Dark Holiday

It’s Christmas and what better way to celebrate the most wonderful time of the year than by watching one of the scariest movies in creation?

My sister and I did that very thing recently when we viewed The Haunting, Robert Wise’s stunning 1963 adaption of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House.

This film has been scaring the screaming bejeezus out of my family for a generation and I am happy to report that it delivered the ghoulish goods once again.

We had gotten together for one of our Saturday sanity sessions, where we emerge from our respective Covid cocoons for dinner, TV, and some much-needed social interaction.

Netflix was on the fritz on this particular evening, so after rummaging through my sister's DVR collection, we settled upon our favorite fright flick.

I was thinking that this was an odd choice given the time of year, but then I remember that A Christmas Carol, the mother of all holiday stories—is packed to the rafters with all manner of things that go bump in the night.

Christmas as celebrated in Europe and the U.S. was originally connected to the “pagan” Winter Solstice celebration and the festival known as Yule, according to Justin Daniels, a religious studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

And now with the coronavirus breathing foully down our necks, a good ghost story offers a nice distraction from the dismal reality.

Shot in black and white, The Haunting tells the story of paranormal researcher who assembles a group of people at Hill House, a notorious New England mansion with a history of violent deaths.

“Hill House had stood for 90 years and might stand for 90 more,” Dr. Markway, the researcher tells us at the film’s opening. “Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there... walked alone.”

Oy vey, I’m getting scared all over again...

The group members have all sorts of tangled emotions that the evil old house feeds on, which is something I never noticed as a child, as I was only interested in the spooky stuff.

'A House that was Born Bad’

One of them, Eleanor, is emotionally unstable and her condition rapidly deteriorates when she comes to Hill House.

Julie Harris, who portrayed Eleanor, was suffering from depression at the time she was filming the movie and she channeled her own issues into the character.

Claire Bloom plays Theo, a clairvoyant, who is a lesbian, although the censors of the day decreed that her character could not touch Eleanor.

Wise made the film as a tribute to his mentor, Val Lewton, the producer of such horror classics as Cat People, I Walk with a Zombie, and Wise’s first directorial effort, Curse of the Cat People.

Lewton believed that people were more afraid of the unknown than things they could see and that philosophy is on full display in The Haunting.

There are no severed heads, no gallons of fake blood spraying across the screen, none of the stomach-turning crap you see in so many of today’s slasher movies.

No, this film brilliantly uses sound and darkness to fill you with an overwhelming sense of dread—even after multiple viewings.

One of the most frightening scenes starts with off with a thunderous pounding in the middle of the night that grows louder and gets closer to the Eleanor and Theo, and while I was watching it, I had a flashback to a childhood vacation in the Poconos.

We were staying in this cottage and our parents had rented a TV just so we could watch The Haunting. We were away from the city's bright lights and being up in the woods, where the darkness is real, made the movie much more terrifying.

Okay, then. So, we had our devilish little detour and now we’re gearing up for our holiday dinner, where we’ll eat, drink and watch Ebenezer Scrooge get put through the supernatural ringer.

I can’t wait to hear Marley’s ghost hit those high notes.