Page to Screen - The Haunting of Hill House
If Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House ended after its opening paragraph and was published today, it could probably win one of those flash fiction contests as a remarkably lucid snapshot of an evil dwelling. Thankfully for the reader, it is just the beginning of one of the most chilling and compulsively readable haunted house tales ever written.
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 itself, not sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, its 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.
First published in 1959, it is the tale of Eleanor Vance, a brittle young woman who has spent eleven years caring for her recently-deceased mother. Now at a loose end and living with her haughty sister, she receives an invite out of the blue to take part in an experiment by Dr. John Montague. The academic wants to find conclusive proof of the supernatural, and he believes that he may have found a genuinely haunted mansion: Hill House, a grim old pile with a sinister history.
Also attending are Theodora, a bohemian artist with a cruel streak, and Luke, an irreverent young heir who stands to inherit the property. The doctor outlines the macabre history of Hill House and it doesn’t take long for the guests to start experiencing strange phenomena. Whatever is causing the incidents, it seems to focus on Eleanor. Later, Dr. Montague’s batty wife, who believes she can commune with spirits, also shows up to complicate matters.
By this point, Eleanor is becoming increasingly rattled and distanced from the group, and comes to believe that she belongs at Hill House. After a dangerous incident involving a rickety staircase to the top of the tower where a previous occupant took her own life, Dr. Montague sends Eleanor home for her own safety. But Eleanor feels that she is already home and decides to make sure she never leaves…
Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?
There isn’t much original in The Haunting of Hill House, a kind of greatest-hits supernatural tale. It is thick with a gothic atmosphere that contains elements of Wuthering Heights, The Turn of the Screw, Rebecca, the ghost stories of M.R. James, and Edgar Allen Poe; the colour-coded rooms of the house feel like a distinct nod to Prospero’s court in The Masque of the Red Death. But its derivativeness is also a strong point.
What distinguishes Jackson’s novel as a superlative haunted house story is her assured and personable writing style. She has been described as a reader’s writer and it is a true page-turner – it is one of those books where I found myself pumping the brakes to prevent myself burning through it in a single sitting. Another factor that singles it out is Jackson’s psychological astuteness. She expertly places us in the mindset of Eleanor and makes the supernatural incidents just ambivalent enough to suggest that they might be products of her unravelling mind. The author takes us deeper into Eleanor’s fragile psyche than either of the film versions could manage and, even though I knew how the story played out, I still felt a sense of trepidation as I turned each page.
Hill House is the star of the show, a baleful country pile designed by long-dead embittered and possibly deranged patriarch Hugh Crain. In one of Jackson’s most joyously baroque flourishes, the doctor explains that every floor, wall, and ceiling within the house was built off-kilter without right angles, and the cumulative effect creates a space that is subliminally disorienting to anyone who dares to enter. There is also the notion that Hill House is an abode born bad, a sentient thing that drives its inhabitants to ruin, madness, or suicide.
It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house ; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.
The novel was published six years before Shirley Jackson passed away at the age of 48 and its authenticity may stem from semi-autobiographical aspects. In the last years of her life, the author suffered from poor health and psychiatric issues including severe anxiety and agoraphobia. It is easy to suspect that her familiarity with such problems found an outlet in the fraying nerves of Eleanor.
Perhaps also Eleanor’s feeling of inferiority and persecution. When Jackson moved with her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, to North Bennington in the late 1940s, they had a strained and somewhat unsavoury relationship with a few of the townsfolk. Hyman endured anti-Semitic comments and the family even found swastikas painted on their windows. Some neighbours threw rocks at the house, mirrored by the stoning in Jackson’s most famous work, The Lottery, and the stones that rained down on Eleanor’s family home in a supposed poltergeist incident during her childhood.
With her conversational writing style and possible autobiographical elements, it is easy to see why Stephen King became such a champion of The Haunting of Hill House, singing its praises in Danse Macabre, his collection of musings about the art of writing horror. He called Jackson’s novel “as nearly perfect a haunted house tale as I have ever read,” and there is something of Hill House in the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
Like Jackson, King also worked semi-autobiographical elements into his haunted house story. He was battling alcoholism while writing the novel and Jack Torrance’s problems ring very true, which may be why King reacted so badly to Stanley Kubrick’s masterful repurposing of his story. Completing the connection, Jackson similarly wasn’t a big fan of the first film version of her novel, stating that she thought it was a poor movie that radically changed the plot of her book.
The Haunting (1963)
After a decade of sci-fi horror dominated by Atomic Age concerns and allegories for McCarthyism and/or Communism, there was something of a gothic revival in the early years of the 1960s. In France, there was the eerie Eyes Without a Face, released in the United States as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus; from Italy, Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, improbably double-billed with Carry On Nurse when it landed Stateside. Deborah Kerr starred in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, an excellent adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, and Roger Corman released a string of low-budget but effective films based on the tales of Edgar Allen Poe, most of them starring Vincent Price. Then there was The Haunting, directed by a man better known for his big Hollywood musicals.
Robert Wise is sometimes overlooked as a director despite helming two Academy Award Best Picture winners: West Side Story and The Sound of Music. He won an Oscar for Best Director for the first and received a nomination for the second. Wise also made several other notable films including The Day the Earth Stood Still, Somebody Up There Likes Me (with Paul Newman in his breakthrough role), The Sand Pebbles (another Best Picture nominee that earned Steve McQueen his only Oscar nod), The Andromeda Strain, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Wise was all set to make West Side Story when he picked up a copy of The Haunting of Hill House. He found it pretty scary and handed it off to screenwriter Nelson Gidding, who had worked on his earlier picture I Want to Live! Gidding spent six months working on a draft while Wise committed himself fully to bringing Bernstein and Sondheim’s hit Broadway musical to the screen.
Giddings leaned into the psychological element of Jackson’s book, working with the idea that all the spooky events could all be a figment of Eleanor’s mind. He and Wise even travelled to visit Jackson to pitch an idea that would become a gimmicky trope of later psychological thrillers like Identity, Shutter Island, and (yuck) Sucker Punch: that the events of the whole story were the imaginings of a character locked up in a psychiatric ward.
Jackson liked the concept but knocked it back – this was definitely a story about the supernatural, despite subtle hints that suggest otherwise in the novel. Perhaps this is why Jackson, herself not in the best frame of mind in the last years of her life, felt that they had altered the story too much. The film does place a different emphasis on certain elements, particularly in the final scene, and it remains ambiguous enough to leave the possibility that Eleanor dreams the whole thing up. Nevertheless, it remains mostly faithful to the novel with whole chunks of dialogue and prose lifted almost verbatim.
Prudently, Robert Wise decided that shooting on a Hollywood sound stage wouldn’t do the novel or the film justice. With a budget of just over $1 million (for comparison, Cleopatra cost $31 million), the director decamped to the UK to begin production and find his Hill House.
There are a few theories about which real-life places might have inspired Jackson’s original haunted house. One is the Everett Mansion in North Bennington, Vermont, the town where Jackson lived the last few decades of her life. The rather gloomy abode was rumoured to be haunted and had a stone turret with a conical roof, much like the house in the book.
The Everett Mansion, Bennington Vermont
Another more famous possible inspiration is the notorious Winchester Mystery House, the sprawling and ramshackle home where Sarah Winchester supposedly kept adding rooms in a haphazard fashion in superstitious fear that she would die if she stopped. The novel also namechecks Borley Rectory, once known as the most haunted house in Britain, and a few other places with a ghostly reputation.
Scouting locations, Robert Wise found Ettington Park in Warwickshire, a relatively modern 19th-Century mansion that is now a luxury hotel. It is reputedly one of the most haunted hotels in Britain, although dozens more also have a dubious claim to that title. It looks suitably ominous with a facade full of archways, stained-glass windows, and hotch-potch array of gables, chimneys, spires, and turrets along its high roof. Although some of the cast and crew stayed at the property during filming, stars Julie Harris and Claire Bloom were so unnerved by the house’s daunting appearance that Wise found them huddled together when they arrived in a limousine.
Ettington Park, Warwickshire
Harris isn’t particularly well-remembered nowadays beyond her starring role in The Haunting, but she was an acclaimed actor of the time. She had won two Tony awards for her stage work (and would add three more before she passed away in 2013) and two Emmys for TV performances. She also had one Oscar nomination under her belt, and took the role of Eleanor because she harboured an interest in parapsychology.
During filming, Harris also had issues that mirrored her character’s experience. Suffering with depression, she felt that her co-stars weren’t taking things as seriously as she was and became distanced from the group. This may have informed her performance; although Harris was no doubt a skilled actor, her portrayal of Eleanor feels so tightly wound to the point of snapping, as if she is barely suppressing a cry of despair.
Harris might have deserved an Oscar nod and she is competently supported by the rest of the principal cast. Claire Bloom, another prominent stage actor, plays Theo with casual feline watchfulness; Richard Johnson is debonair but rather bland as the doctor, now named Markaway; and Russ Tamblyn, best known as Riff in West Side Story, brings a little light relief but largely twiddles his thumbs as Luke.
As with the novel, Hill House is the true star of the movie. Working with cinematographer Davis Boulton, the film is a masterpiece of claustrophobic interiors, disorienting Dutch angles, noir-ish shadowplay, and ingenious yet subtle special effects. In a film where the supernatural horrors are left almost entirely to the imagination but ramped up by intensely creepy sound design, one of the standout moments involves a door that appears to bulge inward under the pressure of a ghostly force – an effect achieved by building the door out of pliable laminated wood and getting a burly crew member to push on it from the other side.
My personal favourite effect comes in the scene where Eleanor and Theo share a bedroom and Eleanor hears ominous but unintelligible chuntering and a child crying in another room. She stares at the heavy-duty floral wallpaper in distress and the pattern changes as the light shifts to resemble a menacing face. It is followed by a classic shit-your-pants reveal: “Whose hand was I holding?”
The film is a slow-burner that powers towards its conclusion with terrific momentum, culminating in an effective jump scare and Eleanor’s inevitable demise. This is perhaps where Jackson took issue with Wise’s approach: as Eleanor drives away, it is strongly suggested that Hill House doesn’t want her to leave and wrenches the wheel from her grasp, crashing her car into a tree.
The wonderful French movie poster for The Haunting, with art by Roger Soubie
The Haunting opened to mixed reviews and failed to make its money back at the box office, although audiences were reportedly frightened by it. Nevertheless, it has gradually built a reputation as one of the best horror movies ever made and Martin Scorsese ranked it among his 11 scariest movies of all time – along with another personal favourite of mine, Night of the Demon. The guy has good taste!
So whatever walked in Hill House walked alone for three decades, causing generations of horror fans (including myself) to pull their duvets a little higher over their heads at night. Then, in the mid-’90s, some genius thought: What if we remade The Haunting and used all this brilliant new CGI to really put on a show.
The Haunting (1999)
This is where things get tricky. Here on the Art of the Movies blog, we always try to take a positive stance wherever possible. In this respect, I admit that I usually cherry-pick films to write about that have at least some interesting aspects, rather than just lash into them. But now we come to Jan de Bont’s The Haunting, a movie with almost zero redeeming qualities.
Robert Wise’s version had a big impact on Steven Spielberg, who has covered many genres in his wide-ranging and celebrated career but has largely stayed away from supernatural horror, with the notable exception of producing (and maybe having a hand in directing) Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist. In 1996, Spielberg approached The Haunting of Hill House fan Stephen King about putting together a remake. They worked on a screenplay before parting ways due to creative differences. King would move on to write and executive produce a TV miniseries of The Shining and repurpose some of their ideas into Rose Red (2002).
Dutch filmmaker Jan de Bont had a Stephen King connection, employed as cinematographer on Lewis Teague’s workmanlike but effective adaptation of Cujo. De Bont’s stature grew in Hollywood with films like Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October before calling the shots himself on two big ‘90s hits, Speed and Twister. The latter got him the gig on The Haunting remake, with Spielberg swapping projects so he could take on Minority Report instead. Apparently, De Bont didn’t want to make a straight reimagining of Robert Wise’s classic, intent on harking back to Shirley Jackson’s novel. Not that you could possibly tell from what we got on screen when it opened in July 1999.
Let’s be fair. De Bont at least assembled a cast that, at face value, made sense for each character at that point in time. In the early-mid ‘90s, Lili Taylor epitomised the edgy spirit of indie cinema with a string of eye-catchingly raw and nervy performances, not least her bravura turn as Valerie Solanas in I Shot Andy Warhol. I can see why she would seem like a shoo-in for a modern update of Eleanor Vance. Liam Neeson, just six years out from his Oscar-nominated turn in Schindler’s List, was carving himself a niche as authoritative leadership figures - so why not Jackson’s paranormal researcher, now called Dr. Marrow?
Theo was a character only coded as bisexual in the novel and Wise’s film, but lesbianism and bisexuality was huge in the ‘90s after the success of Basic Instinct - see also: The Wachowski’s debut Bound, the lascivious Wild Things, and the first-base scene in Cruel Intentions, to name but a few movies that really cashed in on the phenomenon of hot girls making out.
Catherine Zeta-Jones was fast becoming a sultry modern sex symbol to rival Kathleen Turner in the ‘80s or, at a stretch, Marilyn Monroe in the ‘50s. So why not amp up the sexual tension with Eleanor by casting her as Theo? After becoming a household name in Britain for her role in The Darling Buds of May, her transition to the big screen had been uncertain. However, the previous year, she smouldered opposite the equally photogenic Antonio Banderas in The Mask of Zorro, and now she was primed to bend Hollywood to her will.
As for the fourth wheel of Luke, Owen Wilson was at least slightly analogous to Russ Tamblyn, just starting to make an impression with his offbeat comic persona after starting out with Wes Anderson in Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, as well as playing solid supporting turns in big glossy fare like Armageddon and As Good as It Gets.
In the non-event of The Haunting, not one of them emerged with dignity intact. Taylor and Neeson phoned it in, the latter given a sinister slant by David Self’s histrionic screenplay. Jones vamped it up embarrassingly, flouncing about in fancy outfits while unambiguously hitting on Taylor’s Eleanor at every turn - another misguided “upgrade” of Self’s overheated script. Perhaps the only truly shocking thing about The Haunting is that she and Lili Taylor didn’t end up elaborately French kissing for the camera.
It was a vacuous performance from Zeta-Jones that would earn her a double Razzie nomination alongside her role as crinkly old Sean Connery’s romantic interest in the same year’s Entrapment. Wilson is breezy enough, but he is badly miscast as Self’s more openly devious Luke, given little more to say than “Wow,” stating the obvious, and suffering one of the most groan-worthy deaths in horror history.
Self’s screenplay is the root of the problem, discarding any subtlety by trying to pump up the atrocities committed at Hill House before copping out with a saccharine “love conquers all” conclusion. In his iteration of the tale, Marrow misleads his guests with some cockamamie nonsense about participating in a study of insomnia, because of course staging it in a haunted house is the perfect place to gather convincing empirical data on sleep disorders. The doctor has a darker ulterior motive, however, which also doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense.
He’s interested in ghosts, and In this version, the malevolent Hugh Crain goes from a strange and domineering father who possibly abused his children to a full-blown monster who enslaved kids in his cotton mills, a bit like the baddies in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In case that was still too subtle, he was also a child killer who dispensed with the bodies in a cavernous fireplace that makes Charles Foster Kane’s look as unassuming as a four-bar electric heater.
This would all be bad enough, but De Bont decided to completely jettison the nuances of Jackon’s novel and double down on the screenplay’s excesses, turning Hill House into a goofy cartoon haunted mansion. Roger Ebert, whose track record assessing horror was often a little erratic, unfathomably gave The Haunting three out of four stars thanks to its lavish visuals and art direction. Beyond the screenplay, these are precisely the two reasons why the film is so laughably overwrought.
The house’s interior is so extravagantly and bizarrely over-designed that it never once tracks as a real place. It also makes no spatial sense at all, and not in a good way. One of the most remarkable things about the interior design of the Overlook in The Shining is that Kubrick constructed a set that looked so authentically like a working hotel that the impossible layout almost goes unnoticed, instead creating a subliminal level of unease.
That certainly isn’t the case here. De Bont’s designers have imagined a house that would look corny and over-the-top in an episode of Scooby Doo. And that’s all before you get to the godawful rendering of the house’s spirits, perhaps the worst use of CGI in a mainstream movie before or since. I’d prefer not to dwell on it but I will mention a few lowlights: Sub-Casper-like child ghosts sliding up inside Eleanor’s bedding. A needlessly literal interpretation of the house-is-watching vibe from the original - Hill House grows eyes and scowls menacingly at Eleanor. The giant portrait of Hugh Crain, reminiscent of Vigo in Ghostbusters II, of course gets a shadow-monster CGI rendition in the ghastly finale.
Straining for positives, the first night’s haunting is a fairly effective re-telling of the nail-biting equivalent scene in Robert Wise’s version, with a growling entity hammering on the studded doors of Eleanor and Theo’s opulent boudoir, although De Bont gets a little distracted by playing with his cold-breath effect. The only other plus point is that watching the Dutchman’s remake and returning to the original fills one with an immense sense of warmth, relief, and gratitude, like stumbling into an oasis after a near-death trawl across a vast barren expanse of desert.
1999, along with 1994, is held up as one of those high-note years of cinematic excellence, which it rightly deserves. Having said that, 1999 was also the year of The Haunting, Wild Wild West, and Inspector Gadget. The ‘90s was a great time to be a film buff for exciting indie cinema, nailed-on classic event movies, and the moment when world cinema started gradually breaking into the mainstream. But it was also the starting point of a more disappointing trajectory, when Hollywood started making movies so safe and dumbed-down that they could appeal to the broadest possible audience while offending the fewest people. Jan De Bont’s The Haunting is perhaps the one film that sums up that risk-averse trend at its most misguided and creatively vacant. It truly is the stuff of nightmares, but not in the way Shirley Jackson intended.
So there you have it, a brief look back at how Shirley Jackson’s novel became an all-time classic and an all-time stinker. What is your opinion of the book and the two adaptations? Let us know!
