FREE!! To be followed by a discussion with the Brattle staff.
There are a lot of great horror movies, and a lot of ways (could be a plethora of ’em) for a horror movie to be great. Perhaps the rarest specimen in the genre is the film that successfully conjures what H.P. Lovecraft called “cosmic fear,” in which, to borrow from Lovecraft’s description of the most exemplary “weird tales,” “[a] certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”
This is harrowing, shuddersome stuff, as far from the the “whimsical or humorous” as it is from the cinema “of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome.” Those things have their place — and it’s the largest, most popular place, too, within the kitsch- and corpse-heavy world of contemporary horror — but if you’re looking, for whatever reason (you freak), to be genuinely shaken by bone-deep dread, your options shrink faster than man’s prospects in the howling void.
But hey, get a grip already, a few options remain — if not for humanity, then at least for your ghoulish predilection for losing your grip. Why, here comes one of them now, screening even tonight at the Brattle: THE HAUNTING, Robert Wise’s exquisite adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s masterful novel of cracking minds and spectral staircases, The Haunting of Hill House (1959). In her variation on an even-then not particularly original premise, Jackson posited a vast, crumbling New England manse, shared a few choice details regarding the grim fortunes of the family whose patriarch built it, and then repopulated the unsane place with a group of “sensitives” convened by a psychic investigator to definitively prove the existence of the supernatural. What, as they say, could possibly go wrong? In the night? In the dark?
More conventionally Gothic than Jackson’s other, equally unnerving exercises in weird fiction, The Haunting of Hill House simply does its dark work of spooking us far better than we’re used to — in short, it executes. And in the person of lost, lonely Eleanor Lance it has a character whose emotional fragility elicits our anxious sympathy. Director Wise, ever the consummate professional, expertly preserves the novel’s pervasive air of instability, rendering Hill House in just the right expressionistic style: oddly angled, shadow-choked, congested with elaborate filigree. The horror gathers gradually, and implacably.
THE HAUNTING will freeze your blood if you’re the kind of person who’s at all open to such a thing. It’s one of the more entertaining ways to be reminded that whoever and wherever we are, we walk alone.
Bring a friend.
FREE! FREE!! FREE!!!
Be sure to stick around for a discussion with members of the Brattle staff afterward.
7/28 // 6PM
112 Minutes
The Brattle Theatre
40 Brattle St.
Cambridge MA 02138
