You might categorize this post as “Get Off My Lawn” material, but they just don’t make horror movies like they used to. Actually, let me rephrase that. They don’t make supernatural horror very well anymore.
When I say supernatural horror, I mean your bread-and-butter stuff like ghost stories and haunted houses. What I’m not talking about are films that derive their scares from cheap startles, gross-outs or the latest crop of torture porn like Saw 23 or Hostel 14 (full disclaimer: I actually quite enjoyed the original Saw, but that’s beside the point). And don’t get me started on the unfortunate trend of remaking horror classics like The Thing, The Amityville Horror, Psycho, or even the film I’m featuring in this article. A shot-for-shot remake of Psycho? According to Webster’s, that’s the very definition of pointless. Look it up.
I believe a scary movie should frighten you on an emotional level, something that crawls into your brain and makes you turn on every light in the house for weeks after seeing it. Let’s face it, you’re not likely to run into a psychotic madman who forces you to solve deadly puzzles, but who’s to say that noise in the attic isn’t a spectral ghost bride? Huh?
Which brings me to the subject of this post. One of my favorite scary movies of all time is the 1963 black-and-white classic, The Haunting. It’s a pretty simple haunted house story. A paranormal investigator invites three guests to spend the night in a reputed haunted mansion in an attempt to hopefully find some proof of the supernatural. As they learn more about the history of the house, strange things start to happen, and one particularly susceptible guest seems to be attracting the house’s attention.
I know what you’re thinking. Ugh, a black-and-white horror ‘classic’ from the sixties. No thanks. I would urge you to give it a chance. What makes this movie so scary is not lavish budgets, blood-and-gore or nifty CGI effects. It’s about good story, dialogue, and most of all, amazing sound design.
If you watched The Haunting with the sound muted, you might hardly realize it’s a ghost story at all. It’s the sound track that gives it life. The whispers, the moans, sounds of a baby crying and ear-splitting crashes and banging provide far more scares than chainsaw-wielding nut jobs. This film is more of a cerebral scare; you never really see anything happening. But you hear it. You can feel it. The true horror is left up to your imagination, which can conjure up far, far worse than any Hollywood screenwriter.
The film is based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House. I’ve not read it (yet), but by all accounts the film is fairly faithful to the book. Even though I love and recommend this movie, do not confuse it with the 1999 remake starring Owen Wilson and Liam Neeson. Helmed by Speed director Jan De Bont, this version was a big-budget, big-star, CGI-laden abortion that has very little in common with the original film, much less the novel they’re both based on.
In this age of we-can-do-anything-with-computers, it’s easy to just augment a weak story with fancy effects or shocking violence. I’m not against either one, per say, but when it’s used as a crutch or as a way to target a lowest-common-denominator demographic, then it just serves to weaken the genre. If you fancy a slow-burn, genuinely scary film which might also prompt you to buy a night light, then you should definitely give The Haunting a chance.
