What gets you in a haunted house movie are the quiet moments, when you expect something to happen. A good haunted house movie incubates this, stacks up a few false positives, then knocks them down all at once in a crash of cymbals, only to start the whole process over. Think The Shining, Amityville, even Poltergeist. Jan de Bont's The Haunting, a liberal remake of the 1962 Haunting of Hill House, based on the Shirley Jackson novel, doesn't so much concern itself with this second stage--remounting the tension. Instead it jacks it up and keeps it there, until the baseline (the quiet moments) are the moments when only some of the faces on the wall are tracking a character's progress across a room, down a hall, through one of the countless thirty-foot tall doors of Hill House. This isn't to say there isn't escalation, though. More like overload. The place is an absolute amusement park of horror, the ideal setting for Dr. Marrow (Liam Neeson) to stage an experiment on fear; he wants to know what use sweaty palms, rapid heartbeats, pupil dilation and all that have in today's world. His idea is that they're vestigial responses, of no use anymore. How observing a handful of insomniacs is supposed to answer his question is a bit murky, though, which is just as well, as the sweaty palms etc are never given a chance to redeem themselves. So it goes. Suffice it to say that the three subjects--homebody Eleanor (Lily Taylor), bisexual party gal Theo (Catherine-Zeta-Jones), and sardonic Owen (the intractable Luke Wilson)--walk the halls all night trying to get to the bottom of the many strange goings-on. Voices, cherubic faces in the curtains, interdimensional gongs, the whole gamut. And of course no two of them ever see the same phenomenon simultaneously, which isn't so much a trick of camerawork as an accepted convention. Where The Haunting departs from tradition, however, is in the noticeable absence of sexual tension. Nevermind that Catherine Zeta-Jones is splashed all over the trailer, still in supermodel shape from Zorro and Entrapment. She's evidently just window dressing. The one or two token innuendoes (invitations?) her Theo directs Eleanor's way hardly even register, perhaps because Eleanor--suddenly the central character--has other things to worry about. Like distinguishing the scary but good ghosts from the scary and bad ghosts, and how she may or may not fit into the history of Hill House. About this scary and bad ghost: aside from being a Scrooge lookalike, he seems more intent upon frightening Eleanor & Co. to death than upon actually killing them, which--judging by his insanity level and the power he wields--would be a short night's work. But then we wouldn't get startled, right? And The Haunting does startle, something of a feat in itself, taking into account a slightly jaded audience. It does this by not allowing us to anticipate the narrative, and it does that by more or less replacing the narrative with special effects. The same ones introduced with The Frighteners and abused in The Mummy, both of which fell similarly short on story but spent a lot of money doing so. Like them, The Haunting is best seen in the theater, where you can be wowed by sound and lights and not have time to consider what might be missing. (c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones
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