“Hill House had stood for ninety years and might stand for ninety more. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House. And whatever walked there, walked alone.”
Robert Wise’s THE HAUNTING is an exceptional gothic tone poem and a masterclass in restraint, based of course on Shirley Jackson’s classic novel, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE. It’s the perfect intersection of timeless ghost story and very modern premise. The house is old and comes with a long, tragic history, as every great haunted house needs.
That’s paired with the new age fascination with the paranormal and “proving” the existence of ghosts. More than anything, though, THE HAUNTING is about a woman named Nell who is a ghost in her own life, starved for attention not for attention’s sake, but rather because she needs to be seen, to be witnessed at all times to prove to herself that she exists, because she is absolutely petrified that she doesn’t. She’ll constantly do things like repeat her own name, who she is, things about herself, as if forcing herself to believe them because she is so dissociative. This is the story of a personified house and a de-personified woman. Her own story matches up so well to the house’s past, it’s easy to see why the house wants her, IF it wants her.
Part of the genius of THE HAUNTING is that you really don’t see anything, little supernatural touches like the walls breathing, but it’s mostly sound, and that’s it. Whether the house really is haunted is surprisingly accepted by the end considering that you really don’t see anything to objectively prove it throughout the movie. It could easily not be. But the feel of the place, the atmosphere and what it does to a person, that is real enough. There are so many layers to THE HAUNTING, from the subtextual-yet-overt closeted lesbianism to the slightly askew cinematography. It’s so paranoid, gothic and gloomy that it’s absolutely a must watch around the Halloween season for me. especially.