The Haunting

The Haunting (1963) is a somewhat labored but elegant ghost story, with the always annoying Julie Harris playing a nervous Nell type (and her name is really Nell) who's invited to participate in the research of a ghost specialist named Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson) at Hill House, which is the site of a number of supernaturally tinged tragedies. It's a finely made film, directed by Robert Wise with fluid cinematography by Davis Boulton, engrossing music by Humphrey Searle, and an impressive set design by John Jarvis. But Nelson Gidding's script, which he adapted from Shirley Jackson's neo-gothic novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959), falls short. It's overly talky, and once you get past the self-consciously hip dialogue it becomes rather tiresome. What kept me going was the atmosphere, which is admittedly creepy yet beautiful.

Harris' character is unhinged from the beginning (like any good Shirley Jackson heroine), and you know right off the bat that her being drawn to Hill House is no mistake. But her pathetic, emotionally needy performance grates on the nerves. Her repetitive inner-monologue goes something like this: "This is the first thing that's ever happened to me. I'm wanted here. I'm going to stay here forever. I'm accepted here." Nell is such a shaky, dithering bore of a character, and I was far more interested in Theo, the chummy, sophisticated lesbian and fellow ghost hunter (played with skill by the lovely Claire Bloom) she meets at Hill House. Richard Johnson is perfect as Dr. Markway: he exudes that serious intellectual quality you need for an educated witch doctor like Markway, and it's interesting to note that he played a doctor in another horror film, the Lucio Fulci walking dead opus Zombie (1979). Russ Tamblyn, as a likable but goofy playboy whose elderly aunt owns Hill House and who attends the ghost party to keep tabs on everybody else, rounds out the principle cast. He looks as though he were plucked from one of those Frankie and Annette beach party movies. His lack of seriousness lifts the film out of its perpetually gloomy nature.

The most exciting thing about The Haunting are the ominous opening titles and the accompanying narration (by Richard Johnson), which features the wonderfully uncanny opening line (slightly edited) from Shirley Jackson's novel. I enclose it here for the reader: "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality... Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, 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." Such brilliant writing. And visually speaking, the film does Jackson's elegantly creepy prose justice.

But there's a feeling of being gypped: you never really know if the ghosts are real or imagined. Viewers looking to get their money's worth in terms of shocks might be left wanting. But if you're interested in a more ambiguous psychological thriller with the "smells and bells" of the gothic, you'll might enjoy The Haunting. It was remade--with ghastly results--in 1999. Also starring Lois Maxwell as Dr. Markway's skeptical wife. 112 minutes. ★★½

Zombie

The Five Points Horror Fest is back, with another film by Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci. Last year I had the immense pleasure of reviewing Fulci's masterpiece of incomprehensibility, The Beyond (1980), and this year I got to see Zombie (1979), which many consider to be Fulci's piece de resistance. It's certainly a piece of something.

In the poster you will notice that the title is Zombi 2. That's because when George Romero's Dawn of the Dead premiered in Italy, it was titled Zombi, so this is an unofficial sequel to that film. The two have nothing in common other than zombies. The difference between Italian and American horror movies is one of humor. Romero's Dawn of the Dead has a sharp sense of humor throughout, while Zombie is, within itself, utterly lacking in intentional humor. But the unintentional comedy is plentiful enough, because Zombie is such a painfully stupid splatter film.

Fulci sets most of the movie on a small Caribbean island where the dead are returning to life--attributed to voodoo. A reporter and a woman whose father died on the island go looking for answers, and when they arrive, they meet a doctor (Richard Johnson), who's trying to locate a scientific explanation for the zombie problem that's quickly turning all the island's inhabitants into flesh-eating ghouls. Unfortunately, the humans are just too idiotic to adequately defend themselves from creatures that, if they moved any slower, wouldn't be moving at all. And how on earth is the human body so sensitive, so permeable, that with a quick peck a zombie can rip out a hunk of flesh from an arm or a leg? It's madness, I tell you. Madness.

Tisa Farrow, a poor-man's Mia Farrow, plays the girl with a banal seriousness, and Ian McCulloch, a poor-man's Roger Moore, plays the reporter. There's oodles of blood and gore, a fight between a zombie and a shark, and plenty of bad dubbing to make the bad-movie-lover giggle with glee. And of course, being an Italian film, it's well-shot, punctuating the film with little artistic moments that are above the subject matter but somehow lift it out of the muck, if only momentarily. Pretty soon you feel numb from the gory parts, and you laugh at them, not because you're a sadist, but because it's all so dumb, so dumb indeed.