with Dmetri Kakmi

The Haunting

USA 1963

Director: Robert Wise

Cast: Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn

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The need to belong is primal. Even those who hold the notion in disdain find they are invariably drawn to the warmth and security of a tribe. That said, membership into the tribe can be a double-edged sword. It comes at a price: absorption, loss of individuality, and personal freedom. 

Such is the story of one woman’s encounter with Hill House.

“Help Eleanor Come Home” is writ large on an interior wall of Hill House, drawing attention to one of four individuals gathered in the belly of the “deranged” manor to record possible paranormal activity. 

The woman in question is Eleanor Lance (Vance in Shirley Jackson’s 1959 classic ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House). As played by Julie Harris, queen of tremulous, Eleanor is the ultimate wallflower, jumpy, guilt-ridden, neurotic and desperate to belong. She is a child-woman who stands out like a pimple on the nose. In her more sanguine moments, she believes love will come from the married Doctor Markway (Montague in the novel), the leader of the expedition into supposedly haunted realms. 

But Eleanor is seen by something else altogether. Her need is answered by darker forces that may reside in the imposing mansion that tilts alarmingly this way and that, watching and waiting for her to drop her guard so that it may enter and make its home in her, and she in it. 

As memorialised in the most famous opening paragraph in an English-language novel, Hill House, “not sane”, has stood “for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Hill House was obviously not built by a shonky property developer. No, it was built by Hugh Crain, a patriarch most unlucky, whose first two wives met tragic ends in the monument he built to keep out the world, and whose only daughter grew old and died in the nursery she never left. Her wayward paid companion who obviously had a flair for the dramatic hanged herself on the spiral staircase in the library. Where else?

Women all. Yet Hugh Crain’s presence looms large. Perhaps it is he who walks there and walks alone. And perhaps he has seen in timorous Eleanor yet another woman to entomb in his creepy abode.

Brightly lit and filmed with a wide-angle lens, Hill House is revealed in all its ghastly glory. As the eye traverses from left to right of the expansive screen, taking in the minute detail of a room, anxiety kicks in because by the time you reach the other end of the screen you don’t know what you might see next. But Robert Wise is a Val Lewton alumni; he knows less is more and, like the prowling camera, the viewer’s imagination is allowed to roam free, coming up with worse horrors than any special effect.

What makes the scrawled message on the wall alarming is that it is revealed by degrees. At first, the four ghost hunters see only “Help Eleanor”. A call to rescue. A more ominous note is struct when “Come Home” is revealed. This is an alarum because Eleanor does not have a home. Her controlling mother died recently, releasing Eleanor for the first time in her life, and she has been an uneasy guest on her married sister’s couch. 

The question who or what offers Eleanor succour is left unanswered. Is it the “leprous” house? Or is something else going on? 

Earlier Eleanor tells Doctor Markway that she sleeps on her left side because she’s heard it wears out the heart faster — a trifle that hints at a disturbed mind. Eleanor has another card up her sleeve. At the start, Doctor Markway tells the gathering they were chosen for unique abilities. Hip Theodora is there because she is an adept of ESP. Martini-swilling Luke is present for nothing more than he is heir to the house. Eleanor was chosen because she is telekinetic. When she was a child a rain of stones fell on her house for several days. In other words, Eleanor Lance is Carrie White’s spiritual grandmother. Like legendary blood-spattered prom queen Carrie, Eleanor is a mouse who harbours titanic power.

Despite Shirley Jackson’s insistence that everything that happens at Hill House has a supernatural basis, Nelson Gidding’s script leaves open the notion that Eleanor unconsciously unleashes telekinetic force under great distress — the writing on the wall, strange noises in the night, inexplicable attacks on individuals — all of it could be Eleanor’s ability at work, creating a vortex of pain and agony that threatens to consume her and those around her.

On the other hand, it might not be. It might be Hugh Crain’s need for fresh meat. In that regard, Hill House and Eleanor Lance were made for each other. They are both, in one way or another, “not sane” and Eleanor is the bride Crain has waited for these last eighty years.

In the end, Eleanor runs away from an all-absorbing mother straight into the arms of an annihilating father/lover, there to lose herself and become part of a terrifying whole.

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Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Woman in the Well, The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). He is now working on a crime novel called The Perfect Room.