Shirley Jackson

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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Film review: “Shirley”

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Josephine Decker channels the gothic atmosphere and horribly thrilling storytelling of Shirley Jackson’s writing in this fictionalised portrait of the author

It’s hard to succinctly describe what Shirley is, but it most assuredly isn’t a biopic. Josephine Decker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins (adapting Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel) give us a fictionalized portrait of author Shirley Jackson (Moss), presenting her as if she was a character in one of her stories.

The gothic atmosphere, psychological fragmentation and cruel barbs recall Jackson’s writing, but the aesthetic style is all Decker’s. Her woozily subjective camerawork and fluid approach to narrative will likely alienate as many as it entrances, but few could deny it’s a bracingly inventive and bold piece of work – every scene feels charged with anxiety, bitterness or desire.

As in Madeline’s Madeline, Decker probes at the point where artistic inspiration and exploitation meet. Rose (Young) is a young woman entering Jackson’s life just as she writes about the disappearance of a female college student. As reality and fiction blend, Rose grows into a far more complicated and intriguing character than the wide-eyed newlywed we are introduced to, and Young more than holds her own against her co-stars. Michael Stuhlbarg is perfectly awful as Jackson’s smarmy and condescending husband, while Moss attacks the title role with relish, giving us a painfully vulnerable yet larger than life Jackson. “I’m a witch, didn’t anyone tell you?” she tells Rose when they first meet, and you half-believe her.

Source: The Skinny

Shirley Jackson centenary: a quiet, hidden rage

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Born 100 years ago today, Shirley Jackson wrote stories filled with nameless dread that still speak to women’s anger

I first encountered Shirley Jackson through a single short story, “The Daemon Lover”, which I read when I was 12 without knowing any of her other work. Later, I rediscovered the story, along with the rest of Jackson’s writing, and became a fervent admirer of this brilliant and (at that time) much underrated American author.
In some ways, “The Daemon Lover”, from a 1949 collection is a typical Jackson story. An unnamed woman of 34 (though only 30 on her marriage certificate) wakes up on the day of her wedding to a man called James Harris. Impatiently the woman waits for her fiance to arrive, drinking cups of coffee and obsessing over trivia – her choice of dress, the flowers, the light meal she is planning after the ceremony. Hours pass, and at last it becomes clear that the fiance is a no-show. The woman, who does not know where he lives, leaves her flat in search of him, asking locals for a James Harris in hope of resolving the misunderstanding; after a Kafkaesque sequence of increasingly paranoid encounters, she ends up in front of an apartment door, behind which she can hear voices, but which,

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