Natural light melds with artifice, and still, frames are dripping with texture.
The grounds outside Hill House are verdant in a way most contemporary cinema despises, and cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub (a regular Roland Emmerich collaborator) knows how to make an image look expensive. Grappling with a supposed ghost in her room, Eleanor is lit, cast into darkness, and lit again. There are beats where Lili Taylor’s Eleanor Vance is lit only by a swinging pendulum light. THE HAUNTING, Lili Taylor, 1999, (c)DreamWorks/courtesy Everett Collection The Haunting put every dollar on the screen, and not once does it look anything less than marvelous. The visual effects might look dated now, though, at the time, they were groundbreaking. In an era of expensive movies that look like piles of dirt, it’s analeptic to go back and watch a movie preeminently interested in how it looks. Produced with an estimated $80 million budget, every cent was on display. However, $180 million at the box office tells a different story. Critical reception was grim, with The Haunting having quite the showing at both The Golden Raspberry Awards and Stinkers Bad Movie Awards. King reportedly hates The Haunting, and he’s not the only one. Even Mike Flanagan’s miniseries adaptation is arguably more faithful to the original template than what de Bont accomplishes here.įirst conceived by Steven Spielberg and Stephen King, King would later leave the project on account of creative differences, reworking his original script into Rose Red, the source of universal nightmares in the early aughts.
Titled as such to avoid confusion with another house and another hill– William Malone’s House on Haunted Hill- The Haunting is Jackson’s story in name only. Widely believed to be a remake of Robert Wise’s seminal, queer-coded masterpiece The Haunting, also adapted from Jackson’s original text, de Bont’s The Haunting is instead another adaptation, with the filmmakers’ failure to secure the remake rights no doubt accounting for the brazen indifference toward 1960s Gothic fidelity.
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