The Haunting

I am a big fan of the original film "The Haunting." I saw it for the first time as a child and have considered it the most frightening movie I have ever seen.

That said, it was unlikely that the new version could live up to my expectations, but I still had high hopes for it. I was thinking that perhaps they would develop the characters just a little more fully than the original film.

This new film isn't necessarily bad, but I feel that its major flaws are that it is too overblown and that it runs too far afield of the original (book) story. One fear I had was that there would be too many special effects. There were. This story is one that relies mainly on the things that you don't see happen. The fright is built on the sounds, the tensions, and the feeling that things are not at all well in this house. There are only a few physical manifestations in "The Haunting" and these few are enough to convince you that something is terribly wrong without going over the top as they have done in the new version.

As to its adherence to the story line, this version is only very loosely based on the book. If they had not used the same character names and lifted a few lines of original dialog, it would be nearly unrecognizable from the original story. That's too bad because, being regarded as a classic horror story, it's hard to imagine how the filmmakers sought to "improve" (?) on the original by changing it so drastically.

Finally, while the original has a brooding ending, this film has a basically triumphant Hollywood happy ending. Although I like happy endings, it just doesn't work so well here.

7-28-1999