Shirley Jackson's Haunting

I was still a kid when I first read The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson. It was a version translated into Brasilian Portuguese, bought in a tiny shopping mall near the apartment I grew up in São Paulo (I asked the saleswoman for a ghost story because I wanted to give Agatha Christie a break.) I loved the novel even though I wasn't old enough to fully understand it.

A few years ago, while visiting Kevin's parents in Canada, we rented The Haunting (the 1963 version) from the nearest strip mall videostore. Kevin's mom told us later that it gave her nightmares (very understandable when you consider she lives in a remote farm). I was impressed at how faithful the film was to the novel and how it built the suspense purely on suggestion and on a few key scenes involving "the haunting". Many of the novel's themes -- unstable minds meeting an unstable house; "unnatural" sexuality in an "unnatural" house -- also survive in the film, making it a kind of perfect companion piece for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. But, whereas Hitchcock's movie deals with dangerous human insanity in a remote location, The Haunting is about the power a place can have in destabilizing a person whose mind is weak. Hitchcock's psycho gets found out in the end while Hill House continues to stand after the characters are gone, with the implication that many more will meet a horrible fate there.

I bought the film on DVD over Christmas, when I saw it on sale, and last night we got the sour cream Pringles and chocolate biscuits ready before popping in the film. Although naive in some ways, and awkward in others (especially the interior monologues), the film still stands as one of the best ghost stories ever made. It's just so... classy. It's from a time when film-makers assumed their audience were intelligent and could come to their own conclusions, as well as tolerate plenty of dialogue between the characters. No blood and guts here.

I wish there were more ghost stories put to film, more creepy novels on the bestselling lists. Enough with all these chicklit novels and boring film franchises. Let's tell ghost stories to each other.