THE HAUNTING (1999)

Well, you know what?  I wasn't entirely wrong, but I wasn't quite right, either.  Jackson's novel has been savaged, but there's more than one set of handprints at the torn throat.  But I'll get to that.

So here's the scoop.  Liam Neeson plays Dr. Marrow, a psychologist who is studying the effects of fear and group hysteria.  Lili Taylor, Owen Wilson and Catherine Zeta-Jones play the group, a bunch of insomniacs who thinks they're part of a study on sleep disorders.  Marrow brings them to the old spooky mansion, Hill House, to see what happens.  Creepy hijinks ensue, and the cast is actually pretty good, particularly Owen Wilson who could show this movie as an audition tape for the role of Shaggy in Scooby-Doo:  The Motion Picture and get the part.

For the first half of the movie, The Haunting seems like it's doing its best to be a faithful '90s update of Jackson's novel.  Lili Taylor plays Eleanor, a woman whose spent most of her life living in a fantasy life and caring for her invalid mother.  Eleanor is very much the focus of Jackson's novel as her narcissism and isolation are slowly twisted and warped by the evil at the heart of Hill House, and it seems as if The Haunting is going to be a basically faithful version of haunted woman meeting haunted house.  As time goes on, The Haunting turns into more of a traditional gothic, with Eleanor being lured by voices to find secret rooms, secret books, etc., that shed light on the history of Hill House and its mysterious owner, Hugh Crane.  All right, this is okay, I thought as Eleanor sleepily talks to the silk-lined silhouettes of dead children.  I'm okay with this.  After all, Jackson's Eleanor is not a '90s woman and is pretty un-P.C. too boot; passive, repressed and a victim's victim.  Having Lili Taylor play a stronger version, a troubled woman who conquers her fears and loneliness and brings peace to the troubled souls of Hill House, was acceptable to me.

But the movie just got klutzier and klutzier as it went on.  The first half shows you all sorts of creepy statues and paintings, and the first few nights when the group encounters strange spooky noises and rattling doors is entertainingly creepy.  But the filmmakers feel like they have to keep upping the ante, so pretty soon, you have the creepy rooms twisting into malevolent faces, and when that starts to seem old hat, the faces open and twist and lots of wiggly CGI arms coming flying out.  I sensed a lot of Spielberg in this; it reminded me of Poltergeist where all the evil spirits were too busy scaring the family and so, as long as the family members ran around the scary thing waving itself around blindly, nobody would get hurt.

Then, there's all these shots of the group running around in the house while Lili Taylor recites lots of crap that you can tell the rewrite group pulled out of their ass.  ("Hide, you have to hide!  Hugh Crane loved to play hide and seek with the children!  It's your only chance!")  Finally, there's a showdown of good and evil that is, well, just flat and awful (having Lili Taylor say, "this is not about them!  This is about family!" the way that Stan or Kyle will step up and deliver the "special message" of your average South Park episode was not a good idea.  And having her yell defiantly, "You go to hell!" in the exact tones of Mr. Garrison so that you expect her to add "You go to hell and you die!" is really a very, very bad choice).  The audience with whom I saw the movie left laughing and shaking their head.  And this is the same audience that jumped a foot and a half in the first 20 minutes when a champagne cork popped.

So who blew it?  Spielberg?  De Bont?  The writers?

Actually, I think it was the audience.  Not the audience I saw the movie with per se, but the audience that wanted a bigger finish, the audience that wanted a better sense of closure.  The preview audiences, in other words.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that there were a lot of reshoots on The Haunting.  For the editor's sake, De Bont and the rewrite men give Lili Taylor a pendant early on in the movie that she puts on and slips under her shirt.  Whenever you see the pendant, you know that it's a scene added because of lousy preview scores.  There's also a great scene where Catherine Zeta-Jones tucks in Lili Taylor, kisses her cheek and says, "You get some sleep."  Then, after she's walked out of the frame, you hear C. Z-J. say, "I'll be right back with some tea."  Why in the name of god would you bring tea to someone who you just told to sleep?  Because the test audiences wanted to see more of you runnin' around in a skimpy outfit, that's why.

To paraphrase what someone once wrote about democracy, Do we get the movies we deserve?  These days, maybe a little bit.  There were a lot of crappy movies that the hype machine worked so well for that were successful the last few summers, filmmakers start slapping together movies with very little care or belief that the audience would notice.  When the test audience does notice that the movie is crap or, at the very least, not what the hype had led them to expect, the filmmakers freak out.  As someone who would like to make movies someday, it's very, very encouraging to see big moneyed executives, directors, stars and screenwriters making up the end of the movie as it goes along.  The ending of The Haunting, like the ending of Wild, Wild West, is so slapdash and desperate it's like watching an amateur improv group panic while executives shovel piles of hundred dollar bills into a roaring furnace.  Ultimately, The Haunting will scare no one but the accountants at Dreamworks SKG, and I guess that's probably the way it should be.

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All material on these pages is © 1999 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.