Although we generally like to steer away from the most overused resource on the net, the Wikipedia entry on The Haunting is a pretty good introduction to the film. It offers a handy guide to its key themes along with neat background facts/gossip about the production, and a restrained treatment of the key issue that may concern us in the context of this course:
How Uncanny is the isolation of Eleanor as the focal point of the film? How deftly does the film navigate between a reduction of the phenomena experienced by the characters (because it's clearly not "all in Eleanor's head") to either a psychological or a supernatural explanation? How does the story, including Eleanor's fantasies/recollections/disclosures, turn on Repression as an instigator of the Uncanny response--even if it doesn't fit neatly into Freud's scheme?
You may also enjoy:
Patrick Samuel's essay on The Haunting at the Static Mass Emporium website, which is a "deconstruction" of a key, famously frightening scene.
Another issue I hope you'll consider as you view and review The Haunting: The term "Cinematic space" may be used in two ways (at least). The first is the illusionistic image within a frame or between cuts--How does cinema create spaces on screen? The second is the imaginary space created in the viewer's mind by editing practice (and sometimes special effects). "Haunted house" films are a particularly convincing example of the power of cinematic practice to evoke a fantasy world--that has never existed in three-dimensional reality--and especially of the way that imaginary space can affect us emotionally and psychologically. (Consider how this film takes off from "The Fall of the House of Usher," the classic haunted-house gothic novels of the 18th-19th century such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, or for that matter, the novel upon which this film is based, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. It seems as if cinema were made to depict haunted houses; early experimental filmmakers were drawn to "Usher".) The Haunting is sometimes praised and sometimes panned as a horror movie, but few critical treatments note this outstanding feature: Its capacity to identify domestic space created onscreen--with its obscurities and gaps--with characters and emotions so that we really develop a virtual experience of the Uncanny.
To provoke discussion next week, please offer your comments on either:
1. The role of Eleanor or of the house as a focus for the Uncanny in the film, or any other aspect of the film that seems to you worth considering as an indicator of the Uncanny;
OR
2. The position of the narrator and narration--who tells the story and how the story is told--in one of our readings from Poe, or any other aspect of a story, or common point among the stories, as an indicator of the Uncanny.
In a way, of course, we are still asking: What's spooky about these movies and stories? And why is the spookiness pleasurable? But I hope that beyond that, we might ask some questions about how and why we succumb to illusions in art.
You may find The Haunting online at Veoh, though I don't know how reliable that is. Our Poe short stories are online in the Required Readings folder on Blackboard, and accessible through links in the sidebar to the right of this post.
Please comment by 9 am Tuesday, Oct 1, in response to the film or to your reading of Poe's stories.
PS A similar set of themes and settings is to be found in the 1973 film The Legend of Hell House (click on link for Wikipedia entry). (The screenplay was adapted by the respected sci-fi/fantasy author Richard Matheson from his novel.) A key feature is the association of sexual repression, insecurity, and "perversions" with malevolent ghosts. Hmmmm . . .
