The Haunting (film)

Claire Bloom and Julie Harris in The Haunting (1963)

It may be one of the scariest horror movies of all time -- at least among those that have no blood, no body parts, no chattering skeletons -- and it's surely one of the best adaptations of an American work of horror. Directed in 1963 by Robert Wise (West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Andromeda Strain), it stars Julie Harris as Eleanor Lance, alongside Claire Bloom as Theodora (with wardrobe by Mary Quant, credited as the inventor of the "mini skirt"), Russ Tamblyn (later to star in West Side Story as well, but best known as Dr. Jacoby in David Lynch's Twin Peaks), and Richard Johnson as "Dr. Markway" (oddly changed from the "Dr. Montague" of the novel). Interestingly, Wise's first choice for Markway was Peter Ustinov, but he declined due to other commitments (he was directing his own play, "Photo Finish," on Broadway).

Other than that, though, it's a remarkably faithful adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House; Jackson was personally invited to one of the premieres by the director, and by all accounts she was delighted with it. And, though there's a great deal of voice-over with Eleanor's voice -- quite a lot, from the point of view of film -- it's only a small selection of the far more constant stream of her thinking which runs throughout almost the entire length of the novel. The role of the psychic investigator's wife -- Mrs. Montague/Mrs. Markway -- is also quite different in book and film. And, since the film was shot in England, where people drive on the other side of the road, the producers simply flipped the film; they also added a few highway signs for "Route 128," though they neglected to change a placard on a home from "House to Let" to "House for Sale," the more usual American phrase.

Ettington Park Hotel

The interiors of Hill House were all constructed on a soundstage, but for exteriors, they needed a real building -- and they chose an old manor house, since converted to a hotel, not far outside of Stratford-on-Avon (Shakespeare's birthplace). Known as the Ettington Park, it is one of those places on some people's bucket list to stay -- alongside, no doubt, the Stanley Hotel, which was used for exteriors of the "Overlook Hotel" in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining." Those who do stay at Ettington Park will face just two slight disappointments -- there's no library with a spiral staircase -- and no haunted nursery, either. Perhaps they should consider adding them!

NB: I've added a set of discussion questions -- they are optional -- if responding to them is preferable, use them freely; otherwise, feel free to comment on any aspect of either the novel or the film. I also encourage you to consider responding to one another; that's often where the most interesting comments come about!

Also: check out this excellent site with background on the film's production!

The Haunting of Hill House (part 1)

 Laura Miller, in her recent introduction to a new edition of the book, describes it as "setting a trap" -- both for its main character, Eleanor Vance, and for its reader. The trap is an improved version of the old "Poe" model: get your reader into the head of the protagonist, and once they're there, you can lure them into the deepest and darkest places, and they'll have nowhere else to go!

But it's also more than just a trap. Eleanor is a a curious sort of person -- somewhat reticent, shy, and inwardly turned -- indeed, she could very well fit the profile of many members of today's Gen-X and Gen-Y generations. She's also been victimized by a bossy sister, and saddled with the care of their aging, ailing mother.  In part as a result, she's had very little social contact outside the family; when she receives the invitation from Dr. Montague, the most significant thing about it is that it's an actual invitation -- and now, she's "expected" somewhere. Whether Hill House is haunted or cursed or just old and creepy matters not; what matters is that it's a house, a house where she's wanted, expected, and in which she belongs.

Which of course makes her the perfect central character for a horror novel.

According to an account by Paula Guran, Jackson had decided to write "a ghost story" after reading about a group of nineteenth-century "psychic researchers" who studied a house and somberly reported their supposedly scientific findings to the Society for Psychic Research. What she discovered in their "dry reports was not the story of a haunted house, it was the story of several earnest, I believe misguided, certainly determined people, with their differing motivations and background." Excited by the prospect of creating her own haunted house and the characters to explore it, she launched into research. She later claimed to have found a picture of a California house she believed was suitably haunted-looking in a magazine. She asked her mother, who lived in California, to help find information about the dwelling. According to Jackson, her mother identified the house as one the author's own great-great-grandfather, an architect who had designed some of San Francisco's oldest buildings, had built. Jackson also read volume upon volume of traditional ghost stories while preparing to write her own, "No one can get into a novel about a haunted house without hitting the subject of reality head-on; either I have to believe in ghosts, which I do, or I have to write another kind of novel altogether."

So, do you believe in ghosts? Does one need to, in order be enthralled by a tale that includes them? And as to houses, perhaps you know a haunted-looking one in your neighborhood. In your comments, let your fellow students know what views you had before -- and after -- entering Hill House; if you like, you can make use of these discussion questions, which are keyed to the first half of the novel.

The Bus

Original 1965 illustration for "The Bus"

With each miniature masterwork, Shirley Jackson gets a little more "under our skin." Here again, we have a tale of displacement: of time, distance, and of the sudden loss -- or acquisition -- of a feeling of familiarity. We've all had those moments of dissociation -- familiar things seeming suddenly unfamiliar, and vice versa -- but what if, after we rubbed our eyes, they still remained reversed?

"The Bus" is filled with the small frustrations of the everyday, amplified since we know that the main character is elderly, and at times confused. She is determined, all the same, to reach her destination. How many time have any of us heard the words "this is your stop" from a bus driver or conductor -- who are we to question them? We begin, indeed, with empathy: what a sad turn of events -- what will happen to this innocent old woman? And then, by slow degrees, we begin to anticipate another fate: is this just some random house, with a faint whiff of familiarity? Or is it, though at first unrecognized, home?

Along with Jackson's story, I'm asking you to view an old episode of The Twilight Zone, "Mirror Image." It, too, begins in a bus depot with an unfriendly ticket agent, though in this case the protagonist is a young woman, Millicent Barnes (Vera Miles) waiting for her bus to Cortland. The bus is late, the ticket agent is grumpy, but nothing else seems out of place -- until, well, of course, it does. Directed by the German filmmaker John Brahm, and introduced with his usual stretched-lip panache by Rod Serling, it offers another tale in which a journey by bus becomes a trip to insanity. It's available via various streaming services, including Paramount Plus, Prime Video, or Apple TV.

The Lottery

Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" -- in which a town selects each year those of its fellows it will stone to death -- generated more letters to The New Yorker than any other story in its history. Some of these letters were written by quite prominent persons; many seemed to take the story as a claim about some actual town in New England, and rejected it as spurious or insulting. A couple of years ago, a current writer for the New Yorker tracked down a few of the surviving writers of these letters, and some of them stuck to their criticism of nearly seventy years earlier. Miriam Friend, whose husband had been a scientist working on the Manhattan Project, had written to Jackson asking her to explain its meaning "before my husband and I scratch right through our scalps trying to fathom it." Reached in 2013, she told the interviewer she hadn't changed her mind; it was still "such a harsh story."

Jackson herself read all these letters, and incorporated them into a talk she gave on a number of occasions, "Biography of a story" where she took wry pleasure in the musings and misunderstandings readers communicated to her. In a way, it's rather like what happens instantaneously on Twitter or Facebook today; a writer impugns her readers' values and beliefs, and is suddenly called into the court of public shame. Only Jackson wasn't ashamed, only bemused -- and the story ended up as a breakthrough moment in her career.

Perhaps no less remarkable is that the tale was taken up for a film treatment in 1969 by Encyclopedia Britannica, whose film series was, in nearly all other cases, drily educational. Their director Larry Yust, whose other EB shorts included "Electrons at Work" and "How to Produce Current with Magnets," did not flinch at the story's subject-matter, or soften it in any way. The soft Kodachrome tones of his production make the blood at the end even redder. It's been adapted several times since, but never so effectively.

Once again this week we have four discussion questions -- choose one and post your reply below (you don't need to paste the entire question in, just your response).

Invasion of the Body Snatchers/"The Beautiful Stranger"

In a way, it's a nightmare as old as humanity: what if we, or the ones we love, turned out to be imposters? How would we know? What would we do? And who would believe us if we told them?

Although billed as science fiction, most of the real drama of 1953's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is psychological. It opens on an almost bucolic note, as suburban doctor Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) returns from a medical conference and is picked up from the train station by his office nurse. Everything is fine, she says, except for a few strange complaints: Dr. Bennell's once and future flame Becky (Dana Wynter) has one. It seems her cousin Wilma Lentz is convinced that her Uncle Ira isn't really Uncle Ira. When the Doc visits, though, Ira seems his usual, pipe-smoking, grumbly self, by Wilma is unappeased; "There's something missing," she insists, "there's no emotion ... just the pretense of it." Miles does his best to reassure her, but between this and the rest of his patients -- many of whom, though seemingly anxious to see him while he was way, have cancelled their appointments.

Of course, it takes a while for him to realize that people are being replaced by pods placed by aliens in their basements, pods which -- as they mature -- take on the exact form and personality of the people they are to replace, only minus any genuine emotion or personality.

Dr. Bennell eventually regrets his initial failure to realize what's gone wrong -- in the frame narrative (added to the film after audiences found the original, uncertain ending too frustrating) he's explaining his story to an initially skeptical psychiatrist. At one point, in a voiceover, he muses that, as a doctor, he was quite used to people losing their individuality over time, just not so many or so quickly:

In my practice, I've seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn't seem to mind... All of us - a little bit - we harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear.

It's this prescient awareness of the 1950's unawareness of itself that has endeared the film to later fans, and has given rise to the phrase "pod people" being applied to social conformists. The 1978 remake with Donald Sutherland in the lead role (and in which McCarthy has a brief but memorable cameo) is also worth seeing, for the same reasons.

With "The Beautiful Stranger," Shirley Jackson proposes a different kind of sudden replacement: for the young woman in this story, things seem to be going well enough, though her husband is hardly the sensitive, supportive type. But once the "beautiful stranger" arrives, we find ourselves sharing in an unexpected and volatile exuberance -- could this be true? There are some shades of another story, The Return of Martin Guerre, an 1982 film based on a far earlier event of a war veteran's unexpected return -- a double one, in fact. Indeed, after enough time, how do we know that a long-lost loved one is in fact the same one we loved so long ago? Jackson's trick here is that it has not, in fact, been "so long" -- in fact, it's only just been yesterday. In a way, it's also an inverse version of Body Snatchers, the sort of snatching that gives a soulless person a soul -- and yet it somehow unhinges the main character, sending her into a strange world where she almost no longer seems ... herself!

William Wilson/Mr. Pelham

Scene from "The Case of Mr. Pelham"

"It's usually considered bad luck to encounter your double, or your doppelgänger as they say in German. Unless, that is, you have an identical twin! The belief that it's unfortunate goes back at least to the Romantic era of the late 1790's and early 1800's, and is associated with many of its leading writers, and indeed Mary Shelley's creature in Frankenstein (1818) may in some ways be seen as Victor Frankenstein's monstrous double. Edgar Allan Poe took up the idea in his short story "William Wilson" (1839), which is also the only one of his stories to be set in his own childhood, at a school he attended in Stoke Newington, outside London. Dostoyevsy's The Double (1866) builds further on this, making his character's double as extroverted and gregarious as the original is timid and shy. And of course even Stevenson's classic Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is such a tale, though the "hook" here is that they are, in fact, the same man.

But it's with film, and especially television, that the idea of doubles really takes off; through the technique of masking, it's actually quite easy to put two separate images of the same actor on the same screen. Alfred Hitchcock had great fun with the idea in "The Case of Mr. Pelham" (1955, shown above), and the concept took a comedic turn with the "identical cousins" of the Patty Duke Show. Horror master David Cronenberg elevated the story to new heights in his Dead Ringers (1988), a tale of twin Canadian gynecologists, both played by Jeremy Irons, which is -- almost unbelievebaly! -- based on a true story. And of course the much-awaited "third season" of David Lynch's Twin Peaks revolved almost entirely around the idea, with "good" Cooper -- trapped for a time in the life of "Dougie Jones" -- battles with the bad one. Lynch prefers the term tulpa -- but it comes down to much the same thing, and person.

So give us your thoughts on this story -- and, as with our previous post, feel free to make use of these discussion questions (you need only answer one) if you like.

Us

 It's one of the grimmest takes on the age-old theme of the double or döppelganger -- here, one's replacements stand, zombie-like, at the edge of one's driveway, waiting for their moment, baseball-bats in hand. But it begins, as do so many tales of doubling, with a single uncanny moment, when Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) encounters her double in (where else?) a house of mirrors at a carnival. The mirrors provide an apt scene, but also introduce the critical element of doubt: could it all just be in her head?

We fast-forward to adult Adelaide, still haunted by this childhood trauma, on vacation with friends. She's still cautious about large public places, and the beach is no resort for her, especially after she catches a glimpse of a man on a stretcher carried by paramedics, and -- soon after -- a seeming double of that man, bloodied and strange.

And then the fun begins: the lurking menacing mute gathering of the döppelgangers, a little closer to home in each shot. When they come, their resemblance becomes still creepier; we see them mimic the actions of their 'originals,' but in a weirdly clumsy manner. Then the killing begins.

We learn that these doubles are the "tethered" -- creatures linked to those they so resemble, and seeking to free themselves by killing the originals and severing the  ropes that tie them to them. It's a strange sort of linkage in which -- at least in one sense -- their murderous rampages are almost a cry for freedom. Adelaide, of course, is the only one who really understands all this, and it's her struggle -- and her final battle with her own tethered replicant -- that brings the film around to its final denouement.

So what does Us add to the long tradition of doubles? Are its concept of the "tethered" and its "science experiment" explanation any different from the usual suspects? And is its ending somehow creepier or more meaningful than that of earlier such tales? And do you sense the political undertones of this film, perhaps agreeing with Jordan Peele that, untimately, "all horror films are political"? (see his interviews here and here).

Your thoughts here.