The Haunting When I go to "classic" horror movies like "The Haunting," I usually arrive a good 10-15 minutes late. I figure, "this is a dumb movie, what could I miss? Just the basic character introductions." That's exactly what I missed in The Haunting, a thriller so lazy it doesn't bother to come up with a new setting. Oooh, a haunted house, that'll scare every 7-year-old in America!

This movie really is an adaption - or butchering, your call - of the play "The Haunting of Hill House" by great, wonderful, fantastic, etc, author Shirley Jackson (best known for her short story "The Lottery"). The terror in that story came not from what you saw, but what you didn't see - fear by implication, a powerful tool. Unfortunately, the makers of The Haunting had a little too much to drink one night and got CGI-happy. Everything in this film is overdone. If you want to make an over-the-top, outrageous thriller, that's something else, but they don't quite reach for that either - no gore, just one minor injury, and no deaths for the first 1 hour and 55 minutes of this 2 hour, 5 min. flick.

Basically, there are some people in a big, scary, really cool-looking house, and, well... that's it. Lily Taylor, a fabulous actress (The Impostors) makes a good show of going over the edge of psychosis, and Catherine Zeta-Jones (Mask of Zorro) makes a good show of being bisexual and coming on to Lili. Everyone else stands there and occasionally looks scared. The film has the fingerprints of Steven Spielberg, head of Dreamworks, all over it, and thus the ending is predictable before the movie starts - the man gave the Holocaust a happy ending!
There is one redeeming moment in the entire mess, a hilarious decapitation scene. I don't think it was supposed to be funny. Katherine and I just find decapitations - especially cheesy ones, with bad dialogue to boot! - really funny. It's too late at that point to start being scary, anyway.

I suspect this film claims it's not full of cliches, but instead "archetypes of fear." Either way, it's boring. It nicely backs up my theory that there are only three, maybe four, horror films, and they're remade over and over to seem fresh and keep the hairstyles trendy. Now I remember why I avoid the genre.

Wanna be scared?

Go see "The Blair Witch Project" instead.

-- by fenchurch Posted by Arcterex at July 29, 1999 03:45 PM