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.
Ooo–that was such a brilliant movie. It has the distinction of being the only “scary” movie I ever found actually *scary.* Haunting in every sense, it was.
I love her sense of what is haunting. In this story especially the physical world is just a little bit askew, the ground a little unsteady under our feet. The “soul” is what is haunted, by wishes and fears seen just out of the corner of the eye. I even shivered when I wrote this, and it’s been 45 years since I saw the movie the first time. No one there is homeless as Nell is. That’s why Hill House gets her, because she so much wants a home.
Phoenix, it’s always scared me too — still does, even though I know it well.
Barbara, wow — what a cool way to put it. You’re right, no one is as homeless as Nell. Thanks for giving me a new layer to think about.