and how Maggie reacts and tries to understand. It also has both of them aware that supernatural stuff is real relatively early, so we don’t have many scenes where he has to try to convince his wife that he’s not imagining this stuff. Instead she’s caught in this terrible middle place where she knows what’s going on is real but absolutely hates what it’s doing to her husband.

              Kevin Bacon got all of the actorly kudos at the time of release. Just about every review of this I’ve run across does two things: it bemoans how this movie got lost in the aftermath of the success of ‘The Sixth Sense’ and mentions that Bacon does some of the best work of his career. And he’s very good here, when we first meet Tom he’s this working-class guy with a solid job and a wife he loves but who is clearly yearning after some kind of higher artistic expression. That’s probably a good chunk of why Maggie fell for him, this little something extra that maybe the other guys in the neighborhood didn’t have. When he first starts having psychic flashes he’s angry and scared, initially ignoring them and when that doesn’t work demanding that Lisa make them stop.

              The movie turns a corner one night when they decide to use a new babysitter. At Jake’s suggestion they hire a girl named Debbie, who turns out to be the sister of the ghost girl. As they’re leaving Tom keeps getting these red filters overlaid on his vision every time he looks at her. All the way to the baseball game they’re attending he keeps seeing the color red and hearing a buzzing noise. While he starts to panic, back at the house Debbie overhears Jake talking to Samantha and demands to know where she is. Tom finally loses his nerve as they’re about to enter the stadium and starts running back to check on Jake just as Debbie bundles him out of the house. Tom and Maggie arrive home to discover their son is missing. Then Tom starts following the red lights. Maggie follows, desperately asking him what they’re doing, and they catch up to Debbie at a train station. Apparently her mom works there and she was bringing Jake to talk to her. She brandishes a picture of the missing Samantha at everyone and Tom recognizes the ghost he saw. He declines to press charges, surprising everyone, and they go home. From this point on Tom is semi-obsessed and then completely obsessed with discovering what happened to the missing girl. Maggie, meanwhile, is worried about what this is doing to her family while also being aware that what Tom is experiencing is important.

The man has had a day.

              I really want to commend the movie for not sidelining Kathryn Erbe and her character Maggie. In a lot of movies if the focus wasn’t on the son it’d be on his dad, and while Tom probably gets the most screen time Maggie has a lot to do as well. As the only one of the three without psychic powers she complains to Lisa that she feels excluded from whatever’s going on with Tom and Jake. Her constant worrying about her husband missing work and sleeping on the couch waiting for the ghost to come back could come across as nagging, but his actions are so clearly escalating and her reactions so grounded and reasonable that I was torn between supporting both of them the entire time.

              She also has an odd subplot where she takes Jake to the park where they come across a police funeral. One of the officers attending notices that Jake has the gift and that she doesn’t. He guesses that he got it from his father and offers Maggie a business card with an address for where a group of like-minded people are meeting. I expected this to take over the last half of the movie but it’s really just a digression. Maggie shows up at the meeting instead of Tom, much to the officer’s annoyance. He briefly explains to her how ghosts work, that they have something they want and once they latch on to someone they don’t go away until they get it. It’s useful to the audience and it gives Maggie some agency but I can’t help but think this entire subplot could have been cut with very little effort.

              I’m not going to spoil the ending entirely but I’m glad that it is, generally speaking, a happy one. The bad guys get theirs and the ghost leaves, satisfied. It reconfirms that Tom and Maggie still love each other and even has something of a question mark final sting with Jake. There was a mostly in-name-only sequel in 2007 where a recast Jake is a minor character, but considering it’s a Sci-Fi Channel original starring Rob Lowe I’m not in a hurry to check that one out. For a lot of these movies I can spiral off into tangents or dwell on parts of the script that don’t make sense, here I don’t have much to either complain about or dig into for my own amusement. Instead I had to give it a bunch of compliments, oh woe is me. While I’m certainly not arguing this is a perfect movie it’s one of the most solid and well-put-together films I’ve covered this month. Outside of October I don’t watch a whole lot of horror movies so if I wasn’t putting this list together there’s a good chance I never would have seen this, which would have been a real shame.

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.