As a lesbian, obviously, I love gay cinema. But tbh what I love more than gay cinema are those movies that aren’t gay but there’s one character who is and they don’t explicitly say it. I love being teased and spending the whole movie trying to spot all the signs. The character of Theo is a lesbian in The Haunting of Hill House but I didn’t realize that she has been a lesbian since the source material. So my thought process through this was like:

Oooh she’s hot who is she? She’s wearing a tie okay maybe that was a popular fashion choice for women. Why did she just called Eleanor her “companion” while raising a glass to her lips.…

One of the most unsettling films of its time that has managed to hold up astonishingly well after all these years & still retains enough strength to surprise the newcomers, The Haunting is an incredibly tense, highly effective & intensely moody psychological horror that makes excellent use of its eerie atmosphere to instantly grab the viewer's attention & keeps them guessing from start to finish.

The Haunting tells the story of a small team of paranormal investigators who, in order to prove the existence of ghosts, decide to carry out their next research at Hill House; a notorious mansion having a lurid history of violent deaths & insanity. Although initially elated to capture many supernatural phenomenas around the house, trouble begins when one of…

Back in the 60s they didn’t have slashers yet so they had to make movies about how scary certain houses are. Some people still do this even though they don’t have to. They could instead make movies about people stuck in devices that force them to make awful choices. But whatever. I can’t do everything.

The Haunting presents to us the four Jungian archetypes (college boy, psychic lesbian, Gomez Addams, profoundly mentally ill) and sets them loose in a house “wrong from the day it was built” like rats in a maze. Not surprising that Scorsese loves this movie, he’s no stranger to having everybody running around like rats up there. (Smart viewers will recall that the rat at the…

Like most kids, I wasn’t terribly fond of black and white movies. At that time in my life, I found them to be too slow, too calm, and most certainly not scary. Except for one. This movie terrified me as a kid and it was the only one of its kind that did it. It’s probably also the movie that got me hooked on the whole haunted house sub-genre...and if any movie should do it, it’s this one. I remember my mom rented this from the video store for me on one of the rare occasions she went without me. I’m pretty sure I wanted her to rent Halloween but I guess she saw the rating on that one because…

An outstanding performance by Julie Harris predicated in an extraordinary haunted house story. Nelson Gidding’s screenplay relinquishes a vast amount of the supernatural occurrences in Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, which serves as this films source material, and in preference instals neurosis aspects to the narrative which resultingly disintegrates the disparity between otherworldly and psychological horror. Unable to raise the financing for the film in America, director Robert Wise smartly brought the film to England and filmed it extensively in Ettington Park in the West Midlands.

The story commences with Dr John Markway, a researcher in the paranormal narrating the chronology of Hill House, an area of much unhappiness and grief that rumours swirl about it being…

Look, I know the supernatural is something that isn't supposed to happen, but it does happen.
-Dr. John Markway

In 1999 I caught The Haunting in theaters, a remake directed by Jan de Bont with a ridiculously good cast (on paper anyways). The film left me emotionally scarred, not because of frights but because of pure awfulness. Worst of all it left me with no interest in seeking out the original film.

Finally 15 years later I realized that the 1963 Haunting was directed by none other then Robert Wise, a man that seemed determined to make classics in every genre he could get his hands on. This is hardly his first horror film, in fact he directed Boris Karloff…

"I've always been more afraid of being left alone or left out than of things that go bump in the night." Still the only Shirley Jackson adaptation that is respectful of her core preoccupations as a writer: the sense that every social interaction is like a complex magick ritual to keep a sort of nameless, cosmic cruelty at bay, except no one will explain the workings of the ritual to you, and if you get it wrong the universe will start to realign itself against you in subtle, horrible ways, and your mind will start to fray at the edges as you try and fathom what is happening, and then people will be able to tell that there's something wrong…

Okay, so now I understand, the new series just supposes: what if the story were about the original owners, only they were like, flipping a weird mansion in the 80s. I mean, I still don't like it. Or a lot of it. For reasons. Involving when whoever did the new Halloween movie basically said: 'what women directors/writers?' But I feel weirdly guilty I didn't catch that because I haven't read the source material in so long...I kinda forgot the backstory altogether, tbh until the last hundred pages of the biography I'm reading, which are all about my two favorites: Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. (And death. Because the best biographies inevitably are. I…

I'm not much of a reader, but I've now become pretty well-versed with the Hill House material conceived by Shirley Jackson through the various film and TV adaptation approaches that I've seen to the novel and other related material. Completely setting aside the unfortunately silly 90's remake of The Haunting, Mike Flanagan's TV miniseries The Haunting of Hill House was a recent masterful horror/drama combination that repurposed some of the character names and ideas of this novel/film story into a generational time-hopping family drama coinciding with the house's dark history. We also have the extremely similar "Hell House" novel by Richard Matheson, whose 70's film adaptation The Legend of Hell House remains an extremely underrated gem within the retro horror…

Geoff T's Hoop-Tober 5.0 Challenge
The Haunting (1963)

I'm probably going to get some flack for this review, but I'm all about being honest, so I'll leave it at that.

I went into Robert Wise's The Haunting with enthusiasm, given it's intriguing premise and reputation as a top-tier "haunted house" flick, but sadly that enthusiasm died off as I progressed through. Is it well-made? Very much so. Is it enjoyable however? Not so much I'd say, as what I expected to be a fun and spooky ghost story felt more like a uneventful plod.

In a rural area of Massachusetts, Hill House is a place with a history of strange activity whose inhabitants have suffered bizarre deaths over the years.…