Review of The Haunting (1963) by Kevin N — 09 Oct 2011

One of the most frightening films of all time, a true horror classic that uses sound and gripping camerawork to create one of cinema's most unforgettable nightmares. Robert Wise was known for his flexibility, working across genres for many decades.

He is mostly remembered for his musicals ('The Sound of Music', 'West Side Story') but, like the great Jacques Tourneur, he grew his wings under the taught productions of great horror producer Val Lewton.

With Lewton he learned the importance of big scares built with small elements, the effectiveness of a simple sound and offscreen terror. Though 'The Haunting' is a much bigger production than 'The Body Snatcher', it is built with the same technique.

This begins like other haunted house films of the period but grows atypical when it begins to resist explanation and plausibility; while most other pictures in the genre spent their time unravelling logical answers to their scares (and thus not leaving us with any), this film only travels deeper and deeper into darkness.

Wise isn't afraid to ask his audience for complete suspended belief. Julie Harris is wonderful as the lost woman in search of a home; she wanders through the house with a childlike purpose at first, but as the film goes on she becomes wickedly deceptive.

Her voiceover, which starts off sounding like a ripoff of Marion Crane's, becomes complex as the plot thickens, and by the end it is nearly impossible to decipher what in the film is supernatural and what is madness.

There are many scary scenes built around offscreen menace, but perhaps none in the history of the genre is more terrifying than the one in this film in which the women are shaken out of sleep by an approaching, pounding unknown, trapped in a bedroom trying to cling to their sanity.

It is as good as the genre gets. It is sublime.