Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #238 The Haunting (1999)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m about halfway through the complete filmography troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the worlds of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for one of you beautiful people as well.
We are at the very beginning of Mad October, as I explore the spookier side of Virginia Madsen’s filmography for a very generous and appreciated patron. I just wrote up The Prophecy and now I get to share the shuddering anti-climax that is 1999’s The Haunting with y’all.
The Haunting has one hell of a pedigree. It began life as a project that would have brought together our most popular, successful and arguably beloved filmmaker AND our most popular, successful and arguably beloved novelist.
That’s right. The Haunting was supposed to represent a once in a lifetime lifetime collaboration between director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Stephen King but creative differences got in the way and King’s work on the un-produced adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s classic novel The Haunting of Hill House eventually formed the basis for his 2002 mini-series Rose Red.
By the time The Haunting limped to the big screen in 1999 Spielberg had been replaced as director by Speed and Twister’s Jan De Bont and the script was credited to David Self rather than literally the most successful horror writer of all time.
But if the writer/director team were not as historic as they could have been there’s plenty of classy names slumming it in exchange for a fat payday in front of the camera.
Despite an exceedingly small cast and nothing in the way of extras or bit players, The Haunting has so many stars and big personalities that it can squander them in thankless bit roles, beginning with Madsen’s blink and you miss it cameo as Jane Vance, one of the many people in sad sack protagonist Eleanor "Nell" Vance’s (Lili Taylor) life who take her for granted and treat her like shit.
As the film opens, Madsen's cold-blooded, ambitious schemer is taking advantage of her sister’s good nature to kick her out of the modest condo where she has selflessly tended to their sick mother for over a decade, putting her own happiness aside for the sake of her family, following the mother’s death.
Madsen creates an indelible character without much in the way of dialogue or screen time but after that first scene she’s never seen again. The Haunting similarly teases us sadistically by introducing Bruce Dern as a spooky house-keeper who clearly knows lots of dark secrets and has seen things no man should see, only to forget about him until the very end of the film.
Todd Field’s presence here is so bewildering, meanwhile, that I’m not sure the filmmakers even realize he’s in the movie. His appearance feels like a weird accident nobody noticed or took care of before the film’s release.
The movie’s uniquely 1999 quartet of big stars doesn’t fare much better although Owen Wilson manages to inject the proceedings with a wonderful injection of Owen Wilson sideways slacker energy before he is reduced to running away from shitty CGI alongside the rest of a crazily over-qualified cast for much of the film.
Wilson is a breath of fresh initially as an insomniac slacker with an abundance of laconic charm who seems to have wandered in from a much sillier, goofier movie than the one everyone else is in.
Wilson delivers an unmistakably comic performance as a bro who should be lighting up a bong somewhere and grooving to jams but instead finds himself in a cockamamie “sleep study” in what is obviously a haunted house overrun with evil spirits.
If The Haunting had really leaned into the culture-clash, contemporary Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein angle of a chill stoner dude at the center of a special effects-heavy haunted house horror movie it’d be a lot more fun.
Instead the remake of Robert Wise’s 1963 classic unwisely goes for scares that never come and atmosphere that dissipates quickly once it becomes apparent just how little the movie has to say.
An appropriately embarrassed Liam Neeson plays Dr. David Marrow, a mad scientist the movie inexplicably seems to think is not nefarious so much as misguided when all of the available evidence suggests he’s out of his fucking gourd and pretty damn evil.
The demented doctor wants to delve deep into the seldom-explored positive side of fear by manipulating a group of strangers into coming to a spooky old estate under the pretense that they will be participating in a research study on insomnia when what he’ll really be studying is TERROR!
Now I have participated in multiple research studies and they’ve all taken place in cold, antiseptic places like hospitals rather than haunted houses.
But you can’t have a haunted house movie without a haunted house so the fake study occurs in the spookiest and least likeliest of places, a vast cathedral of ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night with a vibe that bisexual Bohemian glamour girl Theo (Catherine Zeta-Jones) accurately pegs as Charles Foster Kane by way of the Munsters.
To get the study’s participants in an appropriately terrified frame of mind, Dr. Marrow tells them of the massive estate’s haunted past as the home of a wealthy man obsessed with children yet doomed to never have any of his own.
There is some seriously bad mojo at play in this haunted mansion but is it the work of a doctor intent on exploring the nature of fear or is it genuine paranormal activity?
Except for the loopy incongruity of Owen Wilson starring in a horror movie and a wildly over-qualified cast, all that The Haunting has going for it is an appropriately spooky set rife with gothic details and free-floating dread.
The Haunting looks expensive but feels cheap. It’s a tacky b-movie with an A-list cast and decadent production values but nothing in the way of a soul or substance.
The underwhelming fright flick has exactly one idea that feels badly cribbed from The Shining: the house has a telekinetic bond with Nell. It seems to intuit her need to serve others, whether that means martyring herself for the sake of her mother or agreeing to look after a bunch of dead ghost children because no one else wants the gig.
The house seems to be calling Nell home as part of a dark destiny she cannot begin to fathom initially but speaks to her soul-deep compulsion to put the needs of others above her own to a masochistic extent.
The Haunting has a fatal flaw in that it is never scary. The CGI is cheap and tacky enough to be distractingly unconvincing but not cheap or tacky enough to be fun or distinctive the way the CGI in say, The Lawnmower Man or Mars Attacks are.
Watching The Haunting I found myself thinking about how much fun it is to watch scary movies during the Halloween season. It’s a tradition I very much enjoy even as I’m all too aware that most scary movies suck, even those with as much going for them on paper as The Haunting.
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