help Eleanor come home - The Haunting (1963)

you may not believe in ghosts, but you can't deny TERROR

*ahem*

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

Any excuse.

Spoilers, obvs.

The Haunting (1963)

Directed by: Robert Wise

Based on: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959) (… I feel like I’m repeating myself)

Starring: Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn, Fay Compton, et al.

Running time: 114 minutes

Original release date: 21 August 1963 (US), 9 January 1964 (UK)

the plot, in brief

Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson), a paranormal investigator (who happens to look like the product of a successful gene splicing of Sean Connery, George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton), plans on studying the reported paranormal activity at Hill House in Massachusetts. A house which has “stood for ninety years”, it was built by a man named Hugh Crain for his wife, who died in a devastating carriage accident as she approached the house for the first time.

In the ninety years since, death and sorrow has become synonymous with Hill House, with Crain, his daughter Abigail and Abigail’s nurse companion all meeting their end in its walls.

Markway manages to convince Mrs. Sannerson (Fay Compton) a distant relative of the nurse companion and the current owner of the house, to let him stay in the house for the purpose of conducting his research, to which she agrees, with the caveat that her heir, Luke Sannerson (Russ Tamblyn), is allowed to join. While he has invited a number of people to take part in the research, only two people turn up: a psychic named Theodora (Claire Bloom) and the sensitive Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris), who experienced supposed poltergeist activity as a child.

For Eleanor, the invitation is a god-send: still feeling guilt after the death of her mother and living on her sister’s (her AWFUL COW of a sister, MY GOD) couch, she sees the Hill House opportunity as exactly what she’s been waiting for. But before long, Hill House starts revealing its secrets, and Eleanor may not be as safe as she thought she was…

but first

The absolute gag of watching the opening credits and seeing Claire Bloom’s outfits for the film were designed by MARY FUCKING QUANT (AKA QUEEN OF THE MINI SKIRT), I was *delighted*.

fun-o-rama

One of my main interests when it comes to looking at horror movies through a storytelling lens is the amount of ways you can tell the same story and still hit upon a fresh interpretation of the source material. A great example of this is Werner Herzog’s take on Nosferatu; Herzog takes the bones of the original (along with its illicit use of the Bram Stoker source material) and necromances it into something uniquely his (austere, full of ennui and wanting) while still in essence telling the same story.

The Haunting of Hill House has three key adaptations (aside from a few radio and theatre ones): the Robert Wise 1963 film adaptation (aka this one), the 1999 Jan de Bont version (… which I am game for talking about for shits and giggles) and the Mike Flanagan Netflix adaptation from 2018. All three of these versions key into the original in their own way - with Wise’s version focusing on the concept of the mind as a haunted house (Nelson Gidding, who crafted the screenplay, came to see the story as not a ghost story, but a tale of one woman’s mental breakdown - he and Wise met with Jackson, who told them the story was definitely about the supernatural, but the elements of Eleanor’s mental health stayed in the script along with the more supernatural aspects) , alongside the idea of a physical location being “born evil”.

Wise is helped in his storytelling by absolutely exquisite cinematography, a sterling atonal musical score and set design that truly emphasizes just how eerie Hill House is. There is a wealth of things we can talk about here but I want to come back to that idea of the mind as a haunted house, and how in Julie Harris’s Eleanor, Wise manages to bring you into her very haunted mind.

I believe it boils down to three factors.

1) casting Julie Harris

At the time of casting, Julie Harris was already a formidable stage (and screen) actress, winning her first of five Tony awards for her role as Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera in 1952. Wise had seen Harris on stage and felt she would be the best fit for Eleanor’s fragile psyche.

When we first meet Eleanor, she is begging her sister and her brother-in-law to use her car. Two things are established here: one, Eleanor’s mother died not too long before the events of the movie and she was taking care of her. Two, nobody in her family appears to take her seriously, or even respect her. Her sister (AWFUL) snaps at her, her niece takes the piss out of her, even her brother-in-law who is probably the kindest to her out of the three is also just a prick to her (FAMIILY DYNAMICS AMIRITE?!).

Julie Harris manages to accurately portray the quiet devastation of Eleanor, along with the hope this invitation has given her. She is a woman seeking both purpose and belonging and Harris’s eyes speak for her as she drives to Hill House, a spark in them, almost like she’s finally awoken.

2) using close ups

There are a number of close up shots of Eleanor’s face throughout the movie, and it allows us to truly see the micro expressions Julie Harris gives, those glints in her eyes, those small, wry smiles - I am personally a huge fan of the below still, because even in this still you can see a world of emotions in her eyes.

3) letting us into Eleanor's head via inner monologue

An inner monologue (the Olivia de Havilland flashbacks, my god) is not an easy thing to pull off, but here it works brilliantly. We sit with Eleanor’s descent from hope to despair and all its frantic swerves, listen in as she is drawn in by the house and ultimately betrayed, listen as she, for the first time in a long time, feels like she has a purpose beyond just being her mother’s carer, beyond being the target of her family’s jokes.

It’s heartbreaking to have this entry into Eleanor’s head. Harris, who apparently was suffering from depression during the shoot, and kept her distance from the rest of the cast during filming, later said that the distance helped her bed into the character, and wove her depression into her interpretation of Eleanor.

As someone who has been suffering from depression myself, on and off, for most of my adult life, I found myself recognizing specifically the moments where Eleanor gets suddenly, spectacularly overwhelmed (the moment when the quartet first ventures into the library for example). Having that way into her mindset gives this version of Eleanor an extra dimension, makes her feel painfully real, and it makes the ending of the film hit extra hard.

Yes, Eleanor dies, her car veering off course and crashing into the same spot where the first Mrs. Crain died (incidentally, we get the potted history of Hill House and the Crain family at the start of the movie and the moment where Hugh Crain forces his daughter to look upon the lifeless body of her mother which he has TAKEN INTO THE HOUSE AND LAID ON THE COUCH? Yeah, that’s cursed behaviour). The film ends with Theo, Dr and Mrs Markway (the latter had turned up earlier on, begging her husband to basically cut this ghost shit out right now) and Luke standing at the wreck of the car, Luke gravely intoning (keep in mind, this is the same Luke who has spent half the movie either being a sleaze or out loud planning what he’d do to the house once he inherits it, what a dickhead) that the house ought to be burned down and the ground sowed with salt.

Eleanor has the last lines of this movie:

Hill House has stood for 90 years and might stand for 90 more. Within, walls continue upright, bricks meet, floors are firm, and doors are sensibly shut. Silence lies steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House. And we who walk here... walk alone.

In a way, she has achieved what she wanted - she wished to remain with Hill House, and now she is forever part of its ghosts.

*apologies, this is the only trailer I could find and it is NOT GREAT (although I’d love for more modern movie trailers to just be out of context flashes of clips pasted together by narration from someone doing Serious 1940s Gumshoe Detective Voice).