The Haunting is not even half as good as you would have expected. Dr. John Markway is orchestrating an experiment to see if ghosts and the supernatural really exist. He plans on getting a group of people together in a haunted house and write down their observations and experiences each night. At the start of the film we are guided through an explanation of the evil history of Hill House (headquarters for our curious cast).

The four main characters in the house are Dr. Markway, head of the project. Then there is our star; shy and psychotic Eleanor 'Nell' Lance, skillfully played by Julie Harris. Theodora 'Theo' is a young beautiful psychic with a cruel sense of humor. Luke Sanderson is my least favorite. He is a young curly haired comic-relief character. I desperately wanted him to walk into another dimension and be done with it, but alas, cool stuff like that doesn’t happen in this movie. If Hitchcock were to make a ghost picture, this would be it, but it would have been much more spooky and with more real tension.

The star of this movie is not the house as you might think, but Nell. It feels as if she is slowly going insane, her past is always after her and she doesn’t feel safe in her own skin. I started to get the point midway that her mental breakdown is the key plot and the haunted house (if it is haunted at all) lay in the background. The few spooky scenes leave much to be desired. The chemistry between Nell and Theo is vibrant. There were points where I felt one was going to lean in and give the other a kiss on the mouth. This alone would have earned the movie a coffin.

After so much build up the end is incredibly poor. My heart was faint because it did not ejaculate, did not climax in a satisfactory way. The movie as a whole can really depress a person. I am totally aware of these atmospheric mood black and white pictures. I loved The Innocents, probably my favorite ghost movie ever. Here I was barely entertained. If the characters of Nell and Theo would not have been performed as good as they were I would have given this movie a red death coffin, hanged myself, and let ghosts run the website from now on!!

- Jorge Antonio Lopez