Skip This: The Haunting

Movie Poster for The Haunting

A little while ago I was bored and looking for something interesting to watch on demand when I came across a movie who's title was simple the haunting. Sounds plausible enough and simple enough to be good, I thought, so I picked it out and read the small description. Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Owen Wilson are all in this picture, so I figured how bad could it be with not one, but three large name actors. And the description also left me more interesting, people brought to a house for a psychological study on insomnia later learn that the house is haunted. Again, simplistic enough that it sounded like a decent plot for some good horror thrills. So I loaded it up and watched the whole movie in one run, and here are my thoughts on a movie I suspect no one has heard of before.

The Haunting [1999]

I've already described the basic plot of this movie in my little introduction, but here is a slightly more in-depth version. This woman named Eleanor was living with her mother who recently passed away. She is being kicked out of her mother's loft by her sister who wants the apartment for her family. That night and while she is still in her mother's apartment she receives a phone call telling her about an ad in the paper that is asking for insomnia patients as part of a research program. She calls and finds out that they will pay her a lot of money a week just for being part of the study, and not just that but they will give her free room and board. Instantly she takes at the offer and drives off to a mansion that is far away from any known civilization.

While out there she meets the leader of the insomnia study, Liam Neeson's character, who actually has a darker side to his story. See, he is actually studying fear induced on patients and is using the old mansion as a primitive way of inducing fear with the insomnia patients. He gives them a fairy tale story, letting them all know how the mansion came to be built, and then lets them go to sleep. Later that night he runs into one of the other insomnia patients, Owen Wilson's character, where he reveals another portion of the fairy tale story that is not so bright. The wife hung herself. From that point onward strange occurrences begin to happen in the mansion, some of which not even Liam Neeson can explain as he takes notes and watches the main character and other insomnia patients slowly change pace.

Theatrical Trailer for The Haunting

The beginning of this movie was really good, in fact it was almost classical in the way that the whole mansion was set-up for the characters to be let loose in. A lonely, middle-aged woman as the main protagonist and a large, mysterious house make for a perfect classic start. And the production even does a good job at making small changes in details the main focus at the beginning, the turning of statue heads and the overall strangeness of the mansion. But that was about all that was good in this movie.

See, unlike other horror movies that are driven by a bloody plot, this one felt more like a horror story driven by an audience of children. They stick away from the bloody mess and more towards fairy tales, trying their best to convey an at most okay story with really well camera work and an excellent cast. It actually is quite sad, because if they would have worked more on the story then this might have been an amazing movie. It had the set-up, it had the cast and characters, and everything was going well until they tried to keep the fairy tale aspect going. And once that was going, they could not stop. So if you are into bad scary movies, this is probably a top pick then.

And then I felt the whole movie just fell out of place. It had this enchantment to it that I liked in the beginning, the mystery of the house and the strangeness of what was happened. They drop that in sight of making the bad ghosts actually a reality that can affect the physical world. That part I did not like. See, I prefer my ghosts to either interact indirectly or have a direct interactions, but never both. In this movie they tried to do both and so it sort of left more to be desired on either side of the spectrum. I wish they would have gone more into why the weird side-effects were happening in the house, how the ghosts were controlling certain things, and why so many different aspects would change. It was overall a little bit more of a let-down than anything. To keep this short, I would not recommend this movie.

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