Busy day, and so although there are things to say and stories to share, today, as they say, I got nuthin’. But since I have written before of Shirley Jackson, and since so many high school students find their way here looking for essay content, I thought I would give you this — a few minutes of Act 1 of The Haunting, the 1963 Robert Wise movie based on The Haunting of Hill House.
This clip begins about 8 or 9 minutes into the movie, after Eleanor (Nell) has been invited to come to Hill House to participate in a paranormal study.
The book, and this movie, have long fascinated me. Eleanor’s overwhelming need to escape is so finely balanced against her clear instinct for good and evil, for what is good or not good for her. And yet, knowing that Hill House is not good for her, she enters into it with only minimal hesitation, with a subterranean lightness of being. There’s a sense of power and freedom in crossing the line of no return… and of course that’s where the horror always comes from, the final realization that what we thought was freedom was just a better trap. It’s subtle and brilliant stuff, both in prose and in film.