I Hear You Knockin', but You Most CERTAINLY Can't Come In: A Shivery Remembrance of The Haunting

By Kevin Renick

Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. 
— Dr. John Markway in The Haunting, 1963

What scares you? Don't think about it too much, just...what makes your hands go clammy, your heart go boom BOOM boom, and your nights go...sleepless? The depraved human mind doing depraved things? Large carnivorous creatures springing randomly from the woods or deep water? Wicked, undead things that may or may not get their marching orders from Satan?

I've been scared by ALL of these things at one time or another, although the sight of a one-inch-long brown spider on my bed will send me leaping in panic faster than virtually anything. And a misunderstanding with a former girlfriend had me driving a faulty car like a Jeep in Jurassic Park, trying to reach her in time, so I could explain what really HAPPENED, y'know? But what truly scares most of us, I'm guessing, is the unknown. Sounds or images that evoke a SENSE of something not identifiable or comprehensible lurking uncomfortably close...that's what has done me in quite a few times. Movies such as The Exorcist, The Ring and Paranormal Activity are all guilty as charged. But my awareness of how positively unsettling a movie could be certainly started with the original The Haunting, a movie based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House. It starred Richard Johnson, Julie Harris, Claire Bloom and Russ Tamblyn. The film generated fear by IMPLYING all sorts of nasty things. You didn't have to see much to be terrified.

The sight of a "diseased house" (as Johnson's character Dr. Markway calls it) deep in the woods of New England with strange windows that seemed to stare right at YOU, was foreboding enough. Add in the house’s countless desolate rooms, a dangling metal staircase, a courtyard with lifelike statues of the ill-fated Crane family, and the stone-faced caretaker Mrs. Dudley explaining that "no one will come any nearer...in the night…in the dark" when the visitors ask about maid service, and you have an atmosphere pulsing with tension. But it's the SOUNDS that got me the most in this movie. Footsteps in the hallway at night. Thunderous banging on walls and ceilings. Moaning sounds from adults and children. And most devastatingly, the simple sound of a doorknob turning. When it's night and everyone has gone to bed, who…in the WORLD could be slowly trying to open the door from the other side? And therein lies the FUN-damental frights of this movie. Someone is in that house with Eleanor, Theodora, Dr. Markway and Luke. Someone able to scrawl scary writing way above a doorway. Someone able to take over the wheel of a car at the worst possible moment. Someone able to hold your hand at night. While you’re alone in your bed. It's the stuff of nightmares, truly.

The Haunting was a black and white movie directed by Robert Wise way back in 1963. Only a few years later Mr. Wise gave us that famous film in which an affable nun sings, "These are a few of my favorite things" and dances on a mountaintop. No one has any favorite things in this movie (they're all pretty much bad news), and the only "dancing" occurs when Julie Harris (Eleanor) glides and sways among the statues in that courtyard, until a ghastly wind whips up the implied ghost of Hugh Crane, apparently wanting to partner her. Nothing is ever explained in a way that gives comfort. Dr. Markway tries, but he’s so busy getting his "researchers" to stir up ghosties that he fails to see how fast Eleanor is deteriorating until it's too late. Course, he's not exactly in control anyway...whatever is hanging out in this monstrous mansion is adept at putting Markway and Luke at one end of the house, while the two women find themselves at the other end, holding on to each other for dear life as unknown entities test the strength of the walls and doors with their...whatever passes for appendages I suppose. To sum up, it's just NOT good. And The Haunting has a spooky way of heightening the fear by making architectural details look like grotesque faces that can only be glimpsed for a few seconds.

The film makes fear itself an exhausting, losing proposition. That is certainly the case for Eleanor, our heroine. She can't understand why she’s being picked on, why SHE is the center of attention. Her vulnerability becomes a prime element in this movie, accelerating the action. What's scarier than that? Eleanor is already depressed at the beginning of the movie, a woman with painful memories of her family. She mistakenly thinks that “getting away” to Hill House will bring her a new kind of freedom. You root for this woman; there’s a sweetness beneath her tortured exterior, and she’s taken with Dr. Markway in a way that shows her romantic loneliness. But Lordy, she’s provoked whatever stirs in that hellish house—and they want her to become a permanent resident. 

The music score of the film (by Humphrey Searle) is not overly sophisticated but it's damn effective. Eerie passages that are close-to-pretty and vaguely nostalgic compete with icky bursts of brass. A sparse piano helps convey the sense of growing dread.

A bit of welcome comedy supplied by Russ Tamblyn's shallow, skeptical character comes to a dead halt after one too many terrifying events occur. "Doc," he says to Markway after a climactic moment. "I'll let you have this place cheap." There isn't much joy in The Haunting. It's about imperfect people with a mostly unhelpful sensitivity plunged into a dwelling drowning in bad mojo. It was a template film, a showcase for the vulnerable competing with the supernatural with the final score not even getting CLOSE to a draw. Some things are better left alone and DEAD, thank you.

As a child, this movie spooked the crap out of me. Usually when I watched a scary movie with my family, I wasn’t too expressive. My default response was to shift positions...I'd sit on the couch for a while, then move to the floor, then go back to the couch. Sometimes I'd sit closer to one of my sisters, especially Therese. Her "fear factor" was as developed as mine. So was Dad's. My mom typically wanted NO part of any horror or intense suspense movie. But man, the rest of us...we'd get wigged out but GOOD.

Weird sounds heard through thick walls always freaked me out, but the relentless sense of dark history and doomed characters in The Haunting left the most disturbing impression. I got a quiet sense of walls and windows WATCHING me, without having to actually SEE an apparition. In the old days, movies could just hint at a malevolent presence. Nowadays, you gotta witness the dang thingie to get your chills, apparently. We’ve lost something in the process. The spirit of these movies (pun intended) has changed irrevocably. I can’t name a scene in any recent cinematic ghost story as memorable as the one in which Eleanor tells Theodora to STOP grasping her hand so tightly, and then she opens her eyes to see her roommate sleeping in a bed clear across the room. The music tumbling over itself in this six-second scene is grippingly effective.

The showcase climactic sequence, when the entire cast is gathered in the Nursery, the so-called “heart of the house,” is among the most suspenseful sequences of that era. To see a door physically bending and some unseen force testing the top of that door, with Tamblyn visibly losing his practiced air of indifference, was utterly chilling. 

I could not sleep after the first couple of times I experienced this film. Once it was in my head that there are incomprehensible THINGIES out there that were not my friends, I was never quite the same. For a long time, the dark corridors and nocturnal sounds of that awful house in The Haunting spawned pure dread. Eleanor’s increasingly unhinged emotional state, existed in a realm of perception that I didn't want to visit too often. And yet I felt inexplicably drawn back.  I might have lost a night’s sleep, but a year later when the film was broadcast again (in those days we had to WAIT for the next showing on TV), my neighborhood friends and I would plan a ritual "frightfest" once again, looking to repeat the entrancing fear of the last viewing. There is something so memorable about that ritual. Group energy can definitely UP the tension: friends go quiet as suspense builds, they might grab your arm if you're sitting nearby, or sometimes there's an audible groan or even a shriek. Everyone has their own reaction, and the sheer uncertainty of this can make the pay-off moments more potent.

In later years, when I became harder to scare, I found myself admiring the stark cinematography and utter bleakness of the script for The Haunting as a classic ghost story. These tales often feature a nameless, possibly formless entity that you can’t quite focus on within the shadows, and if you got a good look at it, you might never be the same. I vividly remember the nightmares induced by my sister Therese's dramatic narration of a ghost story called "Slipdrag”. Paralyzing fear resulted from this, seriously. The tale of some indescribable entity inside a suburban home stalking two children and their babysitter late one night is the same kind of universal terror evoked in the most suspenseful moments in The Haunting.

It’s said that “what we don’t know can’t hurt us,” but we all have some doubt about that, right? And though the nuanced chills of Robert Wise’s film might make audiences shrug these days, those of us who were kids back then will never forget it. It’s genuinely a “haunting” film in many ways. And it’s a reminder that the primal fear of the unknown endures, in almost all cultures. You can never be TOO confident or TOO cocky. Especially in the night. In the dark…