Unseen Menace at Hill House: Robert Wise's The Haunting

During his 45-year long career as a motion picture director, Robert Wise (1914-2005) worked in just about every imaginable genre: fantasy, science fiction, Westerns, boxing movies, multi-generational family sagas, tearjerkers, war pictures, romances, historical epics. In his early career he showed a special affinity for film noir, and many of his later movies in other genres, such as I Want to Live! and the heist movie Odds Against Tomorrow, have a distinct film noir look and sensibility. He came late to musicals, but the first one he directed, West Side Story (1961) won him his first Oscar for directing, and his second musical, The Sound of Music (1965), won him a second Oscar for directing four years later.

In between these two big-budget, large-scale productions, Wise went to England and directed a modestly-budgeted black-and-white film with no major stars, The Haunting (1963). This is perhaps the definitive example of the haunted-house movie, a venerable genre dating back at least to 1927's The Cat and the Canary and one of enduring popularity. Based on the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, published in 1959, The Haunting has a simple premise. A psychical researcher, Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), invites several people with confirmed psychic abilities to spend time with him in the supposedly haunted Hill House in New England as part of a research project to determine if any objective signs of haunting can be verified. In the end, only three people accept his invitation: Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn), a skeptical young man with no psychic abilities who is about to inherit Hill House, Theodora (Claire Bloom), a clairvoyant, and Nell Lance (Julie Harris), a depressed woman with a history of attracting paranormal phenomena.

As for plot, not a great deal really happens. The four characters meet, become acquainted, and spend several nights in the house. During this time strange things do indeed occur. The movie accepts as a given the existence of the supernatural. There is no uncertainty or ambiguity here as in The Innocents (1961), the wonderful movie based on the short novel The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, in which the film neither confirms nor denies the existence of the ghosts that Deborah Kerr believes haunt the house where she has been hired as governess to two strange children. In that movie the ghosts might be real or they might be figments of Kerr's troubled imagination; the viewer never knows for sure. In The Haunting there is never any doubt that some strange force, whether ghostly or otherwise, is present in Hill House and torments its inhabitants.

On the other hand, the exact nature of this mysterious force is never revealed, and it is never shown or made explicit in any way. This approach is not surprising, given Robert Wise's history. His first experiences as a credited director were at RKO for producer Val Lewton. Lewton was the man famous for the nine low-budget horror films he produced at RKO in the 1940s in which the horror, while quite real, was never actually shown but only suggested. Not only did this strategy keep the budget down by eliminating the need for special effects, but Lewton felt strongly that horror was most effective when only suggested and not seen. Typical of this approach is the first Lewton film in this vein, the classic The Cat People (1942).

Two of the three movies Wise directed for Lewton were horror films—The Curse of the Cat People (1944), co-directed with Gunther von Fritsch and ostensibly a sequel to The Cat People, although it has very little to do with the original movie, and The Body Snatcher (1945), based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson and inspired by the notorious Burke and Hare, grave robbers in 19th-century Scotland. Wise's decision to apply the Lewton approach to The Haunting was a prudent one. It reconfirmed Lewton's premise that the prospect of horror can be a good deal more frightening than the actual experience, that unseen menace can evoke a greater sense of dread in the characters and in the viewer than monsters that are shown, and that the human imagination's inchoate images of horror can be far more potent agents of terror than those that are manifest. In fact, Wise has called The Haunting "almost [a] tribute to Lewton and my days with him."

One reason the Lewton approach is so effective is that it requires the viewer to be more than just a passive recipient of horrifying images; it makes the viewer become an active participant in his or her own terrorization. The greatest source of fear then becomes fear itself. In The Haunting this is true not only of the audience but of the characters in the movie as well. The monstrous force in Hill House seems intent on teasing and terrifying these people without ever revealing itself. The movie's emphasis therefore is less on action than on characterization, less on what happens than on the effect events have on the people involved. This is especially true of Nell, and although The Haunting is technically an ensemble piece, it is her character above all else that powers the movie.

Nell narrates the movie through her thoughts and internal responses. She is in many ways an archetypal Shirley Jackson character. Like the main character in Jackson's best known and frequently anthologized short story "The Lottery," Nell is a woman who finds herself trapped in a situation of escalating unreality, dread, and horror, a situation in which a personally destructive outcome becomes more and more certain and unavoidable, until finally there is nothing to do but give in and let the inevitable happen. As in "The Lottery," this is a state of victimhood that seems paradoxically both random and predestined. Once the sequence of events is set in motion, the end result becomes inescapable. This loss of control over one's destiny surely lies at the heart of all horror stories: What could be more frightening than the prospect of losing control of one's life to an all-powerful force of destruction?

The menace to Nell comes not only from the outside, from the house itself, but also from the inside, for her own internal sense of fatalism drives her to reach out and embrace the destructive power whose presence in the house she senses. As in all great tragedies, Nell is at least in part the agent of her own destruction, driven by forces that originate deep within her and over which she has no control. She is a deeply troubled woman who feels guilt over her mother's death and extreme alienation from her family and the world around her. "For the past eleven years," she says at one point, "I've been walled up on a desert island. . . . The only thing that kept me going was the feeling that someday something extraordinary would happen."

When Nell learns of Hill House, even before she goes there, she becomes convinced almost to the point of obsession that her destiny lies there. And once she arrives, this conviction grows ever stronger. Her anxiety exacerbated by the sexual attraction she feels for Dr. Markway (and perhaps by a repressed response to the lesbianism of Theo), she becomes progressively more delusional, believing with the certainty of the truly paranoid that something malevolent in the house is targeting her.

Nell actually begins to feel that her consciousness is merging with whatever mystical force it is that inhabits the house: "I'm coming apart a little at a time," she says. "I'm disappearing inch by inch into this house." One of the eeriest sequences in the movie occurs when Dr. Markway's wife turns up unexpectedly and the house terrorizes her and attempts to drive her out. It is almost as if an act of thought-transference between Nell and the house occurs and the house, reacting to the jealousy and hostility of Nell toward Mrs. Markway, puts into effect Nell's subconscious wishes.

Wise's experience directing horror movies for Val Lewton is not the only of his formative experiences to influence The Haunting. Before becoming a director, Wise was for many years a film editor. Two of the last movies he edited before turning to directing were Orson Welles's Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. (In fact, Wise has said in interviews that when The Magnificent Ambersons was taken out of Welles's control by RKO and re-edited after disastrous previews, he shot additional scenes, uncredited, to cover gaps in continuity.) If film noir got its attitude from John Huston's version of The Maltese Falcon, then it took its look from Citizen Kane. The Kane look informed much of Wise's work before West Side Story, and it is much in evidence in The Haunting, with its somber interiors, atmospheric use of light and shadow, and deep-focus photography perfected by Gregg Toland, the cinematographer of Citizen Kane.

From The Magnificent Ambersons Wise retained the concept of the house itself as an additional character in the movie. Anyone who has seen that movie knows what a huge role the house plays in it. Built specifically for the film, the Amberson house was at the time one of the most elaborate sets ever constructed, each room actually having four walls and a ceiling. RKO reused it or portions of it for many other films, including The Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People. The grand staircase appears in Lewton's The Seventh Victim in two guises, first with its intricate stained-glass windows intact as part of the private school where Kin Hunter teaches, and again, its windows covered over with paneling, as the staircase of the apartment building where her sister lives.

In The Haunting, Hill House is literally a fifth main character. Like the Amberson house, it is a rambling Victorian Gothic mansion with a dark, ornately over-decorated, labyrinthine interior. But whereas the Amberson house is almost a place of refuge from the real world, Hill House is a sinister place whose inhabitants have a way of suffering tragic, violent, and sudden death, almost as though, as Nell believes, the house is possessed by an evil numinous presence that turns it into a malicious killer.

The final element that makes The Haunting such a good movie is Julie Harris, who plays the unstable Nell with such subtlety and precision. Harris is one of the great almost-unknown American actresses. She has appeared in many stage plays, movies, television episodes, and several television series. Her first movie was The Member of the Wedding (1952), in which she repeated her role as the tomboy Frankie in the play by Carson McCullers, which was based on her own novel. Harris was 27-years old when the movie was released, yet she convincingly plays a 12-year old girl (and in the process received an Oscar nomination as best actress). She was the first Sally Bowles on Broadway and in the movie version of I Am a Camera (1955). When she appeared in East of Eden (1955), she received top billing, above James Dean. From the late 1950's, she turned more to television and the stage. On television she has played Anastasia, Queen Victoria, Nora in A Doll's House, and Catherine Sloper in The Heiress. Her one-woman show, The Belle of Amherst, in which she played Emily Dickinson, is legendary, and she received a Tony award for it. In fact, she holds the record for more Tony nominations (ten) and wins (five, tied with Angela Lansbury) than any other performer.

Harris is especially known for playing introverted, sensitive, or neurotic roles—all qualities which made her the ideal choice to play Nell in The Haunting. It is to Wise's credit that he cast the most capable actress imaginable in the role of Nell and not a major star, for even with all its other strengths, for me the movie ultimately succeeds because of the complete authenticity of Harris's performance. Her ability to convince the viewer that this peculiar character is absolutely genuine takes the movie way beyond its genre. Harris makes you see from the beginning how Nell's fragility makes her susceptible to the destructive potential in the situation at Hill House, and she makes the gradual process of Nell's psychological disintegration vivid and believable.

It is illuminating to compare The Haunting to haunted-house movies with a more contemporary sensibility like the seminal Poltergeist (1982), a fine film in its own right. Poltergeist aims above all to thrill, and its thrills are the visceral kind. Its conventional middle-class characters and everyday suburban setting are intended in their ordinariness to create in the viewer a feeling of identification. Its very real monsters are shown in specific detail in both their ethereal form and their gruesome physical form. It supplies the viewer with a rational explanation for the events, an explanation that exists in a moral universe of guilt and punishment, a universe where bad things happen for comprehensible reasons and where chaos is a temporary anomaly that can be corrected.

The Haunting does none of these things. Its aim is to chill the viewer by evoking a disturbing mood and atmosphere. Its characters are far from typical—a rich boy, an academic in an esoteric field, a bohemian lesbian, and a self-tormented neurotic. Its setting is not part of a mundane modern community but macabre, antiquated, and isolated. Its evil too is real but is never shown and never explained in rational or moral terms; it exists solely as an incomprehensible irruption of chaos into the familiar world. It has neither larger meaning nor explanation; it simply is. Poltergeist is the updated movie equivalent of a sensationalistic but ultimately reassuring horror comic book from the 1950s. The Haunting is the movie equivalent of a subtle work of genre fiction that combines psychology with the supernatural to unnerve the reader without providing reassurance that the menace it describes can ever be controlled. It aims to leave the reader—or in the case of the movie, the viewer—in an unsettled state, the only sense of resolution relief that it all happened to someone else.

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The 2007 documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, a Turner Classic Movies production narrated and co-produced by Martin Scorsese, is highly recommended. Robert Wise appears in archival footage as one of those interviewed about Lewton. The Haunting was remade, by most accounts unsuccessfully, in 1999.

Jacques Tati: The Master of French Film Comedy, Part 3

Monsieur Hulot in the Brave New World

Jacques Tati was not a hurried or haphazard filmmaker. His third feature-length film, Mon Oncle (1958), was released five years after his second, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, and the five years Tati spent making Mon Oncle is apparent in its meticulous conception and execution. One remarkable thing about Tati's films is the clear sense of evolution from one to the next. In each successive film he seemed to take elements he had perfected in the previous film and add new ones to the mix. In this way, his movies grew progressively more complex, more sophisticated, and more ambitious, in both the technical and the thematic sense.

Tati's first movie, Jour de Fête (1949), with its emphasis on physical comedy and the precision timing of its physical gags, has much in common with the work of Buster Keaton. His second movie, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, continues the physical comedy of Jour de Fête, although not in such a purely kinetic way, and builds on that film by intensifying the emphasis on characterization. It takes the concept of that earlier film's main character (François the village postman) as comic outsider and applies it even more assiduously to Tati's new creation, M. Hulot. Leaving in his wake a trail of comic chaos, M. Hulot becomes by the end of the movie the kind of social pariah Harold Lloyd played in movies like The Freshman.

Tati recognized that in M. Hulot he had created a perfect Everyman character, one whose simultaneous universality and individuality enabled Tati to devise nearly any conceivable comic situation around this versatile character. Keeping M. Hulot as the main character of Mon Oncle, Tati added to Keaton's physicality and Lloyd's use of character as the starting point of the story a new element: the topicality of Charles Chaplin. If Modern Times (1936)—admittedly, inspired at least in part by René Clair's A Nous la Liberté (1932)—is Chaplin's take on modernity, then Mon Oncle is the first of two movies in which Tati tackled head-on the same subject: the tribulations of the ordinary man alone and alienated in the mystifying modern world.

Yet in fact the germ of those two elements—modern life and alienation—is present in Tati's two earlier films. Consider François's flirtation with modernity in Jour de Fête, in which his disastrous experimentation with what he believes are modern American methods of postal delivery ends with his abandoning the idea and returning to traditional methods. Consider also the rather melancholic ending of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, in which M. Hulot, shunned by the adults at the seaside resort where he is vacationing, ends up on the beach with the children, just about the only people in the movie who will accept his childlike but well-intentioned misbehavior. In this ending there is a sense that M. Hulot is for the first time in his life consciously aware of his apartness from other people. With such awareness inevitably comes the onset of existential alienation, and that is precisely the state Tati explores in a satirical way in Mon Oncle.

Mon Oncle opens on a construction site with the sound of jackhammers heard behind the credits. The film immediately switches to a deserted early morning street in an old section of Paris, with mellow, jazzy Parisian popular music playing on the soundtrack. To the sounds of accordion, banjo, and vibraphone, a group of dogs—several mongrels and one purebred dachshund—are cheerfully roaming, romping with one another, scrounging through the street refuse, and marking their territory. The dogs make their way through a transitional zone with the rubble of razed buildings in the foreground and newly constructed apartment buildings that look like concrete boxes in the background, eventually ending up in a new suburban neighborhood in front of an ultra-modern bungalow with a modernistic metal gate. At this point the dachshund squeezes underneath the gate and is home. This is the house of the Arpels—M. Hulot's sister, her husband, and their son, his nephew Gérard.

In the first few minutes of the film, Tati has staked out his thematic territory: the contrast between the modern world of the Arpels and the traditional world of M. Hulot. Like Tati's earlier movies, Mon Oncle is loosely constructed as a series of episodes filled with sight and sound gags. But unlike Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, where M. Hulot is at the center of each episode, here the episodes are linked conceptually, by the idea of the conflict between modernity and tradition. From the beginning it is clear where Tati's sympathies lie: Everything about the modern world is depicted as soulless, characterless, and spiritually enervating as it relentlessly destroys the old to make way for the new, as it consumes the traditional world and dehumanizes its inhabitants like M. Hulot.

M. Hulot's neighborhood, where the movie starts, is colorful and lively. It is filled with people, activity, and life lived in the open. Everywhere we hear the sounds of life—of dogs barking, music playing, and people chatting with their neighbors and with the vendors in the market stalls of the square. In the streets we see eccentric characters—a deliveryman with a horse-drawn cart; a man sweeping the streets with a crudely fashioned broom; a tipsy man in a raincoat, pajamas, slippers, and beret walking his dog on a leash; a group of disheveled schoolboys who have ditched school playing practical jokes on unsuspecting strangers.

The world of the Arpels couldn't be more different. In their neighborhood the streets are empty except for automobiles. The buildings either present blank facades to the street or, like their own house, are sequestered behind fences. While M. Hulot either walks or rides his motocyclette, M. Arpel drives his huge American Oldsmobile everywhere, delivering his son to his newly built school that looks more like a factory or prison than a school, or to his own modern factory, where his company, Plastac, manufactures plastic pipes and hoses.

In Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, Tati used locations to convey moods, and more specifically he used the Hôtel de la Plage, where M. Hulot spent his vacation, essentially as a character in the movie. In Mon Oncle, Tati also uses architecture and buildings as characters. M. Hulot's apartment building is a rambling, improvised structure clearly added to many times over the years without any thought of overall design. M. Hulot's apartment, on the top floor, is reached by a circuitous route up staircases, across an interior landing, down another flight of stairs, across an exterior terrace, around the side of the building, and up another flight of stairs that leads to his apartment, which appears to be a series of small rooms perched on a former rooftop.

M. Hulot's apartment building

The Arpel house, perhaps the most striking modern residence ever seen in a non-science fiction movie (it easily outdoes the houses in Leave Her to Heaven and North by Northwest), stands in total contrast to M. Hulot's building. To call this house futuristic would be an understatement. The yard leading to the front door is fragmented into geometric shapes that are paved or filled with gravel or tiny patches of precisely manicured grass. In this environment artificial flowers are preferred to real ones because "they're made to last." The few examples of real vegetation are topiary pruned into rigidly geometric forms—cubes, spheres, cones. Two plant-like structures espaliered on the wall of the house appear to be made of barbed wire, the barbs imitating leaves. Dominating all is a hideous fountain with a large, upright metal fish that vaguely resembles a marlin, spewing water dyed a cyanic blue color.

The house itself is a streamlined, two-story, block-like structure with two round windows resembling eyes in the main room of the second floor. The rooms in the uninviting, minimalist interior of the house are boxy, nearly empty of furnishings, and relentlessly colorless and monochromatic. In this house even a single leaf that has blown in from outdoors mars the perfect order and must be gingerly picked up and disposed of by the obsessively tidy Mme. Arpel. Everything in the hi-tech house that can be automated, mechanized, or turned into a gadget has been; even opening a kitchen cupboard is a complicated mechanical procedure that thoroughly confounds M. Hulot. To call this setting sterile would be putting it mildly.

The Arpels' futuristic house

But more importantly, this environment precisely reflects the way its inhabitants think and live. Theirs is a totally planned and controlled world with no room for spontaneity, a humorless place where playfulness is inappropriate, where every thing and every activity must be serious, practical, and functional. Being tidy, methodical, and productive are the most highly prized personal traits in this world. Having wholly internalized this ethos, M. and Mme. Arpel are the ultimate conformist consumers, with an almost worshipful attitude toward modernity and a fetishistic devotion to all things fashionable and up-to-date.

Only two people seem uncomfortable in this environment: M. Hulot and Gérard, the Arpels' young son. Gérard's parents attempt to instill in him their own belief in the value of the totally regimented life—scheduling his day, urging him to apply himself to productive pursuits like school and study, and discouraging him from any activities they deem frivolous. Naturally, the last includes most of the things Gérard would prefer to be doing. Just as the Arpels' dachshund Daqui enjoys roaming the streets with the mongrels of H. Hulot's shabby but colorful neighborhood, Gérard understandably prefers to play hooky and loaf with his uncle or the street kids in M. Hulot's neighborhood.

When Mme. Arpel decides that her brother is a bad influence on Gérard, she urges her husband to find M. Hulot a job in his plastics factory. This results in a long set piece—one of several in the film—that is essentially an extended version of one of the series of small misadventures in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. Assigned a simple, mind-numbingly routine job—to oversee a self-regulating machine that extrudes lengths of what appears to be red plastic garden hose—M. Hulot turns an apparently foolproof job into a comic disaster. As his attention wanders, his lengths of hose, rather than being of regular and unvarying diameter, begin to resemble a string of sausages, all bulges and pinches. M. Hulot is unable either to keep up with the speed of the machine or to stop it before it extrudes a tremendous length of irregular hose that must be discarded.

Unable to perform this simple task, M. Hulot is in the end exiled by the Arpels, sent off to a new job at another factory in a different part of France. The last we see of him is as he is dropped off at the airport by M. Arpel and Gérard. It will be nine years before M. Hulot lands—in Tati's next film, Play Time (1967)—in a world even more unsettling than this one. In the brave new world of Mon Oncle, we at least see vestiges of a recognizably human environment precariously enduring the onslaught of modernity. In Play Time even those last vestiges of humanity will be gone forever.

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