scary movies

The Haunting at 60: is it still one of the scariest films ever made?

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Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg count the slow-burn 1963 horror as one of the greatest of all time but it wasn’t always seen as a classic

By Guy Lodge

There’s a strange kind of pride that many people take in not being frightened by certain celebrated horror films. “Oh, it’s not scary at all,” they’ll say loftily about The Shining or The Exorcist or The Babadook, as if they’ve somehow outsmarted the film and the other, weaker viewers it worked on, all still cowering too much to give the holdout’s smug bravery the shrug it merits. Scariness, in addition to being wholly subjective, is not exactly a value judgement. There are any number of shoddy identikit slashers out there that can make an otherwise discerning viewer jump in all the right places; there are likewise many smart, artful horror films that may not elicit much more than a stray shiver, but stick with you in other ways. Which of those you value more is your call.

Classic horror films are frequently subjected to this kind of dismissal by modern audiences – the contemporary limitations on their violence or explicitness or special effects too often taken for a timidity that outweighs whatever psychological weaponry they may yield. But The Haunting, released 60 years ago this week, has been weathering such taunts since it was brand-new. Director Robert Wise and screenwriter Nelson Gidding’s leisurely, elegant adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 literary ghost story wasn’t much of a hit: reviews were respectable but cinemagoers were underwhelmed by its slow-burning storytelling and curtailed shocks.

Writing about the film a year after its release, in an essay titled Are Movies Going to Pieces?, the critic Pauline Kael – semi-admiring of the film’s accomplishments, while conceding that it wasn’t “a great movie” – despaired at the reaction of the audience around her: “[They] were restless and talkative, the couple sitting near me arguing – the man threatening to leave, the woman assuring him that something would happen. In their terms, they were cheated: nothing happened. And, of course, they missed what was happening all along.”

To this day, the divide remains the same. Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg have both declared it among the scariest films ever made; head on over to the horror film website Where’s the Jump, however, and The Haunting gets a lowly one-star “jump scare rating”. That’s not necessarily damning – think of the the site as a consumer service for the especially faint of heart – but it does indicate opposing ideas of where the horror in horror cinema lies. The Haunting is at heart an old-fashioned haunted-house movie, and boasts its share of that subgenre’s requisite spooky door slams and unexplained nocturnal rumblings.

They’re executed with taste and restraint, which may equal tempered scares for many. Wise, a smooth A-list studio director making a return to modestly budgeted monochrome entertainment between the Oscar-winning musical exhortations of West Side Story and The Sound of Music, wasn’t a B-movie exploitation merchant in the mould of William Castle or Roger Corman. Nor did The Haunting quite aspire to the spare, artsy chills of Jack Clayton’s essential Henry James adaptation The Innocents.

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From Enys Men to The Witch: What’s behind cinema’s folk horror boom?

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Eloise Hendy delves into the genre that turns the pastoral idyll into a place of terror, and asks what’s behind this obsession with the natural world, magic cults, standing stones and feminine powers

By Eloise Hendy

In Enys Men – the much-anticipated new film written and directed by Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, whose last feature, Bait (2019), earned him a Bafta for Outstanding Debut – a woman in walking boots, jeans, and a translucent red anorak trudges across gorsy moorland towards a cliff face. She clambers down, perches on a rocky outcrop, and stares intently at a few white flowers as they sway in the wind, high above clamorous waves below.

Every day she studies these flowers. Then, every day she drops a rock into an abandoned tin mine’s inky depths, and stands listening for a distant thud. She returns to an isolated, ivy-covered cottage. A standing stone sticks out of the landscape like an ancient dagger-head. The woman pulls the cord of a power generator, makes a pot of tea, listens to the scratchy, indistinct noises of a radio communication device, and, in a logbook, records the date – April 1973 – and the words ‘”no change”. At bedtime, by candlelight, she reads an environmental manifesto titled Blueprint for Survival. Snatched glimpses of the cover reveal a quote in red: “Nightmarishly convincing… After reading it nothing quite seems the same any more.”

This phrase goes to the heart of this strange, spectral work of cinema. Even calling it a film feels wrong somehow; it feels more like a fever dream, or hallucination. For, almost as soon as the unnamed wildlife volunteer’s routine comes into focus for the viewer, it starts to fracture. Lichen blooms on her flowers and on a scar that stretches across her abdomen. Grubby-faced men holding pickaxes stare at her from the mineshaft; sailors lost at sea grin and drip outside her front door; a girl in white bell bottoms stands on the outhouse roof. Steadily, the whole far-flung landscape begins to teem with apparitions. They are both convincing and nightmarish; nothing quite seems the same any more. Is the volunteer losing her mind? Or merging with an ancient Cornish terrain – one riddled with myth and old scars, like her lichen-sprouting stomach?

In a statement accompanying Enys Men (which is pronounced Ennis Main, and means “stone island” in Cornish), Jenkin suggests his starting point for the film was a single question: “What if the landscape was not only alive, but sentient?” Long fascinated by Cornish standing stones and their accompanying legends – one of which imagines the rocks as the petrified remains of a group of young girls, punished for dancing – Jenkin found himself imagining what these stones and remote moorlands might get up to under cover of darkness. “Almost inevitably, considering the setting,” he writes, “the idea was inclined towards folk horror.”

Jenkin is far from the only contemporary filmmaker inclined in this direction. Indeed, for at least a decade we have been in the midst of a magnificent folk horror revival. But why has this strange subgenre of standing stones and spectral presences captured the imagination of filmmakers and audiences in the UK and beyond? What does the folk horror boom say about our contemporary fears?

The term itself only went mainstream in 2010, when Mark Gatiss used it in the BBC documentary series The History of Horror to describe three British films now known as the Unholy Trinity: Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). It is certainly no coincidence then that Enys Men is set in 1973, as, making the film, it was precisely these cinematic roots Jenkin wanted to rummage in. “For me,” Jenkin writes, “folk horror has very English connotations. The stripping away of a pastoral layer of Merrie England to reveal an earlier Celtic and pagan past full of perceived brutality, deviance and threat.” Yet, since Gatiss first invoked the genre, cinemagoers on both sides of the Atlantic have been offered up Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) and A Field in England (2013), Paul Wright’s For Those in Peril (2013), James Crow’s Curse of The Witching Tree (2015), Robert Egger’s The VVitch (subtitled “A New England Folktale”), Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Scott Cooper’s Antlers (2021) and, most recently, Alex Garland’s Men (2022). All present nightmarish visions of a deviant, occult and cult-addled countryside. And that is far from an exhaustive list.

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