Popular reviews

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  Review by Sara Clements ★★★★½ 6

  As a lesbian, obviously, I love gay cinema. But tbh what I love more than gay cinema are those movies that aren’t gay but there’s one character who is and they don’t explicitly say it. I love being teased and spending the whole movie trying to spot all the signs. The character of Theo is a lesbian in The Haunting of Hill House but I didn’t realize that she has been a lesbian since the source material. So my thought process through this was like:

  Oooh she’s hot who is she? She’s wearing a tie okay maybe that was a popular fashion choice for women. Why did she just called Eleanor her “companion” while raising a glass to her lips.…

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  Review by CinemaCl🎃wn ★★★★ 7

  One of the most unsettling films of its time that has managed to hold up astonishingly well after all these years & still retains enough strength to surprise the newcomers, The Haunting is an incredibly tense, highly effective & intensely moody psychological horror that makes excellent use of its eerie atmosphere to instantly grab the viewer's attention & keeps them guessing from start to finish.

  The Haunting tells the story of a small team of paranormal investigators who, in order to prove the existence of ghosts, decide to carry out their next research at Hill House; a notorious mansion having a lurid history of violent deaths & insanity. Although initially elated to capture many supernatural phenomenas around the house, trouble begins when one of…

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  Review by Tony the Terror 666 ★★★★★ 11

  Like most kids, I wasn’t terribly fond of black and white movies. At that time in my life, I found them to be too slow, too calm, and most certainly not scary. Except for one. This movie terrified me as a kid and it was the only one of its kind that did it. It’s probably also the movie that got me hooked on the whole haunted house sub-genre...and if any movie should do it, it’s this one. I remember my mom rented this from the video store for me on one of the rare occasions she went without me. I’m pretty sure I wanted her to rent Halloween but I guess she saw the rating on that one because…

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★½ 10

  Spooktober III: The Haunting of the Blood October

  The haunting isn’t a house.
  The haunting has nothing to do with ghosts.
  The haunting is the repression that devours us inside.

  Shirley Jackson, who wrote the novel that the film is based on, briefed the screenwriter Nelson Gidding that this was a supernatural story. However, for him, this was always a story that was less about the supernatural and more about the demons that end up pulling us into an emptiness that ends in doom. The house is being besieged by dread rather than ghosts. It is a place where despairing souls go to be consumed. Whether or not Jackson intended this. In this regard, the movie does an excellent job…

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  Review by Branson Reese

  Back in the 60s they didn’t have slashers yet so they had to make movies about how scary certain houses are. Some people still do this even though they don’t have to. They could instead make movies about people stuck in devices that force them to make awful choices. But whatever. I can’t do everything.

  The Haunting presents to us the four Jungian archetypes (college boy, psychic lesbian, Gomez Addams, profoundly mentally ill) and sets them loose in a house “wrong from the day it was built” like rats in a maze. Not surprising that Scorsese loves this movie, he’s no stranger to having everybody running around like rats up there. (Smart viewers will recall that the rat at the…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black ★★★★ 1

  The queer subtext of this (not so much subtext in the trembling-in-bed scene) takes a "woman driven to madness" trope and adds a dimension of "the deadly closet" that makes this much more. It makes this a compassionate rather than piteous film. It makes the horrors run deeper for anyone who has lived in isolation. The Shirley Jackson story is one of my favorites, and this is truly a fitting rendering of it. The skeptical approach allows for you to see what you want: a haunted woman or a gaslit woman. Either way, it resonates.

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½

  90/100

  Utilizes the framework of a Haunted House film with more fractured beauty and horrifying plainness than any other in the subgenre. Doors, hallways, and wallpaper manifest into specters of pummeling evil, and along with the wondrous sound design, Robert Wise's The Haunting culminates in a film that morphs into the form of a desperate human soul, searching for escape in endless caverns of parading isolation.

  It's a film that reeks of secrets, but hidden under a uniquely classical surface, and like the finest psychological horrors, The Haunting slowly builds to a grand finale of twisty camerawork and matter-of-fact suspense that startles just as much as the continuing stream of moans and whispers. Julie Harris, playing the sheltered protagonist, sells every moment of doubting terror in a performance that binds everything together. She is the eyes and ears of the audience, but what if we can't trust her experiences?

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  Review by CinemaVoid 🏴‍☠️ ★★★½ 3

  A house that was born bad and eats trauma for breakfast faces its biggest challenge yet: loud lesbian lodgers.

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★★ 4

  An outstanding performance by Julie Harris predicated in an extraordinary haunted house story. Nelson Gidding’s screenplay relinquishes a vast amount of the supernatural occurrences in Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, which serves as this films source material, and in preference instals neurosis aspects to the narrative which resultingly disintegrates the disparity between otherworldly and psychological horror. Unable to raise the financing for the film in America, director Robert Wise smartly brought the film to England and filmed it extensively in Ettington Park in the West Midlands.

  The story commences with Dr John Markway, a researcher in the paranormal narrating the chronology of Hill House, an area of much unhappiness and grief that rumours swirl about it being…

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  Review by Geoff T ★★½ 8

  Geoff T's Hoop-Tober 5.0 Challenge
  The Haunting (1963)

  I'm probably going to get some flack for this review, but I'm all about being honest, so I'll leave it at that.

  I went into Robert Wise's The Haunting with enthusiasm, given it's intriguing premise and reputation as a top-tier "haunted house" flick, but sadly that enthusiasm died off as I progressed through. Is it well-made? Very much so. Is it enjoyable however? Not so much I'd say, as what I expected to be a fun and spooky ghost story felt more like a uneventful plod.

  In a rural area of Massachusetts, Hill House is a place with a history of strange activity whose inhabitants have suffered bizarre deaths over the years.…

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★ 5

  Equal parts supernatural and psychological, The Haunting is quite the spooky achievement with its effective sound design, great performances and excellent direction. 

  Two things I’ve noticed:

  1. The older I get the more I like haunted house stories.

  2. I don’t revisit this often, but when I do, it’s windy af out.

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  Review by Mr. DuLac ★★★★★ 2

  Look, I know the supernatural is something that isn't supposed to happen, but it does happen.
  -Dr. John Markway

  In 1999 I caught The Haunting in theaters, a remake directed by Jan de Bont with a ridiculously good cast (on paper anyways). The film left me emotionally scarred, not because of frights but because of pure awfulness. Worst of all it left me with no interest in seeking out the original film.

  Finally 15 years later I realized that the 1963 Haunting was directed by none other then Robert Wise, a man that seemed determined to make classics in every genre he could get his hands on. This is hardly his first horror film, in fact he directed Boris Karloff…