THE HAUNTING: A Remake Gone Awry

Don't bother watching this uninspired retread when you can rent the original.

By Steve Biodrowski     December 12, 1999

THE HAUNTING (DreamWorks, 7/99, 1:52, PG-13) is nowhere near as a big a disaster as last year's PSYCHO remake, but it is nearly as redundant, offering no new insight or entertainment that comes even close to justifying a new adaptation of a novel that was brilliantly filmed the first time. Now available on video and DVD, there is little about the film that would make it worth seeing a second time if you already blew your seven bucks on a theatre ticket, but if you missed its theatrical run, it might be worth a two dollar rental, just to compare and contrast it with Robert Wise's superior original adaptation.
Surprisingly, Jan DeBont (whose action expertise in SPEED and TWISTER would seem to peg him as a piece of directorial miscasting) follows the format of his predecessor, at least for the film's first half. With the emphasis on atmosphere and characterization, the remake actually shows some early promise. When the inevitable CGI effects first kick in, they attempt a certain subtlety, suggesting faces glimpsed in shadows or formed in the creases of billowing curtains. In fact, with its characters walking down ornate hallways (courtesy of production designer Eugenio Zanetti), the film starts to resemble one of Roger Corman's Poe adaptations. Unfortunately, this subtlety soon gives way to the expected effects extravaganza, and the film rapidly deteriorates.
Lili Taylor is an able replacement for Julie Harris as Eleanor, but Liam Neeson's scientist has been rewritten to his detriment (no longer a parapsychologist, he is now merely conducting an experiment into the effects of fear). Owen Wilson's surfer dude is way out of place in Hill House, failing to fill the slot of Russ Tamblyn's character in the original, who effectively voiced the audience's skepticism while also providing a few laughs. Meanwhile, the suggested lesbianism of Clair Bloom's Theo (not a stated element of the source novel, by the way) has given way to an open bisexuality on the part of Catherine Zeta-Jones. However, the result is merely gratuitous, never generating any dramatic sparks, unlike the original, where it was one more wedge driving the characters apart and weakening their united front in the face of a supernatural assault.
In fact, one of the big problems is that, unlike the 1963 version (and unlike BLAIR WITCH), the film never generates any tension from the interaction of its characters; the story is frankly dull when the ghosts aren't attacking. Even worse, David Self's uninspired screenplay foolishly provides an explanation for the haunting, as if afraid the open-ended nature of the original will leave contemporary audiences confused. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if the explanation had been interesting, but the result feels frankly grafted on from another source: the evil, ghostly proprietor of the house; the innocent souls held in limbo against their will; and the young woman who dies trying to release these trapped spirits: these plot points suggest Richard Matheson's Hell House rather than Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.
Of course, this isn't the first time that DreamWorks top gun Steven Spielberg has lifted a page from Matheson's work: as executive producer, he recycled the author's classic TWILIGHT ZONE episode 'Little Girl Lost' in POLTERGEIST. As in that earlier, overblown effects extravaganza, THE HAUNTING insists that malevolent supernatural forces are no match for family values. The frankly silly ending has Eleanor realizing that she is a descendent of Hill House's original owner destined to undo the evil he perpetrated. Poor Lili Taylor is left shouting at the CGI bogeyman, 'This is about family,' as if that were some kind of protective talisman.
By the time she expires and her soul leads the dead children toward heaven, we're left shaking our heads in dismay at the colossal miscalculation. Let's face it: Kenny's ascent into the divine realm at the end of SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER, AND UNCUT is a much more moving cinematic experience. Trey Parker and Matt Stone had the courage to be rude and crude in a way that was refreshingly brilliant and hilarious. Compromised by foolish rewriting of an excellent novel, THE HAUNTING's brand of 'respectable' PG-13 entertainment actually panders far more detrimentally to its intended audience that the foul-mouthed animated epic.