Thrice-Told Tales: 'The Haunting' From Novel to Film... to Film - Steven Jay Schneider

In DeBont’s 1999 remake of The Haunting, Theo’s transgressive lesbianism (here played by Catherine Zeta-Jones [left]) becomes a watered-down and unexplored bisexuality.

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T H R I C E - T O L D T A L E S

from Novel to Film * * * to Film

By STEVEN JAY SCHNEIDER

Abstract: Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House has been widely praised as one of the most frightening tales ever written. Robert Wise’s adaptation for the big screen, The Haunting (1963), is considered by a great many scholars and fans to be possibly the scariest movie of all time. Jan DeBont’s 1999 version of The Haunting bears traces of both its adapted and remade status, although it was derided by reviewers for its reliance on computer-generated imagery, spectacle, and supernatural explanation. Taken together, these three texts provide an ideal case study for examining the possibilities, complexities, and difficulties involved in literary-cinematic adaptation.

Key words: The Haunting, The Haunting of Hill House, horror, Jan DeBont, literary-cinematic adaptation, remake, Robert Wise, Shirley Jackson

“Unknown.” That’s the key word-“unknown.” When we become involved in a supernatural event, we’re scared out of our wits just because it’s unknown. The night cry of a child, face on the wall, markings, bangings, what’s that to be afraid of? You weren’t threat- ened. It was harmless, like a joke that doesn’t come out. . . . Until we know how it works, we’ll continue to carry around this unnecessary burden of fear.

-Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson) in The Haunting (1 963)

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168 JPF&T-Jounnal of Popular Film and Television

cclaimed American novelist and short story writer Shirley A ackson (1916-65) in 1959

published The Haunting of Hill House, a book that through the decades has been widely praised as one of the most frightening tales ever committed to paper. Three years later, director Robert Wise chose this story as the one he would adapt for the big screen to honor the memory of his one-time mentor, Val Lewton (auteurist producer of a number of atmospheric, suspenseful, and highly successful B-grade horror pictures for RKO in the 1940s). MGM, to whom Wise owed a film under a previous contract, obtained the rights to Jackson’s novel, Nelson Gidding wrote the screenplay, and, because of bud- getary constraints, the production was funded through the studio’s overseas arm with a largely British cast and crew.’ The result, The Haunting (1963), is considered by a great many scholars, aficionados, and casual fans of the genre to be one of the scariest movies of all time-if not the scariest. Telling- ly, the word most often employed to describe Wise’s film is “effective” (Jeremy Dyson, for example, uses it three times on the very first page of his essay on The Haunting [228]). And the impressive fidelity it bears to its literary source material has come to be taken as an unquestionable assumption in most discussions of the film.

In 1999, after the wave of self- reflexive, Gen-X-targeted “neo-stalker” movies (including Scream [1997], I Know What You Did Last Summer [ 19981, and Halloween H20 [ 19981) initiated a return to box-office popular- ity of the horror genre,* Dreamworks Pictures released a special effects- laden, $80 million version of The Haunting, directed by Jan DeBont (Speed [1994], Speed 2 [1997]), following a great deal of anticipation and fanfare. Fresh off the abysmal response to Gus Van Sant’s nearly shot-for-shot remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho the previous year, many critics and potential viewers were skeptical of the chances for success of a film that had already been done nearly perfectly b e f ~ r e . ~ Unlike the case with Van Sant’s Psycho, however, this new

Designing fear: Wise had off-centered mirrors placed throughout Hill House in his 1963 film adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel, having them function as eyes, reflecting images of the unwelcome tenants back to them (at times only to the audience) when least expected.

Haunting was in no sense intended as an homage to the original version of the film: The DVD commentary makes no mention of Wise’s picture, and executive producer Steven Spielberg felt it necessary to “travel the road not taken by Wise to deliver the goods for modern audiences” (Jensen 22): Har- vey Roy Greenberg’s provocative the- sis concerning the “intensely rivalrous spirit” inhabiting Always, Spielberg’s 1990 remake of Victor Fleming’s A Guy Named Joe (1943)-namely, that L‘an unconscious, oedipally driven

competitiveness comprises the dark side of Spielberg’s intense admiration for the original and its director” (120 )-here receives additional and independent support, with Wise stand- ing in for Fleming, and Jackson’s crisp novel subbing for Dalton Trumbo’s meandering screenplay.

In pursuit of such a dubious goal, and because Wise’s Haunting is so faithful to Jackson’s novel, the original plot was altered by screenwriter David Self to such an extent that what audiences finally saw bore little resemblance to

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Thrice-Told Tales: The Haunting 169

either of the story’s previous incarna- tions. But despite winding up as a film that betrays the spirit (pun intended) of its literary and cinematic precursors, the 1999 Haunting still bears traces of both its adapted and remade status. Although not sufficiently innovative or distinctive to be placed in Robert Eberwein’s cate- gory of the “apparent remake whose status as a remake is denied by the director” (30fithe example Eberwein gives is Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Antonioni’s Blow- Up (1 966)-DeBont’s film nevertheless qualifies as an “unacknowledged, dis- guised remake.” Greenberg, summariz- ing the work of Michael B. Druxman, explains that remakes of this type undertake “major alterations . . . in time, setting, gender, or . . . genre. The audience is deliberately uninformed about the switches” (126). Complicating matters further in this particular case is the fact that the remake in question disguis- es itself even more by eschewing in large measure the originally adapted source material.

For reasons I will speculate on below, DeBont’s picturedespite a massive publicity campaign and the presence of two of Hollywood’s most recognizable stars (Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta- Jones) in major roles-struggled might- ily to just break even at the box office, and was derided by reviewers for, among other things, its reliance on computer-generated imagery, spectacle, and supernatural explanation at the expense of psychological realism, sus- pense, and ambig~ity.~ Taken together, these three texts provide an ideal case study for examining a number of the possibilities, complexities, and difficulties involved in literary-cinematic adaptation. By holding the two film versions of The Haunting up against Jackson’s novel, we can go a long way toward de- termining where and how each of them managed-r else failed-to provide audiovisual analogues for the innovative literary techniques that Jackson employed to horrify her readers.

lthough The Haunting of Hill AH ouse can be summarized briefly and without much difficulty, the extreme uncanniness of Jackson’s

story can only be experienced firsthand-that is, by reading it oneself. After some cryptic remarks to open the novel (“Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within” [3]), each of the four main characters (the human ones, at least) is introduced by an omniscient narrator. First we meet Dr. John Mon- tague, an anthropologist who “had been looking for an honestly haunted house all his life” and who has arranged an experiment for himself and two women with documented paranormal abilities to “go and live at Hill House and see what happened there” (4). Accompanying Montague are Eleanor Vance, thirty-two years old, friendless, and “ever since her first memory . . . waiting for something like Hill House” (7); Theodora (“that was as much name as she used” [8]), an artist, psychic, and-it is strongly suggested-a lesbian; and Luke Sanderson, the immature future owner of Hill House, sent there by his aunt. Jackson then shifts gears, placing us for an extended period of time directly inside the mind of Eleanor, who leaves the small room she has been subletting from her sister ever since their mother-a cruel invalid whom Eleanor took care of for eleven years-passed away to make the trip to Hill House. From this point, Eleanor becomes the story’s unlikely protagonist (“unlikely” because she is only moderately sympathetic and in no sense heroic); almost everything that transpires in the house is focalized through her, and Jackson spends more time detailing Eleanor’s thoughts, fears, and insecurities than she does describing the external activities of everyone else (save for the house itself) combined.

On her anival at Hill House, Elea- nor meets the others and quickly develops a bond with the liberated Theo, as well as a secret crush on Luke. Dr. Montague goes over the troubled history of the house, which was built by a strange man named Hugh Crain eighty years earlier as a country home for his wife and two young daughters. But Hill House “was a sad house almost from the begin-

ning” (75)-Crain’s first wife was killed in a carriage accident on the driveway, and his second died from a mysterious fall (a third lost her battle to consumption). After Crain’s own death, his eldest daughter became the primary resident of Hill House and lived there as a recluse (save for a lone female companion) until contracting pneumonia and dying there an elderly woman. The companion was accused by many townspeople of neglecting old Miss Crain during her illness; she eventually hanged herself from a turret on the house’s tower. Ever since then, Hill House has been empty, “ ‘Nothing in it touched, nothing used, nothing here wanted by anyone any more, just sitting here thinking.’-‘And waiting,’ Eleanor said. ‘And waiting,’ the doctor confirmed” (82). As Eleanor and her companions quickly find out, the geography of Hill House bears a strong, strange resemblance to its cre- ator: “ ‘Hugh Crain . . . made his house to suit his mind. Angles which you assume are the right angles you are accustomed to, and have every right to expect are true, are actually a fraction of a degree off in one direction or another.’ . . . ‘It is’-and his [the doctor’s] voice was saddened-‘a master- piece of architectural misdirection’ ” (108).

After a peaceful night’s sleep, inex- plicable and vaguely threatening events begin to take place with increasing regularity and with Eleanor at the center of them all: loud, relent- less bangings on the door to her and Theo’s room; a message invitinghn- structing her to “COME HOME’ written on the wall; children’s voices whispering her name. Psychologically isolating herself from the others, Eleanor eventually comes to believe that Hill House is her true abode: She hears her dead mother calling for her, dances with a statue of Hugh Crain, and climbs to the top of a rickety old staircase, where she has to be rescued by Luke. Fearing for her physical and mental safety, Dr. Montague finally dismisses Eleanor from Hill House, despite her pleas (“‘I really wasn’t afraid. I’m fine now. I was-happy. . . . I don’t want to go away from here”’

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170 JPF&T-Journal of Popular Film and Television

[241]) and demands (“‘You can’t just make me go,’ she said wildly. ‘You brought me here”’ [243]). Eventually, Eleanor realizes that there is nothing she can say to make Dr. Montague change his mind. Waving goodbye to the group, she pulls away in her car, but rather than drive off she presses her foot down hard on the accelerator and crashes straight into the huge tree at the base of the driveway: ‘“They can’t turn me out or shut me out or laugh at me or hide from me; I won’t go, and Hill House belongs to me’” (245). These are Eleanor’s last words.

n the following sections, I look close- I ly at how the Hauntings of Wise and DeBont compare and contrast with The Haunting of Hill House linguistically, stylistically, and thematically. With this larger task in mind, it would help to identify the major deviations in plot from book to films. As mentioned, Wise’s Haunting is a great deal more loyal to the original text than is DeBont’s. But this must not be mistak- en for the claim that Nelson Gidding’s screenplay is a mere transcription of the novel: Clearly, a great deal of thought and effort went into how best to simplify (and so hopefully intensify) elements of Jackson’s narrative.

Some of the most obvious plot differences between the novel and the 1963 film are as follows: (1) The back story is simplified in the film: Hugh Crain now has only two wives, not three, and just one daughter, not two. Also, Wise gives us our history lesson immediately after the opening title sequence: An unidentified speaker (who we soon discover is Dr. John “Markway” [Richard Johnson]) pro- vides voice-over narration to accompa- ny what we can only assume is an objective/omniscient montage of Crain’s first wife dying in a carriage crash, of his daughter Abigail spending most of her life inside Hill House’s nursery (an extraordinary temporal ellipsis is achieved here via special effects as Abigail’s face transforms from child to adult to elderly woman without any apparent cuts), and of old Miss Crain’s female companion committing suicide in the tower. By way of contrast, Jack-

son’s Dr. Montague does not share his knowledge of Hill House’s dark past until much later. (2) Dr. Montague, “round and rosy and bearded” (60) in the book, becomes a slim, clean- shaven, and decidedly romantic figure in the film.6 This enables Dr. Markway to take Luke’s (Russ Tamblyn) place as the object of Eleanor’s (Julie Harris) affection, with the result that their scenes together operate on multiple discursive levels: They converse not only as scientist-subject, teacher-pupil, and doctor-patient, but as potential lovers. (3) Markway is far more responsive to Eleanor’s not-so-subtle advances than is Luke in the novel.

tionship with Eleanor, in the book extremely ambivalent, is here rendered in somewhat (though not entirely) more straightforward terms. On the one hand, Jackson’s Theo, although probably gay, expresses only a mild attraction toward Eleanor, and by the end of the novel seems to be hitting it off quite well with Luke. Wise’s The0 (Claire Bloom), in contrast, makes a number of fairly obvious passes at Eleanor and evinces a strong negative reaction toward Luke. Going in the other direction, Theo’s insensitivity, if not outright cruelty, toward Eleanor becomes manifest as The Haunting of Hill House proceeds (“I don’t under-

I One of the biggest differences between the book and the 1999 film is the fact that

DuBont’s Eleanor is given no internal monologue, thereby denying the I audience direct access to

This nod to generic convention renders Eleanor a more sympathetic figure, as her psychological deterioration after Mrs. Markway’s (Lois Maxwell) arrival on the scene is, if not justified, at least understandable and certainly conceivable.

There are three additional differences: (4) Dr. Markway’s wife plays a much smaller role in Wise’s film than does Dr. Montague’s wife in the book, and the latter spouse’s hypermasculine (though quite possibly asexual) friend Arthur does not appear in the film at all. The reduction and omission of characters stand as a definite improve- ment over Jackson’s novel, as the mere presence of this pair of annoying, skeptical, and stock personalities undercuts whatever tension Jackson has created, along with our feeling that Dr. Markway, Eleanor, Theo, and Luke are all alone in a completely alien environment.’ (5) Theo’s rela-

stand. . . . Do you always go where you’re not wanted?’ [209]); in the 1963 film, The0 only becomes angry in response to Eleanor’s own expressions of jealousy and animosity. (6) Finally, Eleanor’s last moments alive are handled quite differently by Jack- son and Wise. In The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor’s death drive is, at least until the “unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree,”” an indisputably self-willed- perhaps even suicidal-act: “I am really doing it, she thought, turning the wheel. . . . I am really doing it, I am doing this all by myself, now, at last; this is me, I am really really really doing it by myself’ (245). Gidding and Wise, almost certainly under pres- sure to rule out suicide as a possible motive for their protagonist’s demise, make it clear that Eleanor is not trying to kill herself, that the wheel of her car is being controlled by an outside force

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that she cannot resist, despite her strongest efforts.

Having already noted that the 1999 Haunting self-consciously works to separate itself from its literary and cinematic forbears, I restrict myself to a quick sketch of some of the major plot differences effected by DeBont and Self. In the most recent Haunting, Dr. David Marrow (Neeson, who, like Johnson, cuts a dashing figure, but no matter: this Eleanor doesn’t have a crush on anyone, save perhaps the already-dead Hugh Crain) brings his subjects to Hill House under false pre- tenses, telling them that they are there to participate in an experiment on sleep disorders. Dr. Marrow also takes two assistants with him, although a conve- nient “accident” arranged by the house forces the pair to leave after a single evening (which raises the obvious question: Why introduce them as characters in the first place?). One of the biggest differences between the book and the 1999 film is the fact that DeBont’s Eleanor (Lili Taylor) is given no internal monologue, thereby denying the audience direct access to her mind. But perhaps the most obvious change is the manner in which the novel’s back story is altered and extended so as to connect with the main narrative. As Eleanor discovers (in an unlikely nod to the detective/ mystery genre), Hugh Crain achieved his great wealth by exploiting the labor of young children, depositing the ashes of those who died under his rule in the house’s massive fire pit. Big Daddy Crain is the unambiguous ghost that threatens the sanity and lives of those who reside at Hill House, and even in death he stalks the children whose souls are trapped in purgatory.

Finally, three differences that corre- spond to those mentioned above: Dr. Montague’s wife, whose role is reduced in Wise’s Haunting, is left out of DeBont’s version altogether; Theo’s (Zeta-Jones) lesbianism, here explicit- ly coded in terms of bisexual prefer- ence, is left unexplored after her first scene;q and Eleanor’s death now takes place inside the house-though self- willed once again (as in the novel), her motive this time is not suicide but sac-

rifice (for the children of Hill House, whose souls are freed from purgatory once Eleanor succeeds in sending Hugh Crain to hell).

ith this background in place, we can now turn to an exami-

nation of the specific audiovisual strategies that Wise and DeBont employed to translate some of Jack- son’s innovative literary techniques onto the big screen. Of course, to do this we must be able to identify the literary techniques in question, whose combined effectiveness led to The Haunting of Hill House’s being labeled by one critic as “the great modem novel of supernatural horror” (Tuttle 133). Stephen King, in his cross-media analysis of horror Danse Macabre (198 l), also lavishes praise on Jackson’s book. Here are five key means by which the author success- fully engenders horror responses in her readers, followed by the directors’ respective attempts (or lack thereof) at providing audiovisual analogues for each of them:

1. The personificatioddemonization of Hill House. This occurs throughout Jackson’s novel, and three principal strategies give the overall sense that Hill House is both alive and unwell. One is the tendency her characters have of describing the house in psychological, at times even physiologi- cal, terms. During a discussion with Dr. Montague, for example, Luke (Owen Wilson) asks what he would call Hill House, if not “haunted.” Dr. Montague’s reply: “ ‘Well disturbed, perhaps. Leprous. Sick. Any of the popular euphemisms for insanity’ ” (70). Later, when Dr. Montague discovers a cold spot in the nursery’s doorway, he identifies it as “the heart of the house” (1 19). And after a night of inactivity leads The0 to assert that “Hill House has fallen far short of its original promise,” Eleanor objects, “It’s not us doing the waiting. . . . It’s the house. I think it’s biding its time” (1 5 1-52). In addition, there are a number of occasions when the characters address the house directly, as if it could hear them and perhaps even

respond. For example, Eleanor remarks at one point, “Hill House . . . you’re as hard to get into as heaven” (29); and when The0 later declares that “Hill House has really been very kind to us,” Eleanor worries because, “It’s as though she were saying it deliberately, . . . telling the house she knows its name, calling the house to tell it where we are” (1 22-23).

A third strategy is the use of imper- sonal narration to endow the house with physical characteristics typically reserved for living creatures (humans especially), for example, “the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice” (35). As a result of Jackson’s commitment to personifying/demoniz- ing Hill House, those primitive beliefs in the possible consciousness of inani- mate matter-beliefs abandoned by most readers long ago-are uncannily (in the Freudian sense) reconfirmed.’O

Besides the placement of dialogue (or similar dialogue) spoken by Jack- son’s characters into the mouths of their cinematic equivalents, Wise digs deeply into his bag of cinematograph- ic and editing tricks to endow Hill House with life. By visually disorient- ing his audience, he supports- through actual demonstration-the novel’s claims that the house is psychologically unstable. This disorientation is variously achieved: The fram- ing of the mise en sctne inside Hill House is frequently canted from a whole host of different angles; a proto- type 30mm wide-angle lens, at the time not commercially available, was employed for distortion purposes (Keesey 309); rapidly edited montage sequences and multi-speed camera- work (including a frenetic swish pan around the girls’ room and a dizzying subjective shot down the tower’s spiral staircase) make it next to impossible to get a handle on spatial relations. In addition, Wise bestows on Hill House a kind of proto-consciousness by alter- nating between medium shots of Eleanor and location shots of the house itself, thereby establishing a vir- tual dialogue between them; cutting to close-ups of wall patterns resembling

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faces and statues with eyes that hum with life; high overhead shots of Eleanor that turn into unclaimed points of view that swoop down and threaten her; and situating off-centered mirrors throughout the house and having them function as eyes, reflecting images of the unwelcome tenants back to them (at times only to the audience) when least expected.

DeBont, in contrast, takes a far more objective or literal approach to the task of giving Hill House life, a definite tactical error on his part (not to mention a theoretical one). David Self’s script features few direct addresses to the house by the characters. Little effort is made to visually disorient the audience (e.g., no cre- ative cross-cutting, just a couple of mildly canted frames and conventional mirror imagery). And although he makes abundant use of high overhead shots, DeBont almost always has the camera close in on his characters via Steadicam, thereby depersonalizing the house at the same time that he sup- plies it with consciousness. DeBont’s main interest seems to have been the creation of a few spectacular (but surprisingly unmoving) scenes in which parts of the house turn into living organisms that attack Eleanor and the others.” In the 1999 Haunting, Hill House may present a clear and present danger to its inhabitants, but as Wise’s Dr. Markway makes plain, the threat of physical annihilation is not (at least not primarily) what generates horror: “ ‘Unknown.’ That’s the key word- ‘unknown.’ When we become involved in a supernatural event, we’re scared out of our wits just because it’s unknown.” Dr. Montague couldn’t have said it better himself.

2. The mental instability and eventu- al deterioration of Eleanor. We have already noted how Jackson places us directly inside Eleanor’s mind early in The Haunting of Hill House. Because we have access to her internal monologue, we do not have to rely on behav- ioral cues to determine what she is thinking and feeling, and we get to know her very well indeed. Some of Eleanor’s personality traits, increasing- ly apparent as the narrative progresses,

are her profound insecurity, self-consciousness, and arrested development (she believes she is taking part in a fairy tale adventure; she develops a schoolgirl’s infatuation with Luke; she conceives of herself as a homeless orphan), her intensity, self-absorption, and tendency toward hysteria. The following passage illustrates a number of these traits quite succinctly:

He is trying to phrase everything to make as good an impression as possible, she thought, and I will know how he holds me by what he answers; how is he anxious to appear to me? Does he think that I will be content with small mysti- cism, or will he exert himself to seem unique? Is he going to be gallant? That would be humiliating, because then he would show that he knows that gallantry enchants me; will he be mysterious? Mad? And how am I to receive this, which I perceive already will be a con- fidence, even if it is not true? Grant that Luke take me at my worth, she thought, or at least let me not see the difference. Let him be wise, or let me be blind; don’t let me, she hoped concretely, don’t let me know too surely what he thinks of me. (165)

By the book‘s final chapters, Eleanor has almost completely alienated herself from the others, her inner mono- logues turning into strange dialogues with the disembodied voices that call her name and direct her movements:

“Come along,” a voice answered dis- tinctly upstairs, and Eleanor turned, eager, and hurried to the staircase. “Mother?” she said softly, and then again, “Mother?” A little soft laugh floated down to her, and she ran breath- less, up the stairs. . . . “You’re here somewhere,” she said, and down the hall the little echo went, slipping in a whis- per on the tiny currents of air. “Some- where,” it said. “Somewhere.” (228)

Because we see the world primarily through Eleanor’s eyes, and despite (or perhaps because of) her numerous character flaws, we cannot help sym- pathizing with her. We experience her breakdown firsthand, and whether or not she is “crazy” ultimately matters very little considering the extent of the trauma she has suffered.

Unlike DeBont, who foolishly cuts out the bulk of Eleanor’s soliloquies- most likely in an effort at rendering her a less introspective, less psycho-

logically disturbed, more heroic figure-Wise wisely grants his audience direct access to Eleanor’s thoughts and feelings, relying on the somewhat old- fashioned (but here still effective) technique of voice-over narration mapped onto Harris’s corresponding facial expressions and body language. The result is basically the same as in the novel, although Wise adds an extra, nondiegetic element to the mix. Whenever Eleanor’s thoughts are nar- rated, a soft, airy melody kicks in beneath the words, thereby signaling our entrance (descent, regression) into the depths of her unstable mind.

Interestingly, however-and this may be a weakness of the 1963 film as compared to the novel-Wise chooses not to show us what makes Hill House so seductive from Eleanor’s visual (as opposed to mental) point of view; when she dances with a statue of Hugh Crain, for example, all we see is his menacing face staring out at us, and so we find her behavior not just disquiet- ing but difficult to comprehend. (Con- trast this with the chilling denoue- ments of two of Wise’s earliest direc- torial efforts, Curse of the Cat People [ 1941 and The Body Snatcher [ 19451, both RKO-Lewton productions. In the former film, we see through the eyes of a hyperimaginative little girl as she visually transforms [via clunky super- imposition] a threatening woman into a benevolent protectress. In the latter film, we view the reanimated body of sociopathic grave robber John Gray [Boris Karloffl along with the doctor who killed him; this shocking sight- the doctor thought he had a female corpse with him at the time-leads him to run his carriage off a cliff.)** Even DeBont, to his credit, gives us occasional access to Eleanor’s highly subjective visual field. In one scene, for example, she sees a woman’s body hanging from a railing in Hill House’s atrium. We see it too, but when Luke and The0 turn to look, there is nothing there.

3. Detailed descriptions of mysterious and threatening sounds. Perhaps the most underappreciated of Jack- son’s authorial gifts is her ability to describe strange, hostile noises with

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such precision that readers are actually prompted to imagine them. One evening, for example, Eleanor and The0 are awakened by a loud noise coming from somewhere down the hallway:

“Just a noise,” Theodora said, and moved next to Eleanor and sat tight against her. “It has an echo.” It sounded, Eleanor thought, like a hollow noise, a hollow bang, as though something were hitting the doors with an iron kettle, or an iron bar, or an iron glove. It pounded regularly for a minute, and then sudden- ly more softly, and then again in a quick flurry, seeming to be going methodical- ly from door to door at the end of the hall. Distantly, she thought she could hear the voices of Luke and the doctor, calling from somewhere below, and she thought, Then they are not up here with us at all, and heard the iron crashing against what must have been a door very close. (128-29)

Notice how Jackson overlays different sorts of sounds on top of one another (beneath the iron bar pounding on the wall, Eleanor hears the distant voices of Luke and Dr. Montague), and the care she takes to specify not just their volume but their rhythm and timbre as well. In addition, Jackson frequently enables her most disturbing noises to stand out even more than they otherwise would by contrasting them with moments of eerie silence: “the door was attacked without sound, seeming almost to be pulling away from its hinges, almost ready to buckle and go down, leaving them exposed. . . . ‘It knows we’re here,’ Eleanor whispered. . . . She was aware, dully, the pounding had begun again, the metallic over- whelming sound of it washed over her like waves” (201-02).

Wise’s experience as a sound editor before he moved to the director’s chair served him especially well when it came to The Haunting, and with help from Humprey Searle’s score he suc- cessfully presented what Jackson could only describe. Jeremy Dyson rightly calls attention to the sheer den- sity of the film’s soundtrack, a technique Wise learned from Lewton, who “made use of similarly layered effects” (240). One of the most disturbing scenes in the 1963 Haunting is the famous “whose hand was I hold-

ing?’ set-piece that takes place in Eleanor and Theo’s room three-quar- ters of the way through the film. Lying in bed, clutching what she mistakenly believes is Theo’s hand, Eleanor (and with her, the audience) first hears a muffled male voice muttering something insanely to itself. Wise follows Jackson’s instructions to the letter, as “the low, steady sound went on and on, the voice lifting sometimes for an emphasis on a mumbled word, falling sometimes to a breath, going on and on” (161). Added to this incomprehen- sible mumbling on an entirely different register is the sound of a child cry- ing (or perhaps laughing, which is how Jackson describes it). A faint moaning can be detected as well. As Dyson observes, “when combined with the

ing, while undeniably impressive (sound designer Gary Rydstrom is win- ner of seven Academy Awards for previous work, as the film’s DVD commentary does not fail to mention), give us too much while frightening us too little. Critic Mick LaSalle puts the point in a scathing review of the film: “Music blares. The floor shakes. Big metal doors slam, and the noise echoes throughout the house. . . and all of this, every second. . . is absolutely without life.” Part of the problem is simply the film’s overreliance on sound: There are hardly any moments of tension-build- ing silence, without any dialogue, deaf- ening noises, or foreboding music present to diminish the effect. To make matters worse, at the nondiegetic level, Jerry Goldsmith goes the conventional

By the end of Jackson’s novel, we may be confident that there is no naturakcientific explanation for what has gone on at Hill

House, but considering Eleanor‘s impressiona bi I ity and hypersensitivity, we

cannot be sure whether the terrifying occurrences are supernatural, psychological, or

some bizarre combination of the two.

image of the bedroom wall in darkness, which contains the suggestion of a face in the pattern of the wallpaper, [these sounds] become all the more upsetting” (241). And although Dyson underestimates the importance of nondiegetic sound in Wise’s Haunting- we have already mentioned the idee‘ f i e accompanying Eleanor’s voice- over narration-there is also an atonal fusion of blaring horns and shrieking strings that pipes in during moments of chaos and terror, thereby increasing our sensory disorientation-he is certainly correct in pointing out the effective absence of such sound in many of the film’s most frightening scenes: another Jacksonian technique success- fully adapted by the director.

Just as with its visuals, the sound effects and score in DeBont’s Haunt-

Gothic horror route with an uninspired orchestral score instead of returning to the stripped-down, Psycho-influenced trumpet-and-violin arrangement mentioned above. And although DeBont saw fit to include a saccharine melody for Eleanor to hum throughout, because there is no voice-over narration present to grant us direct access to her thoughts the melody loses much of its impact as a chilling marker of psychological regression.

4. Calculated ambiguity as to the source, cause, and meaning of the dis- turbances. In The Penguin Encyclope- dia of Horror and the Supernatural, Jack Sullivan writes that “the depic- tion of intense loneliness and mental disturbance in an ambiguously supernatural context became Jackson’s trademark. Reversing M. R. James’

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dictum that a ghost story should leave a narrow ‘loophole’ for a natural explanation, Jackson wrote stories of psychological anguish that leave a loophole for a supernatural explanation” (qtd. in Keesey 307). In The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson achieves metaphysical and explanato- ry ambiguity in a number of ways, par- ticularly via a steadfast refusal to reveal the source of all those mysterious sounds, to show her characters (or describe for her readers) who or what it is that pounds on the doors of Hill House at night,l3 and explicit conversa- tions between members of the Hill House party questioning the underly- ing cause of the haunting: “ ‘Could it be,’ [Luke] asked the doctor, ‘that what people have been assuming were supernatural manifestations were really only the result of a slight loss of bal- ance in the people who live here?”’ (107). By the end of Jackson’s novel, we may be confident that there is no naturdscientific explanation for what has gone on at Hill House, but considering Eleanor’s impressionability and hypersensitivity, we cannot be sure whether the terrifying occurrences are supernatural, psychological, or some bizarre combination of the two: “ ‘What’s here? What really frightens people so?”’ Theodora asks Dr. Mon- tague at one point. ‘I will not put a name to what has no name,’ the doctor said. “ ‘I don’t know”’ (74). And nei- ther do we.

Despite employing virtuoso camera- work and special effects trickery in his Haunting, Wise never goes so far as to unravel the numerous mysteries raised by the original text. Since we never learn what the true connections are between Eleanor and Hugh Crain, Eleanor and Abigail’s companion (both of whom took care of an elderly lady who used to bang on the wall at night with a cane), even Eleanor and Theo, and since we never get the opportunity to associate physical characteristics with the demonic presence in Hill House, we too are haunted-by questions that can never be answered.

The closest Wise comes to disam- biguating the narrative occurs in the final scene, when, as noted above, the

wheel of Eleanor’s car moves of its own accord to kill its driver. Unfortu- nately for DeBont and his audience, this is the level at which the 1999 Haunting differs the most from those of Jackson and Wise. With assistance from a massive team of special effects and computer-animation experts, De- Bont reveals the ghosts of those who died at Hill House, the second Mrs. Crain, even the demon Hugh Crain himself. But this difference between the two films is best exemplified by their respective “writing on the wall” scenes. In both The Haunting of Hill House and Wise’s 1963 film, Luke stumbles on a message written in large chalky letters on the wall that reads, “HELP ELEANOR COME HOME’ (“‘It knows my name, doesn’t it?’ asks Eleanor, ‘It knows my name”’ [146], thereby contributing to our growing sense that the house is alive). The absence of punctuation here renders meaning ambiguous: Is the house asking the other members of Dr. Mark- way’s party to help Eleanor or is it asking Eleanor herself for assistance? It is impossible to say for certain. In DeBont’s Haunting, the message simply reads “ELEANOR PLEASE COME HOME.” Still no punctuation, but now there is no uncertainty as to meaning either.

5 . Linguistic/thematic/narrative repetition. By having all of her characters, especially Eleanor, say the same words and phrases over and over again, Jack- son taps into another source of uncanny feeling, namely the infantile (and later neurotic) “compulsion to repeat,” which according to Freud, “lends to certain aspects of the mind their dae- monic character” and “leads all but the most hardened against superstition to ascribe secret meaning[s].” A few examples will suffice here, although there are literally dozens to choose from:

“Bang bang,” Theodora said. “Bang,” Eleanor said, and giggled. I am calm, she thought, but so very cold; the noise is only a kind of banging on the doors, one after another; is this what I was so afraid about? “Bang” is the best word for it; it sounds like something children do, not mothers knocking against the wall for help, and anyway Luke and the

doctor are there; is this what they mean by cold chills going up and down your back? Because it is not pleasant; it starts in your stomach and goes in waves around and up and down again like something alive. Like something alive. Yes. Like something alive. (128)

I will take a lot from this lunatic filthy house but I will not go along with hurt- ing a child, no, I will not; I will by God get my mouth to open right now and I will yell I will I will yell “STOP IT,” she shouted. . . . (163)

“Eleanor, Nellie Nell Nell. They sometimes do that,” Mrs. Montague broke off to explain. “They repeat a word over and over to make sure it comes across all right.” (192)

Jackson also employs repetition at the narrative and thematic levels, however. So, for example, Eleanor dies the same way the first Mrs. Crain did, by crashing into the huge tree at the curve of Hill House’s driveway. This is too unlikely a similarity to be mere coinci- dence, and it produces the eerie suspi- ciordsensation that the women are doubles of one another. Then again, the antagonistic relationship between Eleanor and her sister is mirrored by what we learn of Abigail Crain and her sister: Each pair of siblings argues over which one has the right to the previous possession of a dead parent. Besides rendering things even more mysterious (by raising additional questions that will not be answered), the linguistic repetition and narrative/ thematic doubling pervading The Haunting of Hill House endow the book with a palpable fairy tale-cum- nightmare quality. And this in turn takes us out of the realm of historical specificity and into that of myth, leg- end, even archetype. For Eleanor, as well as Jackson’s readers, the constant recurrence of the same thing “forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of chance” (Freud 166).

In this regard, Wise may have gone so far with his Haunting as to actually improve on the original text. Although there was a price to be paid for allow- ing Gidding to include many of Eleanor’s repetitive speeches in the film (e.g., the second one quoted

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above)-some critics felt they come across as overly formal, even mannered-the overall disturbing effect they engender makes the decision well worth it.I4 Unfortunately for DeBont, someone had David Self “update” the script of their Haunting so as to include a few self-referential observa- tions (“It’s like Charles Foster Kane meets the Munsters,” Theo proclaims on entering Hill House) and ironic asides (mostly from Luke, now a Gen- X wiseg~y).’~ Although no longer mannered, the dialogue is now wood- en, and all of Jackson’s calculated repetition is gone as well. Besides which, the numerous contemporary refer- ences (to some popular pharmaceuti- cals, for example, and to the designer of Theo’s boots: “Prada. Milan, not New York!”) work precisely to coun- teract the very fairy tale-cum-nightmare quality described above.

Wise, on the other hand, employs various doubling techniques in addition to his script’s linguistic repetition, some of which are absent in Jackson’s novel. I have already mentioned the placement of off-centered mirrors throughout Hill House; in one scene, near film’s end, we watch a distorted image of Eleanor scamper down a hallway toward the camera. Just before she crashes into idus, the camera swings around to reveal that what we have been looking at is in fact a full-length mirror, toward which the “real” Eleanor has been running in the opposite direction. As Dyson astutely observes, “as well as jarring the view- er on a perceptual level, the image res- onates with the by now well-estab- lished theme. Eleanor is being drawn toward something, something dark and destructive. Wise is telling us she’s running toward herself’ (240). Just as subtly efficacious is the director’s use of visual metonymy to establish a dop- pelganger for his protagonist. Instead of going the conventional, heavy- handed route as DeBont does (by having Eleanor at one point literally trans- form, with the help of computer graphics, into a clone of Hugh Crain’s second wife), Wise achieves his goal by encouraging a nearly subconscious association of images. In the prologue

to the 1963 Haunting, all we see of the first Mrs. Crain is her arm dangling lifelessly from an overturned carriage. In a brilliant stroke, which also serves to bring the narrative full circle, when Eleanor dies in the final scene all we

great films, whether acknowledged as such or not, whether or not they are any good themselves, can go a long way toward illuminating what it is that makes the original so special. And when the films in question are in turn

Hill House is alive . . . (too) literally: DeBont’s main interest seems to have been the creation of a few spectacular (but surprisingly unmoving) scenes in which parts of the house turn into living organisms that attack Eleanor and the others.

see once again is a limp arm hanging from her car door. Because DeBont’s Huunting lacks a prologue altogether, preferring to interweave past events with present ones in such a way as to wrap everything up (too) neatly at the end, there is no possibility of achiev- ing such formal or thematic elegance.

This discussion is by no means intended, nor does it pretend, to exhaust the possible insights obtain- able from a comparativekontrastive analysis of the two film versions of Jackson’s novel. The fact that Wise’s picture is in black and white and DeBont’s is in color, for example, surely constitutes an important difference between them, a difference worth exploring in depth and detail (cf. Psy- cho, the novel and films). But since I take it that The Haunting of Hill House itself is “neutral” on this issue-that, at least prima facie, there is nothing in the novel to recommend one color scheme over another-it is less than essential from the standpoint of literary-cinematic adaptation. Remakes of

adapted from a literary text, the stakes are raised in both complexity and potential reward.

NOTES 1. Gidding also wrote the screenplay

for the classic anti-death penalty film I Want to Live!, directed by Wise in 1958.

2. For more on this recent cycle, see Schneider (“Kevin Williamson”).

3. See, for example, William Rothman; James Naremore. See also the Van Sant Psycho “print symposium,” forthcoming in Hitchcock Annual, 2001-02. Like The Haunting, Psycho was adapted from a novel of the same name (by Robert Bloch, 1959). The numerous formal and thematic similarities between Hitchcock’s Psycho and Wise’s Haunting (e.g., the female protagonist in each film has a creepy internal monologue while driving in a car after committing a subversive act) would be well worth exploring. 4. Those involved had every reason to

believe that Spielberg knew exactly what he was talking about; in 1982, he produced and co-wrote the sleeper hit Poltergeist, another haunted house film.

5. Contrast the 1999 Haunting with the phenomenally successful-and extremely low-budget-Blair Witch Project, which

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received a limited release in the United States just four days before DeBont’s film. The Blair Witch Project is much like the original Haunting (and completely different from the remake) in that its horror is manufactured primarily through innovative, albeit low-budget, sound and camera- work, and because it insists on leaving the face of evil to the spectator’s imagination.

6. As reported by Dyson, Richard John- son was up for the role of James Bond before Sean Connery finally won out (231).

7. The intermittent appearance of Mrs. Dudley the caretaker does nothing to con- tradict this claim, since, as she makes abundantly clear in her famous speech to Eleanor, and later The0 (present in each of the three Hauntings): “ ‘I don’t stay after I set out dinner. . . . Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before dark comes. . . .We live over in the town, six miles away. . . . So there won’t be anyone around if you need help. . . . We couldn’t even hear you, in the night. . . . No one could. No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that. . . . In the night. . . . In the dark. . .’ ” (39).

8. When she wonders, “Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me?” (246).

9. Cf. Roger Ebert, who writes that “Catherine Zeta-Jones’ beautiful The0 . . . does some bisexual lip-smacking at the outset but never follows up, and spends most of her time running to the rescue.”

10. For more on Freud‘s theory of the uncanny as applied to the horror film genre, see Schneider (“Monsters”).

11. As the director himself states in the DVD commentary accompanying the film, “I wanted the house to come really alive, in a very organic way.”

12. When the doctor’s apprentice later views the corpse with more “objective” eyes, he finds (as does the audience) that it is indeed a woman.

13. W. H. Rockett argues that “the story value of the horror story that would terrify as well as revolt is dependent upon the degree to which its author manages to break away from the Aristotelian convention of completeness, and the compulsion to open the door, to show and tell.” He continues, “Sublime terror rests in the

unseen-the Ultimate Horror. Things seen, fully described, explained, and laid to rest in the last reel or paragraph are mere hor- rors, the weakest of which are the merest revulsions over bloodshed and dismember- ments (the gross-outs, as King calls them)” (132). Lewton, for one, would certainly agree.

14. Cf. the concluding scene from The Body Snatcher. While speeding along with what he believes is the reanimated body of his longtime tormenter, Dr. Toddy MacFar- lane (Henry Daniell) hears Gray’s voice intoning, “You’ll never be rid of me, never be rid of me, never be rid of me, never be rid of me, never, never, never, NEVER!”

15. “[Tlhe last thing this kind of movie needs is an ironist,” comments LaSalle. “The script needs to build a mood, not undercut it.”

WORKS CITED Druxman, Michael B. Make It Again, Sam:

A Survey of Movie Remakes. South Brunswick Barnes, 1975.

Dyson, Jeremy. Bright Darkness: The Lost Art of the Supernatural Horror Film. London: Cassell, 1997.

Ebert, Roger. Rev. of The Haunting. Chicago Sun- Times. http://www. sun times.com/ebertlebert-reviews/l999/ 071072303 .html.

Eberwein, Robert. “Remakes and Cultural Studies.” Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes. Ed. Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal. Berkeley: U of California

Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’ ” (1919). Rpt. Penguin Freud Library Vol- ume 14: Art and Literature . Ed. James Strachey. London: Penguin, 1990.

Greenberg, Harvey Roy. “Raiders of the Lost Text: Remaking as Contested Homage in Always.?’ Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes. Ed. Andrew Hor- ton and Stuart Y. McDougal. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. 115-30.

Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Penguin, 1984 [1959].

Jensen, Jeff. “A Shiver Runs through It.” Entertainment Weekly July 23, 1999: 22+.

Keesey, Pam. “The Haunting and the Power of Suggestion: Why Robert

P, 1998. 15-33.

Wise’s Film Continues to ‘Deliver the Goods’ to Modem Audiences.” Horror Film Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini. New York: Limelight, 2000.

King, Stephen. Stephen King’s Dame Macabre. New York Everest House, 1981.

LaSalle, Mick. ‘“The Haunting’ Is Pretty Stupid.” San Francisco Chronicle July 23, 1999. <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi bin/article.~gi?f=/c/a/l999/07/23/DD73 385 .DTL>.

Naremore, James. “Remaking Psycho.” Hitchcock Annual, 1999-2000: 3-12.

Rockett, W. H. ‘The Door Ajar: Structure and Convention in Horror Films That Would Temfy.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 10.3 (Fall 1982): 130-36.

Rothman, William. “Some Thoughts on Hitchcock‘s Authorship.” Alfred Hitch- cock Centenary Essays. Ed. Richard Allen and S . Ishii Gonzalts. London: BFI, 1999.2942.

Schneider, Steven Jay. “Kevin Williamson and the Rise of the Neo-Stalker.” Post- Script: Essays in Film and the Humani- ties 19.2 (2000): 73-87.

. “Monsters as (Uncanny) Metaphors: Freud, Lakoff, and the Rep- resentation of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror.” Horror Film Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini. New York: Limelight, 2000. 167-91.

Tuttle, Lisa. “Shirley Jackson, The Haunt- ing of Hill House.” Horror: 100 Best Books. Ed. Stephen Jones and Kim Newman. London: Xanadu. 1988.

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STEVEN JAY SCHNEIDER is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Harvard Uni- versity and in cinema studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts . He has published essays on the horror genre in such journals as Cineaction, Film & Phi- losophy, PostScript, Kinema, and Hitch- cock Annual. He is co-editing the following collections: Horror International (Wayne State UP), Dark Thoughts: Philo- sophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror (Scarecrow), and Understanding Film Genres (McGraw-Hill).

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Documents

Thrice-Told Tales: 'The Haunting' From Novel to Film... to Film - Steven Jay Schneider