The Haunting (1999)
Directed by Jan de Bont
Dr. David Marrow invites three distinct individuals to the eerie and isolated Hill House to be subjects for a sleep disorder study. The unfortunate guests discover that Marrow is far more interested in the sinister mansion itself — and they soon see the true nature of its horror.
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What critics compared The Haunting to
And if that's not enough to unnerve those multiplex viewers expecting a thriller starring J-Law, there's also a vaginal opening in the floorboards that oozes blood, while a beating heart seems to emanate from within the walls of the house, locating this bare, cavernous abode in the same spooky neighbourhood as The Overlook Hotel in The Shining or Hill House in Shirley Jackson's seminal novel The Haunting Of Hill House (and Robert Wise's terrifying 1963 adaptation The Haunting) or Allerdale Hall in Crimson Peak – dwellings possessed with an eerie life of their own.
The caretaker's wife (Marian Seldes) is like a sister to Young Frankensteins Frau Bluecher: the solemn warning she issues to her guests is hilariously inflected with the spirit of ghost movie dialogue.
Nearly catatonic with fear, they refuse to stay at the house after dark and spout lines that sound like outtakes from Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein.
It moves the story from being an evil house as in The Haunting (1963, 1999) or Burnt Offerings (1976) to something else.
Like horror classics ranging from Cat People (1942) to The Haunting (1963) to The Blair Witch Project (1999), it suggests its terrors rather than explicitly showing them, which leaves far more to the imagination and sends more genuine chills up the spine.
I have to note that I didn't see "Paranormal Activity" at an afternoon press screening surrounded by know-it-all film critics who noted its debts to Robert Wise's " The Haunting " before walking into the sun's soothing, rational bright beams.
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Perhaps the most obvious inspirations for "The Others" are Robert Wise's 1963 "The Haunting," still the greatest of all haunted-house films despite the inept 1999 remake, and "The Innocents," Jack Clayton's outstanding 1961 screen adaptation of "Turn of the Screw."
Of course, by now the rules of werewolfism--full moons, silver bullets, etc.--are well known, and screenwriters Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self (who both have experience reinventing old horror tropes, with Walker cowriting Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow and Self writing Jan De Bont’s The Haunting) work hard to honor the B-movie legacy on whose shoulders they’re standing while also elaborating and expanding the mythology, giving us something that is both indelibly modern and hopelessly retro.
Theoretically a remake of the 1941 genre-defining Lon Chaney, Jr. vehicle The Wolf Man (please note the subtle distinction between the titles), the new film, written by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self - the former man at least has some respectable credits, while the latter vomited out Thirteen Days and the 1999 remake of The Haunting - borrow little from Curt Siodmak's original scenario besides character names and the set-up that a prodigal son has returned to his ancestral home in Great Britain on the event of his elder brother's violent death (the remake doesn't even leave the action in Wales).
The film is littered with references to genre classics — Poltergeist, The Changeling, Robert Wise’s The Haunting — but they’re never foregrounded.
Looking back at her résumé, I am reminded that she appeared in The Haunting back in 1999.
To this end, the demon targets Carolyn Perron, played by Lili Taylor in her first major-release haunted-house film since 1999's The Haunting remake; at least The Conjuring is better, and I'm always tickled to see a one-time indie-film goddess like Taylor in a summer creepshow for the masses, though she spends most of the climax in a burlap bag.
That mother is played by Lili Taylor, who is no stranger to haunted-house flicks, having starred in the disappointing 1999 remake of Robert Wise’s 1963 spine tingler The Haunting .
No stranger to ghost stories (Taylor starred in the lackluster remake of “The Haunting” back in 1999), she brings a level of respect to the picture that a lesser actress wouldn’t.
This is a do-over of sorts for Taylor, whose previous horror outing was the awful 1999 remake of the classic 1963 film The Haunting.
The always wonderful Joan Cusack ("Cradle Will Rock," "Working Girl") is a bit shortchanged as far as screen time and material is concerned, while actresses such as Catherine Zeta-Jones ("Entrapment," "The Mask of Zorro"), Lili Taylor ("The Haunting," "The Impostors") and Lisa Bonet ("Angel Heart," TV's "The Cosby Show") are good in their limited roles as various women who torment Bob in one way or another during the film.
Eventually, Rob contacts old flames (two of whom are played, in cameo, by The Haunting 's duo of Lili Taylor and Catherine Zeta-Jones), hoping they'll shed some new light on his perennial girl trouble.