Why 'The Haunting' isn't scary

As I'm making the notes for this, I'm watching the 1999 remake of 'The Haunting.' The old version is one of my favorite films, and it never fails to deliver a large helping of cold chills. When I first saw the teaser trailer for this new one, which gave absolutely no real hint about the film, I held my breath. In a little, secret room in my head, I whispered, 'Please don't suck. Please don't suck.'

I re-watch this newer version every once in a while, probably more often than I watch the original. I look forward to watching it, but I usually end up doing something else (like writing this) at the same time. Part of the reason the film gets under my skin the way it does, is because it doesn't suck. It misses. It aims in the right direction, and then for some god-damn reason decides to fire ninety degrees off target.

If you haven't seen the original or read the novel by Shirley Jackson, go do that. You won't forgive yourself if you don't, and I won't forgive you either.

Done? So nothing that I say is going to be a spoiler? Good.

There's this house, and it's haunted. There are ghosts, and that's where the problems with this incarnation of the story start. We see the ghosts. They're right there. The first ghost we see is a cute child, and it's more touching than scary. The character who sees it isn't scared at all, and neither are we. Before that, we see our first blatant clue that spooks are here. A tightening screw pulls a wire in a harpsichord tight enough to snap, and it happens right in front of us.

In the behind the scenes feature, someone, (one of the producers, I think) invokes a key truth about horror movies: Less is more. We need room in between the bits we see on screen for our imagination to flow into, so we can let ourselves be scared. But in this movie, we don't get less. We get more and more and more. On top of that, what we get isn't scary. The effects are magical instead of horrifying. We have majestic stone gryphons, magic carpets, and a villain who we see in both his painting and his ghost as a massive, towering giant. These are the currency of myths, not hauntings. After watching it again this time, it hit me what the CGI effects remind me of – The Harry Potter movies. If someone took a print of this films, changed the title to 'The Knights of Hill House,' and edited the dialogue at the beginning to take out the horror element, you would end up with a movie that was a lot more consistent.

So how would we go the other way? If we popped back in time, locked the director in a closet, then called all the actors and crew over to announce we were making a few changes, how would we make 'The Haunting' a genuinely ghostly movie? Well, as long as I'm armchair-quarterbacking, I'd draw most of my inspiration from (surprise) the book and the original film, which wisely deviated very little from Ms. Jackson's story. There would be a bit more emphasis on the house itself, as opposed to a single all-powerful ghost. We would see a few more of Hill House's previous owners come to disturbing ends. We could still let our actors display bits of heroism, because that's part of how we come to like them. But it wouldn't be game-changing heroism. One of the themes of good horror is how little our strengths and abilities do against the unseen forces that haunt us.

Hopefully I'll get my chance to play out on the field soon, instead of just second guessing the people already out there. I have an idea for a haunted house story that I started some time back. Sadly, I think I've lost what I had earlier written.

So I'll write it again.