The Haunting

Many years ago little nutshell asked Mommy and Daddy for permission to stay up and watch this movie. He soon regretted it, as this bone-chilling ghost story nearly caused the young lad to soil his shorts, and it would be several more days until he could fall asleep with the lights out. Even today, I can't watch this movie in an empty house with the lights off. It's just too damn scary. Robert Wise had one of the most varied and distinguished directorial careers in Hollywood history, and he understood very well that psychologically speaking, what you can't see can hurt you. An imaginative viewer will almost always fill in a blank with something far more horrible than what the director could show on screen. This is a formula that has be...

And whatever walked there, walked alone.

The Haunting is directed by Robert Wise and adapted to screenplay by Nelson Gidding from the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House. It stars Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn and Lois Maxwell. Music is by Humphrey Searle and cinematography by David Boulton.

Hill House has a troubled history, death, either by accident or by suicide, has occurred there over the years. Today, Dr. Markway, an anthropologist and investigator of paranormal activity, leads a team of four for a stay at Hill House, where they will stay for a period of time in the hope that Markway can prove something paranormal resides there…

The haunted house premise has been a staple for horror fi...

A simple film with a basic script, but which scares us in such a way that it still has an influence on horror productions today.

Movies about haunted houses? Whoever saw one of them, saw them all right? I like to think not. And this film is probably the grandfather of a good number of them! Currently forgotten due to the passage of time, the film had a much weaker remake in 1999, and I believe that it is itself a rewrite of House on Haunted Hill, released three years earlier, in 1959, and which also has already deserved a new production in recent years. The impact of this film on the industry and horror genre was notable and continues to have some echoes.

The story begins by introducing us to Hill House, a fateful mansion shrouded...

The wealthy "Crain" builds a gothic mansion in a remote part of New England where he plans to house his new wife and daughter. Mysteriously, she doesn't survive long enough to ever move in and as we skip forward almost a century, we find the house bleak and run-down and now inherited by a distant relative of the daughter. It's this house that "Dr. Markway" (Richard Johnson) is determined to investigate. He has convinced the new owner "Mrs Sannerson" (Fay Compton) to allow him and his team to try to prove or disprove for once and for all whether there are such things as ghosts! This house will be the ideal venue for his work and assisted by her rather feckless nephew "Luke" (Russ Tamblyn) as well as the spiritual medium "Theodora" (Clare Blo...