From the scariest novel I have ever read, Shirley Jackson's 1959 classic "The Haunting of Hill House," producer/director Robert Wise & Co. were able to create, four years later and to their eternal credit, the most chilling film I have ever seen: "The Haunting." This picture has been sending ice water down my spinal cord for many decades now, and last night, as I watched it for at least the dozenth time with undiminished chills, I tried to figure out just why. The film, in which a quartet of researchers spends a few nights at the famously haunted New England pile known as Hill House, features nothing per se that is frightening; no visible ghosts, no materializations, no violence or murders. Rather, through sheer power of suggestion and use of the cinematic arts, viewers are made to feel the eeriness and evil of this abode. Or ARE we? The picture is oh-so cleverly ambiguous, as was Jackson's novel, and it IS just possible that all the strange manifestations in the house (the bangings, the whisperings, the bulging doors) are rather being caused by one of the four researchers, spinster Eleanor Lance (Vance in the book...why the change?), supremely well played by Julie Harris. (Harris' interior monologues are perhaps the picture's single scariest element.) Richard Johnson as head researcher Dr. Markway (Montague in the book...again, why the change?), Claire Bloom as the (subtly inferred lesbian) ESP practitioner, and Russ Tamblyn as the house's brash young owner, all excel in their roles here; Wise's direction is masterful and impeccable; Nelson Gidding's screenplay is both ingenious and witty; and Humphrey Searle's score gives me goosebumps every time I think of it. Filmed in gorgeously creepy B&W and featuring Oscar-worthy art/set decoration, the picture is truly brilliant in every department. As the original trailer so correctly put it, "You may not believe in ghosts, but you can't deny terror." Like the book on which it is based, "The Haunting" is a genuine work of art.
Review of The Haunting
