Perception and Personification in ‘The Haunting’
Robert Wise’s The Haunting is often considered to be one of the greatest haunted house movies ever made. This is no surprise. After all, it is based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, often considered to be one of the greatest ghost stories ever written. There’s so much reverence in the film for the language of the novel that the movie reads almost like a book sometimes and not just because it’s often narrated by our protagonist, Nell. The iconic first paragraph of the text, especially its closing line, “silence laid steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone” form the opening lines of the film, establishing the mood right off the bat. This is a ghost story told to you as much as it is shown and yet so much of the power of this film comes through the visual language.
The visual element only strengthens the language of a movie that is, in essence, a deconstruction of the word “haunting” itself. As much as it is the classic ghost story, it is at the same time unlike any other ghost story ever told. Every haunted house story is ultimately about bringing life to an inanimate thing, usually a place. A house. On that level The Haunting is no different, but it goes one step further. This is a film in which the antagonist is a personified house and the protagonist is a de-personified human being.
Eleanor “Nell” Lance is a deeply interesting protagonist, especially because she’s not a terribly pleasant person, usually by her own design. She lashes out when she’s afraid and she’s always afraid. She gets upset when people suggest she’s seeking to be the center of attention, because that’s exactly what she’s doing. But why she’s doing these things is something no character around her understands, probably not even Nell herself. She spent the past eleven years taking care of her sick mother and now she lives with her sister. Nell does not even have a bedroom of her own, she sleeps in the living room, the one place in the house that most belongs to everyone else. Nell has never had a life or a home that has belonged to herself for one day out of her entire life.
The only thing that belongs to her is her own name and she is fiendishly protective of it. When she finds it written on the wall in the house she nearly has a mental breakdown, screaming that the house has taken it from her. And yet she never speaks it fully, and has shortened it to the smallest possible form. In fact, Nell, by itself, is just one letter away from “null.” For something that’s the only thing she can call her own, and that she can identify herself as, she almost strains to make it as close to nothing as possible.
Of course, there’s also the lesbian subtext between Theo and Nell, which is one of the most well known and oft-examined aspects of both the book and the film. Theo immediately recognizes Nell as a kindred spirit, and Nell is both tempted and disgusted by Theo’s outgoing, carefree personality, simply saying what she wants, whenever she wants, without caring how anyone takes it. There’s a pretty blatant, awful moment on Nell’s part when she lashes out at Theo in the middle of an argument and refers to her as “God’s mistake.” This could easily be read as simple homophobia, but both Nell and Theo knows that she’s saying it for attention, to push people away from her by putting all of their eyes on her. To me, this is completely connected to the way Nell is depicted throughout the text, it’s the lure of nothing, same as her name. Nell doesn’t push away from her attraction to Theo simply (at least not exclusively) because of internalized homophobia. She does it because it is attraction, period. It’s a specific, individualized human trait. It To be either drawn to or repulsed by Theo is a specific character trait that makes her human, and that is what she can’t take. To ignore that attraction, one way or another, is nothingness, so that’s what she chooses.
Nell can easily be seen as a woman desperately terrified of two things, 1, dying, and 2, living. This fear is so overpowering that she cannot feel anything else, and so it forms the basis of every thought she has, every action she takes, every word that comes out of her mouth, for every second of her life. Nell’s terror can more digestibly be seen as someone who does not believe she is real unless she is being perceived. She expresses this terror constantly throughout both the book and movie. The only problem is that she doesn’t seem to quite know, for herself, if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
There’s a seductive quality to absence, to nothingness. For someone who wholly believes herself to already be as close to nothing as a person can be, the notion of being fully gone has a strong allure. The call of nothingness is something that Nell deals with throughout the entirety of the story. It’s the main thing that drives her character, that keeps her pushing herself toward the darkness when everyone tries their best to pull her back. It’s not even death that Nell is courting, necessarily. She has no clearly expressed thoughts of dying. It’s nothingness, not existing, perhaps to have never existed at all. That’s what seduces her about Hill House. It’s also, ironically, where she and Hill House are at odds.
The cinematic strengths of The Haunting truly lie in its depiction of the house. From the opening shot, we’re seeing the house by itself, a dark, jagged shape against the sky, as we hear the opening narration. There are many shots of Hill House by itself, depicting its vast emptiness, even after our main cast of characters move in. This is where so much of the horror comes from. It establishes an isolated mood, makes the characters feel so small and helpless within this massive house. More than that, the cinematography helps so much to personify Hill House. That personification goes right back to Jackson’s novel. One of the very first descriptions of the house, in the first paragraph of the book, is “not sane,” and that says everything. This is a house that thinks. This is a house that breathes. This is a house that wants, and it wants Nell.
It’s interesting that for a film that is, for the most part, only vaguely supernatural, the fact that Hill House is a living force is plainly accepted by everyone in the end. This is a movie that famously shows very little, establishing horror through sounds and feelings, it could simply be Nell’s own rapid descent into madness, and is presumed to be by the characters for most of the run time, but the house just feels so oppressively bad that even when there’s still a high possibility of a rational explanation at the end, everyone fully believes in the power of Hill House.
As for why the house wants Nell, it’s explained just enough, but never outright stated. She was caring for her elderly mother, and her mother died calling for her while Nell refused to answer. Abigail Crane, the previous owner, died calling for her nurse, who never came. Nell’s car accident is identical to Hugh Crane’s first wife, the day little Abigail moved in.
Throughout the film, Nell repeats to herself over and over that something is finally happening to her, that she’s finally embarking on a story of her own. And that is ultimately the biggest lie she tells herself. In the end, she is exactly what she and Hill House wanted her to be: a part of it. A telling and retelling of its own story. Just one more empty room in a big, dark house.
