(RE)ENTERING HILL HOUSE
Case studies
‘I guess Shirley Jackson was right. Some houses are born bad’, says professor Joyce Reardon
in the Stephen King miniseries of Rose Red (2002).1 In King’s legacy, but also in horror film
and television in general, the cliché of the haunted castle and its modern offspring (the urban
apartment, the suburban house, the remote hotel) is still very much alive.2 This study deals
with two of its most intriguing examples: the film adaptations, both called The haunting, of
Shirley Jackson’s famous novel The haunting of Hill House (1959) that King pays tribute to.3
Although Jackson, a popular American author of the 1940s and ‘50s, was obviously not the
first to use the very Gothic commonplace of the haunted house, her novel has been referred to
as ‘the most influential ghost story since The turn of the screw’.4 It inspired both Robert Wise
(1963) and Jan De Bont (1999) to make quite different films out of it.5 Much has been written
about the novel, but altogether there have not been any really intensive analyses of the films,
and their relation to the novel and each other. Both are very relevant case studies for
adaptation theory and narratology, psychoanalytical film theory, and the study of Gothic
horror and the woman’s film.
Both films are about the spinster-like Eleanor (Nell) who, after the death of her invalid
mother, has no other place to go to but the spine-tingling Hill House, where she is invited to
take part in a psycho-anthropological investigation. Uncannily, she then starts to feel that
something in the house wants her there and that it is her home, where she belongs. Rather
than being a story about a house then, it is really all about its inhabitant Nell. This is the
general plot that the films share. Yet whereas the ‘63 Haunting, an elegant horror classic,
‘faithfully’ captures the novel’s psychological depth, its depiction of the house as an evil
character, and its quality of leaving the haunting unexplained, the ‘99 adaptation is a far more
1
Rose Red a.k.a. Stephen King’s Rose Red . Dir. Craig Baxley. ABC, 2002.
Various examples of a ‘haunted house’ can be found in, for instance, some original films (films that are not
adaptations or remakes): The others (2001), The haunted mansion (2003), Ju-on (The grudge, 2003), The
skeleton key (2005), El orfanato (2007);
some remakes: House on Haunted Hill (1999), The grudge (2004), The Amityville horror (2005);
an adaptation of a Stephen King novel: 1408 (2007); a remake of an adaptation of a Stephen King novel: Salem’s
lot (2004), and an adaptation of a novel based on a Stephen King novel (and a prequel to Rose Red): The diary of
Ellen Rimbauer (2003)!
3
Shirley Jackson. The Haunting of Hill House (1959). New York: Penguin Books, 1987.
4
Murphy 2005: 10. The comparison is not coincidental: both The turn of the screw (1897) and The haunting of
Hill House are about fragile young women who think that the big house they move in is haunted; that there is
evil in it, and in both stories it is difficult or even impossible to find out if this is all happening for real, or only in
their heads.
5
The haunting. Dir. Robert Wise. MGM, 1963.
The haunting. Dir. Jan De Bont. DreamWorks SKG, 1999.
2
explicit and spectacular film. Felt by some to betray the ‘spirit’ of the novel6, it is ultimately a
rather straightforward detective story with an evil villain resembling Bluebeard (the fairy tale
figure whose curious bride discovered the dead bodies of her predecessors in a forbidden
room). It is up to Nell to defeat him.
The different approaches taken by the films’ makers lead to striking differences in the
meaning of the haunting and the characterization of the protagonist. What I argue, then, is that
both films (and the novel) essentially depict Nell’s path towards homeliness, albeit in a
different way. What is it that Nell seeks and finds in the house, and how does she become part
of it? Whereas in the novel and first adaptation Nell’s ‘becoming homely’ is inextricably
related to the impossibility of cutting loose from her mother (a problem that the house
embodies), in the later film the house is haunted by an actual ghost, a father figure. In other
words, upon re-entering Hill House, it has become entirely different; it has shifted from a
regressive domain to a kind of arena, where Nell must stand up to this evil villain to defend
her friends and family. ‘Becoming homely’ is also the way in which the newest adaptation
can be positioned in relation to the other texts, as it has tried to offer straight-forward
resolutions to the unpleasant and ambiguous fate of the earlier character of Nell - a disturbed
spirit still wandering around in film history, so to speak. Still, although the victimized Nell
has become a more modern heroine in the 1999 film, this adaptation has entered the new
century/millennium by announcing an old-fashioned message, as I will argue.
Even if The haunting ‘99 seems to try to have the final say, the focus shall be on the
Wise film, exactly because this youngest adaptation, with its unambiguous and dull,
Computer-Generated monsters, is only really interesting in relation to the ’63 film, as will
become apparent. The latter is highly disturbing, and maybe so because it is not a typical
horror film at all. The terrible here resides in the fact that its fragile protagonist, Nell, has
never truly lived before and then loses her life at Hill House. It resides in her mental
breakdown, not in a threat to her body. Linda Williams speaks of horror as a ‘body genre’,
and horror films usually depict the slaughter of attractive young women.7 They are subjected
to a male gaze and, if empowered, need to fight off a physical opponent who means to harm
them. Yet in The haunting ’63, not a single drop of blood is spilled in the whole film, and the
plain, mousy Nell feels mostly watched by…the house. The meaning of her (body) dwelling
in the various rooms and corridors is not so easily defined. Exactly what is it that the house
6
For instance Schneider (2002) and Zacharek (1999), who opens her review as follows: ‘Spiritually speaking,
Jan De Bont's “The Haunting” shares nothing with either the lullingly terrifying 1963 Robert Wise picture of the
same name or with Shirley Jackson's subtly chilling novel “The Haunting of Hill House.”
7
Williams 1991: 2-3.
2
can do to her? Through Nell’s prominent, eerie voice-over we are witness to her growing
concern that the ‘evil’ house is after her. Whether this is the case is never truly resolved.
There is no tangible antagonist, then, and the protagonist is not a typical heroine either, as she
is possibly delusional.
I will therefore not take a typical horror approach to this difficult-to-define film, but
rather turn to what Mary Ann Doane calls the ‘paranoid woman’s film of the 1940s’ – and see
how this holds for Jan De Bont’s Haunting. This psychoanalytical (Freudian and Lacanian)
model still lends itself particularly well for The haunting’s tale of a woman who is still bound
to her mother and fails to make it in the outside world. The cinematic mechanisms that Doane
points out are very apt to study how the character of Nell and the dynamic between her and
the house are audio-visualized. The paranoid woman’s film is a guiding principle throughout
this study. It allows me to make the link to other conceptions of the genre too, but first, relate
it to other psychoanalytically inspired models, such as the theories of Michel Chion and Kaja
Silverman on the - rather elusive - disembodied voice, and Laura Marks’ haptic visuality and
her application of the Deleuzian affection image. Other guiding principles are Freud’s
conception of the uncanny, which will manifest itself on several levels throughout the ’63
film, (yet is largely dispensed with in the ’99 film), Mieke Bal’s narratology, Kamilla Elliott’s
concepts of adaptation through body and soul analogies and, in order to do justice to the
ambivalent status of Hill House (at least the one that appears in the first film), Michel
Foucault’s heterotopia. This is a contradictory space at the edge of society where the
irrational is safely stored. Although this may seem like an eclectic approach, it will actually
prove to be a very consistent one. Before I explain my chapter-to-chapter approach, sketch my
floor plan, so to speak, it is necessary to see how these concepts relate to each other by
explaining the foundation of the house, which at the same time partly accounts for the
attraction of Hill House on Nell.
A foundation haunted by Gothic
Hill House seems to have a Gothic foundation. It resembles a haunted castle, and as such it is
rare. As we learn from Jackson’s story, a real twentieth-century haunted house is difficult to
find for Dr. Montague, the anthropologist who initiates the investigation.8 Anachronistic in its
essence, the haunted house, according to Fred Botting, ‘signalled the spatial and temporal
8
Ghost hunting was, as we read in the novel, not really something of modern times anymore: ‘Perhaps the
leisurely ways of Victorian life lent themselves more agreeably to the devices of psychic investigation, or
perhaps the painstaking documentation of phenomena has largely gone out as a means of determining actuality’
(Jackson 1987: 4).
3
separation of the past and its values from those of the present’.9 Still, this somewhat outdated,
but major topos of Gothic plots continues to haunt our imagination: ‘Gothic narratives never
escaped the concerns of their own times, despite the heavy historical trappings. In later
fiction, the castle gradually gave way to the old house: as both building and family line, it
became the site where fears and anxieties returned in the present’.10 Despite the fact that
Gothic proliferated mostly in novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century11,
Botting sees it as a diachronic writing of excess and transgression that even in our
increasingly secularized society, still counters modernity with its terrible tales about the
supernatural, human evil and mental disintegration.12 Now, The haunting of Hill House and its
adaptations are very aware about their inclusion of this commonplace and explicitly point out
the house’s anachronistic nature. Its new ‘inhabitants’, except perhaps for Nell, only come to
the house to conduct an experiment (in the first film, to study the paranormal, in the second,
to study insomnia), not to actually live there, because they know the place might be haunted.
This self-referential story is really a ‘knowing’ strategy of that modern Gothic sensibility that,
according to Julian Wolfreys, keeps popping up…
…as it dies or appears to be decaying. It starts to be celebrated or perhaps fed upon, by criticism for
example, or else it feeds upon itself adopting a knowingly self-referential manner. What we observe
therefore is that a spectralization of the Gothic takes place; that this phantomization is always already at
work within the very identity of the form.13
This phantomization, or perhaps vampirism of its own Gothic base accords with Hill House’s
status as a heterotopia. This is an ‘other place’ prominent in classical Gothic fiction, according to Botting, and yet its meanings are multiple and ambivalent. This kind of place has both
utopian and dystopian, real and unreal qualities. Heterotopias can be institutions but also
places of refuge.14 It is in these contradictions where one can find how this house appeals to
Nell in the first place. What both the novel and the ‘63 film are performing are stories within
the ‘real’ story of the lonely and bored Eleanor, who is a subject of psychic investigation in
what might just be some sort of asylum; there is a certain Gothic romance that agrees with the
blissful domestic fantasies of Nell. This romance is a mirror-text (Bal) that resembles but also
contrasts with reality. What Nell dreams to find in Hill House is a home, even if, or exactly
because she is running away from her own (pictures 1 & 2). Of course, this House will
9
Botting 1996: 2.
Botting 1996: 2/3.
11
Wolfreys 2002: 8.
12
Botting 1996: 1.
13
Wolfreys 2002: 8/9.
14
Botting 1993: 253-255.
10
4
become like a nightmare. Here Nell is confronted with its horrible history, another one of the
many stories she is receptive to. The modern Nell, on the other hand, is only after earning
some quick money and having a place to stay. The Gothic background story of the novel and
‘63 film moves to the foreground as the main event in the latest adaptation, and becomes
reality for this Nell.
Pictures 1&2: Mind mapping Nell through signposts (1963)
The house of the earliest film is also heterotopic in allowing, housing different
readings for its strange phenomena, which partly accounts for the divergent storylines of the
adaptations. Are there actual ghosts (as in the later film) or is it more complicated? Regarding
the novel, the balance between a Gothic sensibility and simultaneous self-awareness of its
fictionality explains how screen writer Nelson Gidding (of the earliest film) felt that behind
the novel’s stock Gothic ‘ingredients’ was the real story of a heroine confined in a private
sanatorium.15 Shirley Jackson, however, rejected this idea, and apparently did not give them
her ‘true’ meaning explicitly, so that Gidding and Wise stuck to a ‘no-holds-barred, honest-toGod ghost story’.16 Yet by trying to remain faithful to the ambiguity of the book the makers
kept its possibility of explaining these supernatural phenomena in several ways, and also kept
the novel’s sometimes ironic distance towards its typical Gothic elements (unlike the later
adaptation, which takes up the house’s history as its main story line). Wise’s particular
approach to literary film adaptation has always been to put ‘the spirit of each story first and
15
Gidding quoted in Leemann 1995: xii.
Gidding quoted in Leemann 1995: xiii.
Wise, in fact, selected the story for adaptation as an homage to his one-time mentor Val Lewton, the
influential RKO producer of several atmospheric, noir horror films of the forties, including Wise’s own The
body snatcher (1945) (Schneider 2002: 168).
Whether or not Gidding and Wise intended the story to have an institutional psychiatric subtext, the
label ‘ghost story’ does not mean that the occurrence of ghosts could not be attributable to the psychological
instability of the people in the house. Jackson’s inspiration for the story was an actual nineteenth-century psychic
experiment in a ‘haunted house’: ‘[The investigators] thought they were being terribly scientific and proving all
kinds of things, and yet the story that kept coming through their dry reports was not at all the story of a haunted
house, it was the story of several earnest, I believe misguided, certainly determined people, with their differing
motivations and backgrounds’ (Jackson quoted in Friedman 1975: 121).
16
5
[his] own approach second’, resulting in an oeuvre of very different films.17 Wise, indeed not
really known as an auteur but as a director of various genre films18, apparently saw himself as
some kind of medium to the novel’s and the author’s ‘spirit’.
In this characterisation one recognizes the classic fidelity approach to literary film
adaptation, and, more specifically, the ‘psychic concept of adaptation’, which Kamilla Elliott
describes in her article ‘Literary film adaptation and the form/content dilemma’. This concept,
the most widespread in adaptation criticism, holds that the form of the work can change,
whereas its supposed spirit can remain constant’.19 As such, the first film and its makers are
haunted by the ‘essence’ of the book.20 There are other concepts of adaptation by body and
soul analogies, which are particularly appropriate in this case study, because the space of Hill
House is constantly described in both mental and bodily metaphors. The concepts include the
ventriloquist, the genetic, the de(re)composing, the incarnational and the trumping concept.
Although Elliott critically illustrates these concepts as they appear in adaptation debates, this
textual haunting by a so-called ‘spirit’ is also fruitful because, besides the fact that a lot of
what has been written on Jackson can be applied here as well (for instance Darryl Hattenhauer
and other Jackson scholars), it relates to Wise’s Haunting’s success as an adaptation, in its
own unique ways. The second adaptation, on the other hand, is more like a de(re)composition
of the novel in its supposed ‘infidelities’ to this text, yet at the same time it – ventriloqually –
speaks a new messages through the novel’s signs.
As I suggested earlier, both films also have things in common with the genre of
Doane’s ‘paranoid woman’s film’. The rise of this type of film is a sign of how the Gothic
sensibility has mingled with other forms of popular culture. Being the filmic counterpart and
predecessor of the cheap Gothic paperbacks of the fifties about fair maidens and demon
lovers, the films were at the same time hybridised with a filmic genre, combining ‘the female
agency, the melodrama and homeliness of the woman’s film with the sinister traits of the
Gothic novel’.21 The study of the woman’s film (a type of film made for a female audience,
depicting the experience of a female protagonist)22 was a hot topic in the eighties, conducted
by Diane Waldman (1981), Andrea Walsh (1983), Christine Gledhill (1987, ed.), Mary Ann
Doane (1987) and Lucy Fischer (1989) amongst others. With the exception of Fischer, they
17
Wise quoted in Tibbetts 2005: 7.
For instance horror: The body snatcher (1945), musicals: The West Side story (1961), The sound of music
(1965) and science-fiction: The day the earth stood still (1951) and The Andromeda strain (1971).
19
Elliott 2004: 223.
20
Elliott 2004: 223.
21
Doane 1987: 124-125.
22
Doane 1987: 124.
18
6
all focus on films of the 1940s. No wonder it is somewhat of a closed subject twenty years
later, although the topic has been put back on the map by, for example, Maria Tatar (2004)
who studied this corpus of films in her work on the Bluebeard tale, Secrets beyond the door.23
She does not include both Hauntings, however.
Even if the woman’s film was at the height of its popularity in the 1940s, and the more
specific popularity of the paranoid films was symptomatic for its then prevalent culture of
distrust against men (returning from World War II to their newly employed, money-making
wives)24, the paranoid woman’s film is an already hybridized form not necessarily bound to a
specific period: its themes and mechanisms can be found in later texts as well. Recognizing
them in the Haunting adaptations (films not specifically targeted at a female audience),
reveals much about the mystery of Eleanor, and her modern transformation in the 1999 film.
The typical story of the paranoid woman’s film is about a (semi-)orphaned young bride who
moves into a frightening mansion. Confronted with the traces of her predecessor, who died for
mysterious reasons, she starts to think that she might be watched (the most typical symptom
of paranoia) or under persecution of some sort25, ultimately leading to the thought that her
new husband wants to kill her (for instance Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca).26. Whereas the
latest adaptation picks up on the murderous husband theme, The haunting ‘63 has the threat of
murder transformed into a more abstract entity - a ‘murderous’ house - and also adds the
threat of supernatural forces.
What is important in Doane (as I interpret her article) is not to ultimately label a
female character as paranoid or delusional, but rather recognize a paranoid, ambivalent
structure in the cycle of films (which will be discussed extensively):
(1) The foregrounding of epistemology in relation to paranoid speculation and the systematicity of the
delusion; (2) a destabilization of the oppositions between internal and external, subject and object; (3)
the foreclosure of the paternal signifier [the Law of the Father which normally allows the child to enter
the Symbolical Order without problems, and become separate from the mother, FA] and corresponding
fusion with the maternal; (4) the mobilization of the auditory and the visual as the two most important
material registers of the paranoid delusion.27
Without intending to pathologize The haunting’s heroine, I find this structure very useful in
studying the ambivalence of Nell’s observations and sentiments in the house. Although the
23
Very recently Helen Hanson’s Hollywood heroines: Women in film noir and the female Gothic film (2007)
appeared, in which she takes a critical look at the work done in the eighties and also discusses some recent
‘female Gothic’ films such as What lies beneath (2000). As relevant as this work may be, my own study was in
its concluding stages when I got it, so I have unfortunately not been able to incorporate Hanson’s findings into
my thesis.
24
Walsh 1984: 168.
25
Doane 1987: 126.
26
Rebecca. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Selznick IP, 1940.
27
Doane 1987: 134.
7
‘foregrounding of epistemology’ is relevant in both films (since the whole point is to
investigate inexplicable phenomena), there is no stress on ‘knowing for sure’ in the first film,
but the other three elements are overtly present in it, as I will demonstrate. In the ‘99
adaptation, it is almost the other way around: the verification of the observations is very
important, but the other elements are not, which correlates with the straightforward story line
and its detective-like protagonist. Doane’s model also offers several characteristic examples
of cinema’s particularly effective, medium-specific mechanisms - the auditory and the visual to convey the paranoid experience. Yet does this still hold in the later film where the ghosts
become visible?
The breakdown of clear binary oppositions such as subject and object relations, inside
and outside, is caused by the experience of das Unheimliche (which is, even more than ‘the
unhomely’ best translated as the uncanny). It was familiarized mostly through Freud’s famous
essay of the same name (1919). He has explained how both on a cultural and an individual
level primitive notions once familiar return in the present, which then seem scary and strange.
There is a wide variety of things that strike us as uncanny which we shall also see in the
themes and mechanisms of the first film as well, such as animated objects, telepathy,
ventriloquism, involuntary repetition (although they all originate from the three concepts of
castration, Doppelgänger, the motif of repetition and the omnipotence of thoughts, as Samuel
Weber has pointed out).28 In the paranoid woman’s film, the most important setting – the
house – is essentially unheimlich.29 Freud began his essay by giving an etymology of this
word, that contradicts and reaffirms itself at the same time; the meaning of heimlich (homely,
inside, safe, familiar), gradually shifted to its opposite of ‘hidden’, ‘secretive’ etcetera; thus,
unheimlich is not really its antonym. This means that the binary opposition between inside
and outside, safe and unsafe breaks down.30 The homeliest place has become a site of horrors.
Whereas in the first film the ‘becoming homely’ is related to the involuntary return of Nell’s
repressed feelings in the various dwellings, in the second it is about actively uncovering dark
secrets in a hidden room.
Approach
In the first two chapters, the focus is on the first Haunting adaptation. The third, final - and
shorter - chapter is about the later film. The first chapter, ‘The house is calling me’, deals
28
Weber 2000: 210.
Doane 1987: 139.
30
Freud 1975: 226.
29
8
with narration and the function of the voice-over (particularly that of Nell) in the film’s
narration. In the paranoid woman’s film in general and the ‘63 film in particular, the voiceover (and its interaction with the image) is a major auditory mechanism to convey the
experience of paranoia; or in any case, the feeling that the house has its eye on Nell. One
question is whether the voice-over gives us the same kind of interiority of Nell’s psyche (the
feeling of being inside her head) that the book provides through its uncanny, ‘telepathic’
narration. Another issue is to what extent Nell has her own autonomous and authorative voice
(-over). Does it make her marginal, or on the contrary, omnipotent? In order to answer these
questions I will first illustrate Mieke Bal’s concepts of narration through the opening of the
novel and address the uncanny, medium-specific narratological differences between novel and
film. I will then identify, through the theories of Michel Chion and Kaja Silverman, the
disembodied voices in the film such as the (male) acousmêtre, and contrast this powerful male
voice with Nell’s interior, female voice.
Then, in ‘Space, distortion and the surface’ the focus shifts from the space inside
Nell’s head, as it were, to the space of Hill House. How is the distorted house, so extravagantly described in the book, audio-visualized in this film, and what does it really incarnate?
Supposedly functioning as a mirror (the ultimate heterotopia) to the mind of Hugh Crain, the
man who built it, the house also seems to have a logic of its own. An important aspect of the
building is the surface. Heavily decorated and patterned, the surfaces (walls, tapestries) mess
with people’s minds, and reflect the mind of the maker, but they also act as projection screens
for Nell’s anxieties. Projections appear both through touch, sight and sound, although sound
in particular, as a sonorous envelope (Silverman, Doane, Chion) is used effectively to capture
the proximity between Nell and mother, inside and outside. The walls themselves also
become enveloping; even skin-like, as if the house is a body itself. For this reason haptic
visuality, theorized by Laura Marks, is the right approach to this house, because it entails a
pre-Oedipal mode of looking which is more like eyes grazing over the surface than clearly
seeing something. Marks also relates haptic imagery to the Deleuzian affection image. Some
of the most terrifying effects and affects in the film stem from the use of affection images, for
instance the fear of being watched by the building. It is about seeing things that are not really
there, and hearing sounds of unknown sources.
Finally, in ‘Bluebeard revisited’ I move to the 1999 adaptation. The question rises to
what degree this Haunting is really different from the novel and earlier film, but also how it
can possibly add new meaning to the narrative. It digs up and revitalises a story line that
seemed quite irrelevant in the previous texts. The importance of this story line affects the
9
characterization of the heroine and what constitutes the haunting. The new Eleanor, instead of
turning inside her disturbed self, faces the outside world, and like Bluebeard’s new bride,
finds what is hidden in the house; moreover; she solves all the problems. The focus on this
chapter shall therefore be on how the film ultimately turns away from the paranoid woman’s
structure towards the Bluebeard plot, as defined by Maria Tatar and others. This plot is of
course prominent in many Gothic stories and the paranoid woman’s film, yet it differs in
some crucial aspects. Nell is now a woman who knows what she is afraid of. Her final
incorporation into the house is a logical end to her heroic, saintly and ultimately more
traditional characterization (picture 3); it is no longer a desperate and uncanny outcome of
events. The makers of this film have sought to overcome das Unheimliche and instead find a
way for Eleanor to have a clear purpose in the house, and to let her be part of a traditional
home as the peaceful site of family.
Picture 3: Nell, embracing the family (1999)
10
‘THE HOUSE IS CALLING ME’: INTERIORITY, VOICE AND NARRATION
The uncanny effect (introduction)
-
Did you say something?
-
I heard a voice.
-
In your head?
-
No, in yours.31
Nicholas Royle, the author of this piece (a whole chapter in his experimental study The
uncanny!), is confident enough that the uncanny effect of this hypothetical and spooky little
conversation will speak for itself. The effect stems from the second speaker’s (or thinker’s?)
ability of having some kind of access to the other’s mind, and equally, that this first person
experiences the voice inside his or her head as spoken by someone else. A similar thing
happens in The haunting of Hill House and The haunting (1963). Through their narration, one
can read Nell’s thoughts, as it were, and hear the voice in her head – a voice that sometimes
does not seem to belong to her and displays her fragmented subjectivity. It is this ‘interiority’,
that is, perceiving everything from Nell’s perspective and sharing all her feelings and
thoughts, that confuses one about whether all the strange phenomena are really happening or
not. Thus the ‘objective’ outside world strangely merges with her subjective experience.
Despite the allusion in the title to a kind of dialogue with a personified house, the voice of the
house is never heard. On the contrary, this is about Nell’s own voice-over that the
reader/spectator must accept as a guide to her growing attachment to the house and the
inexplicable things happening there.
Recalling Doane’s structure of the paranoid woman’s film, the two elements that are
important here are the ‘destabilization of the oppositions between internal and external,
subject and object’ and ‘the mobilization of the auditory and the visual as the two most
important material registers of the paranoid delusion’.32 Doane does not really go into the fact
that most of the heroine’s ‘delusions’ are proven right at the end, which is why I think that it
is more about the ambivalent paranoid structure in these films, where the heroine’s
observations, up to a certain point, cannot be verified, but also cannot quite be denied, either.
31
Royle 2003: 106.
Doane 1987: 134.
The full quote:
‘The aspects delineated above which seem most relevant to the paranoid structure of the films are: (1) The
foregrounding of epistemology in relation to paranoid speculation and the systematicity of the delusion; (2) a
destabilization of the oppositions between internal and external, subject and object; (3) the foreclosure of the
paternal signifier and corresponding fusion with the maternal; (4) the mobilization of the auditory and the visual
as the two most important material registers of the paranoid delusion.’
32
11
In both the novel and the film the lines between objectivity and subjectivity, and inside and
outside uncannily blur, but this happens in different, medium-specific ways, because the
film’s literalization of the voice (the frequent use of the voice-over) is obviously not the same
as narration in a novel. Or have these uncanny ways perhaps become normal in these media?
Doane observes that ‘the novelistic mode of narration [...] provides an access to interiority
which is lacking in the classical cinema’.33 In cinema, subjectivity is more difficult to localize,
because interiority is ‘by definition invisible’.34 It is for this reason that the voice-over is
really prominent in the paranoid woman’s films, a genre where the woman’s ‘inner world’ is a
central topic.35 However, the women’s voice is usually marginalized, embodied and not very
powerful in the classical Hollywood film, unlike the male voice, especially in its disembodied
form. Yet the film as an adaptation is, as it were, haunted by Nell’s psyche, trying to express
it as fully as possible. Essentially, I will argue that Eleanor’s voice-over, an uncanny medium
to her soul, will actually transcend its interior status and ultimately tie her to the house.
First, in ‘Suspended in space and time’ I will need to explain the narrative function
of the voice-over, and discuss some types and uncanny qualities of the disembodied voice (as
occurring in the film), like the powerful acousmêtre who is heard but not seen. Then, in
‘Voice of woman’, I will study Nell’s own voice-over and its correlation with and
transcending of her character. In both parts the theories of Chion and Silverman, and the
theory of the uncanny are important.
Suspended in space and time
There is a space- and timeless quality to Hill House in general, as well as to the acousmatic,
narrative voice that introduces the house in the film. Yet before discussing this, first it is
necessary to outline some basic concepts of the narratologist Mieke Bal, and the very
effective microcosmic opening of the novel, by which the concepts can be illustrated. Bal
makes several structural distinctions in her model:
A narrative text is a text in which an agent relates a story in a particular medium […]. A story is a
fabula that is presented in a certain manner. A fabula is a series of logically and chronologically related
events that are caused or experienced by actors. An event is the transition from one state to another
state. Actors are agents that perform actions. They are not necessarily human. To act is defined here as
to cause or to experience an event.36
33
Doane 1987: 126.
Doane 1987: 144.
35
Doane 1987: 126.
36
Bal 2004: 5.
For ‘text’, I actually prefer Seymour Chatman’s concept over Bal’s (hers is ‘a finite, structured whole composed
of language signs’, 5) because it is not always clear whether she sees a film as a text, too (for instance on page
34
12
What is clear in this concise definition (the isolation of which, of course, does not really do
justice to the complexities of Bal’s theory) is that the notions of ‘fabula’ and ‘actor’ demand a
certain causality - something that is not always easy to identify in The haunting. The
questions of what exactly causes the strange things at Hill House and why they occur are
never resolved. Also, the house’s actors mostly undergo the supernatural phenomena and are
often powerless to act, or act involuntarily (a topic which will come back later). The point,
however, is that these issues are a matter of interpretation; one can theorize about what or who
causes which event (the house itself for example), leading to different fabulas. There is not
just one. Bal’s concepts are not meant as exact measures, but as tools for interpretation.37
The very first paragraph of the novel, which Bernice Murphy calls ‘one of the most
elegantly atmospheric openings in all of modern American literature’38 is very effective in
introducing some essential themes and setting up expectations about all these different
elements. Apart from actors and events, the fabula consists of ‘time’ and ‘locations’. Like the
actors, locations have characteristic traits, especially Hill House:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks
and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills,
holding darkness within; it had stood so 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.39
The detailed description of Hill House makes this location so highly personalized that one
would expect it to be an actor of some sort, or rather a character (‘actor’ is a structural term;
‘character’ is its semantic equivalent).40 This must be exactly the point. The ‘non sane’ Hill
House is not just some location. Apparently the sane creature needs the non-sane, dark
environment in order to dream, and deal with reality, so that it seems only logical that some
dreamer will be drawn to and absorbed in this strange house. Even before the protagonist is
introduced, this house is already characterized: in its persistent solidness it is a legitimate,
indestructible entity in its own right.
161). Chatman’s ‘text’ refers to ‘any communication that temporally controls its reception by the audience’ such
as a novel, which has a first page, and a film, which has a first scene. A painting - which does not ‘tell’ the
spectator what to look at first and for how long, is not a text by his definition (Chatman 1990: 7). What makes
the text narrative is that it has an internal time sequence; time passes in the plot as well and not just in the
reading process (9).
37
Bal 2004: 10.
38
Murphy 2005: 10.
39
Jackson 1987: 5.
40
Bal 2004: 5.
13
If writing a novel, according to Henry James, is like building a house of fiction41, then
Jackson sets up hers with powerful and crafty, yet deliberately mystifying sentences. Hill
House is quite unique in its ambivalent essence. On the one hand, it seems unreal. This
building is standing outside of normal reality as a fantasy space for dreamers. It is also
animated and probably haunted (or not/not yet? In the last phrase, does one focus on
‘whatever walked there’, meaning the presence of some strange entity, or rather on the fact
that ‘it walked alone’ and that there really was nothing else?). On the other hand, the house is
part of that ‘absolute reality’, being rooted in the earth with its solid wood and stone walls. Its
eighty years are not included in the enfolding story; they precede it in the form of a ‘minisummary’ in which no detailed information is given about what exactly took place in those
years.42 And yet this period is part of the fabula, relevant not as an event, after all, nothing
really changes, but as a state, stressing the powerful continuity of the house. As it keeps
standing there, the house is anchored in time, possibly outliving mortals (and for an American
house, 80 years is a respectable old age).43 Though not exactly ruinous, the house’s
continuing existence and solidity somehow seem to strengthen it as an all-too familiar, yet
also particular topos.
The power of this opening also has a lot to do with how it is presented as a common
fact by an ‘invisible’ narrator, as it were. Bal distinguishes between an external narrator (nondiegetic), as in The haunting, and a character narrator (diegetic).44 Despite the non-diegetic
status of the narrator, events are always narrated from a certain perspective; they are always
focalized. Focalization refers to ‘the relation between the vision and that which is “seen”,
41
Chandler 1991: 2.
Bal 2004: 105.
Later on in the text, the eighty years are included in the story, when Dr. Montague tells the group what happened
to the house in the past.
43
Of course, I make the assumption that the story takes place in America, although the location is never
specified in the book. The short stories and novels of Shirley Jackson, who moved from San Francisco to New
York at a young age, usually take place in small New England towns.
In this case, before writing her novel, Jackson was fascinated by a hideous and evil-looking building in
New York and found, in the newspapers, a similar house in a California town. Upon asking her mother in
California, she found out that this particular house had been built by her great-grandfather (!) (Friedman 1975:
121). Jackson’s own background is almost Usher-esque in its association between family and a particular house.
In the film, there is explicit reference to the mansion being located in New England (even though the
actual house used was the centuries-old Ettington Hall near Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire, England (DVD
audio commentary). The fact that for budgetary reasons the film was made in England with a largely British
crew and cast (Schneider 2002: 168), for instance Richard Johnson (Dr. Markway) and Claire Bloom
(Theodora), adds even more to the old-style Gothic atmosphere of the film.
44
Bal 2004: 19-21.
With this model, Bal provides alternatives for the classical distinction between the ‘omniscient’ third-person and
the ‘restricted’ first-person narrator. After all, there is always an ‘I’ narrating. This is not to say that the classical
first-person narrator is the same as a character narrator, because even if the narrator explicitly speaks in the Iform, he or she may not be involved in the story.
42
14
perceived’.45 Most of the story will be told from the perspective of Nell, but because no real
character has been introduced yet, the reader is willing to take this opening as somehow nonfocalized, thus entering that shady area between what is objective and subjective. In the novel
Jackson has employed, according to Darryl Hattenhauer, ‘a radically unreliable narrative point
of view by focalizing through a delusional character’46, although of course the narration is
psychologically very reliable in making the readers experience Eleanor’s growing anxiety,
and besides, calling her delusional is already opting for a single reading out of various
possible others.
The narrator then moves along to introduce the experiment taking place there, and its
participants, most of all Eleanor (Nell) Vance. Nell is characterized as a lonely, unhappy and
somewhat spiteful individual, who fantasizes about escaping her dull life and the family she
hates. Nell has no hobbies or a family of her own, as she was always confined to the home in
order to take care of her ungrateful, bedridden invalid mother. It is suggested that she might
have ignored her mother calling for help, so that the old woman died. Nell has never really
made an entrance in the outside world, which makes her very shy and self-conscious. Nell
also hates her selfish sister, whose family life does not really appeal to her. Then the
opportunity of Hill House comes along in the form of an invitation for the experiment. A
latent and long-time fantasy of hers becomes manifest as the narrator is still ‘hovering over
her head’, as it were:
During the whole underside of her life, ever since her first memory, Eleanor had been waiting for
something like Hill House. Caring for her mother, lifting a cross old lady from her chair to her bed,
setting out endless little trays of soup and oatmeal, steeling herself to the filthy laundry, Eleanor had
held fast to the belief that someday something would happen.47
By revealing this wishful thinking, this passage demonstrates just how much ‘access’ the
narrator has to Eleanor’s mind. Of course this strategy of ‘being inside her head’ is not quite
unique, because (unlike cinema) the novel can be considered ‘an inherently uncanny medium’
since it is ‘the only literary genre, as well as the only kind of narrative, in which the unspoken
thoughts, feelings, perceptions of a person other than the speaker are portrayed’ (Dorrit Cohn
in Transparent minds).48 As such, things (thoughts) that normally remain hidden for other
subjects uncannily come to light, like the uncanny experience of telepathy – the transfer of
thoughts from one person to the other.49 Nicholas Royle consequentially proposes a logic of
45
Bal 2004: 142.
Hattenhauer 2003: 155.
47
Jackson 1987: 7/8.
48
Cohn 1978: 7.
49
Freud 1975: 225.
46
15
telepathy for narration (instead of ‘omniscient’ narration), in which the narrator can
sometimes read the character’s mind directly. And sometimes, it is not even clear whether we
are looking from Nell’s point of view or not, or that there is, perhaps, double focalization, as
the narrator seems to mix ‘general facts’ with Nell’s observations.50
Doane states in regard to literary narration:
The device of the interior monologue as well as the ability to construct a clear distinction between the
first person and the third person make it possible for novelistic narration to establish relatively
unambiguous binary oppositions between subjectivity and objectivity, the internal and the external.51
Indeed, the possibility exists, but it is not a given fact that these binary oppositions are easily
sustainable in the novel, as we saw. This medium-specific component is not aided by the fact
that Jackson is famous for her almost postmodern forms and themes, such as the depiction of
fragmented subjectivity, disunified characterization and an ‘illegible narrative point of
view’.52 Doane is right, however, in suggesting that there is, of course, not a direct filmic
equivalent for this kind of psychological subtlety on a lexical level, because the cinematic text
consists of various medium-specific components. A voice-over other than just the main
character’s (whether diegetic or non-diegetic, speaking retrospectively or not) could, to a
certain extent reveal what goes on inside Nell, but there is no such commentator in this film.
(Instead, it is Nell herself who confides to Dr. Markway [Dr. Montague in the novel] at
breakfast: ‘I knew someday, something truly extraordinary would happen. Something like
Hill House’). The interiority effect is not present in cases like these.
Also, voice-overs can only form part of the filmic narration. Since their use is always
an artistic choice, film as such is not inherently uncanny in the sense of having full access to a
character’s mind. Brian Henderson argues that if there is voice-over narration in a film, it is
used somewhat creatively: ‘It is a narrative convenience used and dropped by the film to suit
its purposes [according to no principle but expediency]. […]. If a character’s voice is dropped,
50
For example in the following passage, it is clear to the reader that Nell thinks the house is ‘vile’. However, the
next observation, which is the beginning of a new chapter, is not explicitly ‘thought’ by Nell; rather it seems like
some kind of general wisdom. The passage: ‘She turned her car onto the last stretch of straight drive leading her
directly, face to face, to Hill House and, moving without thought, pressed her foot on the brake to stall the car
and sat, staring.
The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is
vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.
[New chapter]
No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house.
[…] Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.
I should have turned back at the gate, Eleanor thought’ (Jackson 1984: 32-34).
51
Doane 1987: 126.
52
Hattenhauer 2003: 2.
16
it is usually in favour of another character’s voice’.53 It is significant in this respect that the
first voice-over at the beginning of the film is not Nell’s but a male narrator’s voice, which,
even if it is not to return later, opens the text from a dominant, higher level. As such it
contrasts with the ‘interiority’ and subjectivity of the female voice that I will discuss later on.
With the establishing shot of Hill House (in a dark silhouette, yet unrevealed, picture 4)
showing, a determined voice says:
An evil old house, the kind some people call haunted, is like an undiscovered country waiting to be
explored. Hill House had stood for ninety years, and might stand for ninety more. Silence lay steadily
against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone…
It is a similar kind of story opening as the book, and
the notion of a sort of ‘terra incognita’ - again the
inviting nature of the house - is intriguing. The voice
sounds powerful and authorative; it is a voice that
Picture 4: ‘Whatever walked there...’
seems ‘to know’. Because the man who speaks is not
visible, and because after these lines he is silent for a considerable time, he comes close to
being the extra-diegetic, non-character narrator from the literary text. At the same time, the
comment also has the added value that disembodied voices have in cinema. The disembodied
voice, unlike normal sound, already has presence, because it obviously originates from the
agency of a human being, an animate subject.54 For this reason, Michel Chion’s acousmêtre, a
subject/voice that is everywhere, all-seeing, omniscient and omnipotent, is such a powerful
being, and, even more so, because this acousmatic voice cannot be visually identified with a
body.55 The ‘knowing’ voice, that is heard while seeing the images hovers, as it were, over the
dark silhouette of Hill House, not really tied to a specific moment or place. It is somehow
‘wandering along the surface, at once inside and outside, seeking a place to settle’56 and
remains to be embodied.
Disembodied (and acousmatic) voices frequently strike us as uncanny. They are
connected to such uncanny themes like telepathy or the blurring between the human and the
mechanical.57 But how are all these themes related? The problem of Freud’s essay on das
Unheimliche, as Samuel Weber has demonstrated, is that it is for a large part a Musterung (an
53
Henderson 1999: 72.
Connor 2000: 24.
55
Connor 2000: 24.
56
Chion 1999: 23.
57
For instance, the Mystery Man on the phone in Lost highway (Dir. David Lynch. October Films: 1997), who
can somehow tell what his interlocutor is thinking, or as an example of a humanized, talking computer, HAL in
2001: A space odyssey (Dir. Stanley Kubrick. MGM: 1968).
54
17
assemblage) of examples of the experience of the uncanny, without really providing its
structure. Weber recognized castration anxiety as paradigmatic for all other forms of anxiety
in Freud’s theories - and thus its importance in producing the experience of the uncanny which allowed him to work out a structure of the uncanny.58 Weber employs an abstract and
complex notion of castration anxiety, which is essentially a discovering of absence (originally
of the maternal phallus). This negative perception forms a threat to the child’s narcissistic
notion of completeness. ‘The eyes are robbed of the desired phenomena’; of a wish to
properly see, resulting in a ‘crisis of phenomenality’.59 Weber: ‘Castration can never be
looked at, en face, for it is always off to the side, off-side [abseits], like the uncanny itself’.60
What is perceived is unreliable. With disembodied voices, there is again a crisis of
phenomenality, since the eyes cannot complete the wholeness of sound and image. Like Rick
Altman says: ‘Sound’s ability to be heard around a corner makes it the ideal method of
introducing the invisible, the mysterious, the supernatural (given that image = visible =
real)’.61 We cannot exactly see the ‘castration’ itself,62 but we do perceive the effect of the
split between sound and image, confronted with the abseits, around-the-corner uncanniness of
the sound, until it is reunited with its visual source: the human subject.
After this digression, let us return to the initial voice-over. The acousmatic voice of the
opening starts to sound less threatening after the credits roll. It says ‘Scandal, murder,
insanity, suicide. The history of Hill House was ideal. It had everything I wanted’. Then it
starts to relate this history, adopting a more informative function. The voice speaks about a
house ‘born bad’, that from the beginning somehow caused the wives of Hugh Crain (the
Picture
Abigailtonext
coffin
Picture
second
wife after
fall his death
master5:ofCrain
the and
house),
dieto the
mysterious
deaths,
and6: itThetells
about
how her
after
master of the house, picture 5), to die mysteriously (picture 6), and it tells about how after his
58
Weber 2000: 214.
Weber 2000: 222.
Of course, this allows Weber to relate this structure to that most uncanny anxiety of losing the eyes, in his own
reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann. The uncanny here also turns up when the protagonist Nathanael,
standing on a balcony, cannot clearly see the approaching cause of dread, Dr. Coppelius, because his view is
blocked by his fiancée, Clara. He then flings himself off the balcony.
60
Weber 2000: 224.
61
Altman 1980: 74.
62
Weber 2000: 214.
59
18
death his daughter Abigail grew old there until she, too, passed away. By departing from the
novel’s build-up which cuts straight to the main characters, the voice introduces a fabula (‘the
history of Hill House follows a classic pattern’) that later on will turn out to be embedded in
the ‘real’ fabula. It is accompanied by images of these events, mostly shot in strange angles
and canted frames that establish Hill House as a disturbed place from early on. The voice here
is what Chion calls a ‘picture presenter’, a kind of parental voice that is personally involved in
the events it presents.63 The man thus has a part in the story-world. Chion also identifies an
intimate kind of cinematic ‘I-voice’ that also seems to apply to this particular voice, as it later
draws the attention to itself. It both appeals to an audience and itself. This I-voice is not just
equivalent to the literary ‘I-voice’, because it needs to be both closely miked and without
reverberation. It cannot always be bound to a particular moment, because when an I-voice
starts telling a story, it is as if the present time is momentarily suspended.64 At this point, the
present time has not even been established yet, and the voice is at some kind of overarching
narrative level.
The storyteller concludes the history with the old Ms. Crain’s page companion, who
hanged herself at the top of the spiral staircase; the voice finally speaks of the house’s
inheritor Mrs. Sanderson, ‘who I very much wanted to see’. The spiral staircase then dissolves
into her face (picture 7). The voice ultimately loses its power as it turns out to be embodied by
a Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), who must have been explaining the same story to this Mrs.
Sanderson (Fay Compton, picture 8). He is an anacousmêtre now, a ‘speaking body’ that can
be ‘reassembled’ because the acousmatic voice can be identified to belong to his body65, and
vocally speaking, he is on a different level now: in the here and now.
Picture 7: Shift to the present tense
Picture 8: The acousmatic voice revealed
But was this final disembodied voice also uncanny? Is not the use of voice-over in
film so naturalized that there is not much of an uncanny effect (as much as the effect of a
telepathic narrator in a novel is weakened)? The scary and strange quality of the disembodied
voice is after all a lot less when it turns into a reassuring, informative voice. Apart from a
63
Chion 1999: 50.
Chion 1999: 50.
65
Chion 1999: 32.
64
19
different sound quality, it is useful to recognize two shifts between the threatening
acousmêtre-like voice and the informative voice. The first is in its ‘embodiedness’: the true
acousmêtre is essentially disembodied, whereas the more familiar voice-over, the I-voice/
picture presenter usually entails the promise of embodiment (the wholeness of sound and
image), which takes away a lot of the uncanny effect.
Another shift is in the motivation of the voice. In the case of the acousmêtre, his
specific powers are related to what Freud calls the omnipotence of thought, which is the
child’s - and primitive man’s - narcissistic over-valuation of his own mental powers (once
overcome, this same phenomenon strikes modern man as uncanny).66 The acousmatic voice
often gives commands, or possesses impossible knowledge (the acousmêtre here can only
claim the latter). Basically, he says: ‘I am invisible, so I am in control’, which creates anxiety
about where he is hiding. The picture-presenter, however, draws attention away from his
location to the story he is telling.67 Thus, the aforementioned anxiety is reduced. Of course,
this acousmatic voice of Dr. Markway’s, although omnipresent and not really bound to a
specific time, was really not prominent enough to demonstrate any special powers. Yet by its
shift to a different type of voice it allows us to consider the nature and functions of the voiceover and the workings of the uncanny in it, and, furthermore, demonstrating the greater
powers of this male voice. This double persona of the male voice who, for a moment, reaches
a sort of omniscience is essentially different from the female voice, which has a more
restricted, interior and embodied position, as we shall see now.
Sound of woman
It is difficult to think of any instance of a female acousmêtre in films, and indeed, Chion
acknowledges that this omnipresent type of voice is often male.68 Exactly why this voice is so
often masculine is something that Chion fails to explain - a bit of a flaw in his otherwise very
strong study. Is it too obvious to think that the acousmêtre is a powerful figure and that, in a
patriarchal society, this privileged voice must necessarily be the domain of male characters?
Naturally, Markway is a scientist, who is a natural figure of authority, even if he does not
really know any more than the others and the execution of his (anthropological?) research on
supernatural phenomena, is a bit ridiculous. Another related and plausible reason for the
66
Freud 1975: 240.
One might also add that the acousmêtre usually has a diegetic address: he addresses characters in the story,
whereas the picture presenter/I-voice has an extra-diegetic address: he addresses the spectators of the film. Since
my example of the acousmêtre is not the greatest, we cannot witness it here.
68
Chion 1999: 63. (He does so in the case of malevolent telephone voices).
67
20
prevalence of male acousmatic voices is that the acousmêtre has specific powers, evil powers,
so that the role is mostly taken by villainous characters (murderers, robbers, evil scientists and
hypnotists etcetera) who are usually men.
The acousmêtre, in my impression, has a composed voice; all his words carry
significant meaning, and perhaps the women’s voice in film, if authorative and purposefully
addressed at someone, is not so much verbally commanding but rather enchanting, associated
with melodiousness. Chion does, interestingly, relate the powerful effects of the acousmatic
voice to an ‘archaic, original stage’ - the first five months of childhood, when the infant only
hears, but does not understand, nor really sees the omnipresent parent. We later understand
that Chion is talking about the maternal voice, because ‘the greatest acousmêtre is […]
Mother’.69 Furthermore, he describes this original disembodied voice as a rather horrendous
umbilical web, so that upon hearing a disembodied voice later in life, the subject is uncannily
reminded of the separation from the mother.70 Extending this to Kaja Silverman might help
us further, for Chion is influenced by Lacan, but does not really push it further. In ‘The
fantasy of the maternal voice’ Kaja Silverman identifies many of such examples of ‘the
maternal voice as a blanket of sound’, both idealised (Doane and Guy Rosolato, a ‘sonorous
envelope’) and terrible, as in Chion.71 Yet despite this originally maternal voice, this is not at
all how it works in Hollywood cinema. Silverman:
It is astonishing that a cinematic device which thus carries within it the symbolic ‘trace’ of the mother
should have become the exclusive prerogative of the male voice within Hollywood film, while the
female voice not only is confined to the inside of the narrative, but is forced again and again into
diegetic ‘closets’ and ‘crevices. […] What is demanded from woman […] is involuntary sound, sound
that escapes her own understanding, testifying only to the artistry of a superior voice. The female voice
must be sequestered […] within the heart of the diegesis, so far from the site of the enunciation as to be
beyond articulation or meaning .72
This turning point in the authority of the female voice is based on the fact that the young man,
after growing up with his mother’s voice, only recognizes nonsense and child-like babble in
her voice once he himself has become part of the Symbolic Order (as psychoanalytic film
theory has it, and how classical Hollywood cinema often reflects it).73 Woman is traditionally
excluded from discursive authority, including the disembodied voice.74 When the male subject
is cinematically represented as a disembodied form (as an acousmêtre), he, on the other hand,
69
Chion 1999: 27.
Chion 1999: 61.
71
Doane, Rosolato and Chion quoted in Silverman 1988: 72.
72
Silverman 1988: 76-77.
73
Silverman 1988: 81.
74
Silverman 1984: 131.
70
21
is aligned with ‘transcendence, authorative knowledge, potency and the law – in short, with
the symbolic father’.75
Yet in The haunting the protagonist is a woman, who, being always attached to her
mother, only knows about her own world. After the acousmêtre, Nell’s voice is at a different
narrative level; her subjective and physical story is told by a voice inside her head. It is a
medium to her inner world. Nell’s voice-over is not here to give background information,
because it is really in the ‘here-and-now’. Though being the leading and, at one point, the only
voice-over, it is unstable. In the paranoid woman’s film the woman’s mental sanity is at stake;
as such ‘the voice-over is not infrequently subjected to a loss of unity, coherence and
consistency’76 and sometimes, ‘the female character is ultimately dispossessed of this signifier
of subjectivity as well’.77 To what extent does Nell have her own voice?
Nell (Julie Harris) is first heard after ‘stealing’ the family car as she drives off feeling
both guilty and excited (picture 9), a scene that (also visually) resembles the car sequence in
an earlier sixties horror classic, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (picture 10).78 What it has in
common with The haunting is not just its black-and-white photography, but also its featuring
one of the most notorious mansions (and mothers) in film history. But this film’s troubled
driver, Marion Crane, imagines the voices of others after they will discover her theft, and one
does not actually hear her own voice. She is more ‘in control’. After all, the pathological case
and main character in Psycho is not a woman, but a young man haunted by the ghost of his
Picture 9: Eleanor Vance in her car
Picture 10: Marion Crane in her car (Psycho)
mother.79 However, when Nell has read the route description out loud, it is her voice that
suddenly ‘says’ without her lips moving:
75
Silverman 1984: 134.
Doane 1987: 151.
77
Doane 1987: 150.
78
Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Shamley Productions, Paramount, 1960.
79
Of course the interiority of the female voice still holds in this film; one need only think of the voice of
‘Mother’, ventriloquized by Norman.
76
22
Oh I hope this is what I have been waiting for all my life. They probably never thought me capable of
taking the car. I never thought myself capable of taking the car. I’m a new person. Finally I’m doing
something for myself… I might just stop anywhere, and never leave again. Or I might drive on and on
until the wheels of the car are worn till nothing, and I’ve come at the end of the world. I wonder if all
homeless people feel that way…
Nell’s voice frequently mediates her inner conflict. On the one hand simply the fact of
running away from it all excites her, but on the other hand she also seems to have a
determination to reach this particular place, thinking: ‘At last I’m going some place where I’m
expected and where I’m given shelter. I shall never have to go back’. Nell is divided between
both the wish of being by herself and turning away from the nuclear family, so to speak, and
that of being welcomed in yet another household. As she moves past an elegant villa with
stone lions, she fantasizes about having exactly such a house for herself.
Although Nell has finally taken a step towards her happiness, she lets her fate depend
on the circumstances, being confident that she is somehow passively being led somewhere.
She is not exactly in touch with reality, as her voice-over demonstrates, although she seems
still a degree more mature than her dreamy, literary double (even for the simple reason that
the voice-over cannot exhaustively explain all the complexities going on inside her). The Nell
in the book is, in the words of Darryl Hattenhauer, a puer aeternus [sic] who escapes into
fairytales and fantasies of ‘adolescent romances’ and at the same time, ‘recuperates the
victimized heroines of eighteenth-century sentimental novels’.80 A castle is the ideal site to
live those fantasies. Yet ‘our’ Nell’s fantasies, too, revolve around the domestic experience,
the only thing she is familiar with. She does not really ‘belong’; not even so much because of
her supposed supernatural powers (for which Dr. Markway invites her to the house) but
simply because she is utterly lonely and does not know how to connect with others. What Hill
House has to offer for Nell is an adventurous experience of the home, and at the same time the
opportunity to escape the problem of not making it on her own in the outside world.
Despite driving in a picturesque and lovely landscape, Nell’s mind goes wandering.
The actress Julie Harris has a wide range of facial expressions that make her look at ease in
one moment, and very worrisome in only an instant later. This internal conflict is intensified
by music. Long shots of the surroundings, accompanied by a light, cheerful tune, are
contrasted with medium-close shots of the worrying Nell, in their turn accompanied by an
eerie tune that stresses her neurotic thoughts. Again there is this intimate I-voice, sounding
really close so that the hearer identifies with it, but it does not address anyone; not even
herself, really. These are just private thoughts, uncannily available to the spectator too. Thus
80
Hattenhauer 2003: 157.
23
here we have the telepathy effect, much more than during Markway’s I-voice that explicitly
narrated the story to us.
Chion’s other criterion for the I-voice, ‘dryness’, or absence of reverberation (so that
the voice cannot be specifically located), does not literally apply, interestingly enough. On the
contrary, this internal voice-over has a more hollow, deep and solemn quality than Nell’s
normal sound. So there is reverberation, but not from Nell’s actual environment, which
suggests a kind of space that is not there. Reverberated voices are less easy to identify with,
according to Chion; their quality becomes ‘embracing and complicit’, like autonomous object
voices.81 Nell’s voice-over is uncanny in this sense. It combines contradictory qualities in one
sound, being both intimately close-by and objectified, as if it is doubled and separated from
her as a subject. In this sense, the voice is not just a medium to Nell’s psyche but becomes the
sign of an uncanny voice: as a ‘hollow, disembodied voice’ it signifies/might signify mental
instability and uncanniness.82
As classical cinema dictates, the camera is pointed at the spot from where the sound is
supposedly coming83, which, according to Rick Altman, makes cinema a ventriloquist medium, because it masks the immediate sound source and covers up the film’s ‘image-sound
split’.84 A point of critique might be that in a literal ventriloquist act nothing is masked; apart
from the illusion – the ‘talking’ dummy – one normally also sees the ventriloquist, whose lips
are not moving. As a result, one becomes aware of the act’s construction. Our readiness to
accept this cinematic ventriloquism (by which we try to cast aside the uncanny split)
apparently still works to a certain degree when the sound is not visibly produced (after all,
Nell is not speaking). Although it is somewhat uncanny that the unity between body and
sound, or image and sound, is not entirely complete, Nell is recognized as being the source of
the sound. What is at work is always a confirmation of the sound through the image,
according to Altman: it is the sound hermeneutic, whereby ‘the sound asks where? and the
image responds here!’85 Thus one attributes the source of the sound to a kind of ‘mental
space’ inside Nell’s head. When the film’s spectators see nobody and only hear a voice, they
might feel addressed themselves, whereas now they understand it is herself she is talking to,
obviously.
81
Chion 1999: 52.
Barthes in Elliott 2004: 226.
83
Altman 1980: 71.
84
Altman 1980: 72.
85
Altman 1980: 74.
82
24
In these moments of private reflection, she is alone, or in any case, she is in close-up
with perhaps just a small figure on the background. Seeing someone directly next to her
would rather de-familiarize and expose the way the viewer has an uncanny access to these
private thoughts, whereas another character in the same room (a third party) would not.
Jumping ahead a bit, there is an exemplary scene that shows Nell on the foreground, her
‘thinking’ voice loudly expressing her thoughts, with Markway and Theo very softly
discussing something in the background (picture 11). Nell is worried about Markway’s wife,
who has come to visit and who, Nell thinks, might take her place in the house. Markway
leaves the room, and Theo (Claire Bloom), speaking inaudibly even though she is in hearing
distance, moves towards Nell. Suddenly, her voice is much louder and perfectly audible, and
Theo says ‘Nell! I’m talking to you’. Then, when she is still not responding: ‘Oh for peace’s
sake snap out of it!’ (picture 12). The intervention of Nell’s private moment leads us to realize
that although it may look as if the access to her thoughts is fully naturalized, it really relies on
an intimate relationship between us as viewers and her as a character.
Picture 11: Nell in her own world
Picture 12: ‘Nell! I’m talking to you’.
Only the clairvoyant character of Theo can read the thoughts of Nell; she tells her:
‘You wear your thoughts on your sleeve’ (a subtle pun stressing the confusion of things
turned inside out).86 Theo also hears the same voices that are calling out to Nell, whereas Dr.
Markway and Luke (Russ Tamblyn) do not. Hattenhauer suggests that Theo (who upon their
meeting hopes that she and Nell shall be ‘like sisters’), is perhaps some sort of double to
Eleanor; moreover, that she is also her ‘mirror opposite [who] expresses Eleanor’s repressed
feelings’. The assertive, sensuous and worldly Theo is perhaps the woman Nell would have
86
Especially in the novel there are many interesting examples where Theodora seems to read Eleanor’s thoughts
and reacts upon them, for example:
“I am going to get fat and lazy in Hill House,” Theodora went on. Her insistence on naming Hill House troubled
Eleanor. It’s as though she were saying it deliberately, Eleanor thought, telling the house she knows its name,
calling the house to tell it where we are; is it bravado? “Hill House, Hill House, Hill House,” Theodora said
softly, and smiled across at Eleanor’ (Jackson 1987: 123).
‘Eleanor turned and stared, and then saw the amusement on [Theodora’s] face and thought, She’s much braver
than I am. Unexpectedly – although it was later to become a familiar note, a recognizable attribute of what was
to mean “Theodora” in Eleanor’s mind – Theodora caught at Eleanor’s thought, and answered her. “Don’t be so
afraid all the time,” she said and reached out to touch Eleanor’s cheek with one finger’ (Jackson 1987: 50).
25
liked to become, had her life been different.87 (Through framing and dark/light contrasts, the
women really do look like mirror opposites, for instance during an argument (picture 13).
(Nell, who says she would rather be ‘poor and innocent’ than be like Theo, believes that she
herself is sane and the rest of the world is mad, thus making Theodora look like the
madwoman. This line of reasoning is not at all illogical in her view. Nell tells Theo that ‘the
world is full of inconsistencies… unnatural things, like you’, hinting at Theo’s sexual
preferences). Although Theodora might be a double, she is at the same time not exactly an
illusion, so the fact that she too can hear the same things as Nell at the same time supports the
idea that maybe the house is really haunted.
Picture 13: Mirror opposites
Now let us return to the paranoid woman’s voice. Doane notes: ‘The voice-over has a
privileged relation to interiority - it can make accessible that which is not and cannot make
visible. Its independence from the image allows it to signify delusion or misrecognition […]
and hence to more fully represent subjectivity’.88 But is it really right to speak of
misrecognition? For it is interesting to find that, just as in the book, images back up Nell’s
voice-over and narration is aligned with Nell - even in scenes without any or few point-ofview shots. Often when her voice-over is heard, the actual thing appears to be happening as
she perceives it. When she first arrives at Hill House and feels observed (a scene analysed in
the next chapter), there is a strange high shot taken from the house that looks down on her
tiny car, which puts the house in the place of an observer, of an actual character (picture 14).
This raises the question whether Nell’s intuitions about the house are right, if her supposed
delusions are visible outside her point of view. It also adds up to the effect of faithfulness to
87
88
Hattenhauer 2003: 163.
Doane 1987: 150.
26
the novel’s ‘spirit’; although here it is about the changing perspective of the camera, instead
of a description of the house as surveillant, this, too, signifies the possibility that the house
really casts a watchful eye on people.
Picture 14: View from the house on Nell’s approaching car
In any case, Nell herself is aware that ideas like these are strange and that they ought
not to be shared with others, although when actually speaking Nell does expose herself. Her
voice, that most intimate sound, channels as an uncanny medium between her inner self and
the ‘outside’ world.89 Usually the insecure Nell is in control of the relation between thinking
and speaking, but sometimes, in an uncanny compulsion to repeat90, her involuntary speaking
betrays something that even she herself is not aware of. This is often connected to her late
mother. During dinner, Dr. Markway comes up with a scientific explanation for the strange
phenomena at Hill House, to which Nell suddenly replies ‘That was the neighbours, they
threw the rocks. Mother says they were always against us because we couldn’t mix with them.
Mother....’ then realising that she was caught up in an entire different time and place, says ‘Oh
dear...I must be more tired than I thought’. Moments like these signal Eleanor’s increasing
isolation of the group, and they also show just how inwardly turned and narcissistic she is –
everything around her she relates to herself. Here I repeat Kaja Silverman on the female
voice:
What is demanded from woman […] is involuntary sound, sound that escapes her own understanding,
testifying only to the artistry of a superior voice. The female voice must be sequestered […] within the
heart of the diegesis, so far from the site of the enunciation as to be beyond articulation or meaning.91
89
Connor 2000: 1-9.
Freud 1975: 238.
91
Silverman 1988: 77.
90
27
The superior voice belongs (in her perception) to the house that addresses her, but it is
interiorized in her. In the penultimate scene Dr. Markway, Luke and Theo think it is best for
Nell’s sanity that she leaves the house. She is very reluctant in leaving, having no place to go,
and finally drives off alone in the car. She thinks ‘At last I’m going. But I won’t go! I belong
here’. Losing control over the wheel, she thinks it is the house that punishes her for leaving
and wants to make her go back, and Nell shouts: ‘What are you doing?’ Then there is the
internal voice-over again that says/thinks: ‘Why don’t they stop me, can’t they see what’s
happening? But it’s happening to you Nell. Finally, something is really happening to me’
(picture 15). Hardly having thought this comforting idea, she then suddenly sees Mrs.
Markway (who had come to visit her husband and got lost around the house) come out of the
bushes and, startled, crashes into a tree. Nell is clearly speaking to the house, but no one hears
it responding except her. Somehow that voice also seems to speak through her. Here the
voice-over testifies to Nell’s ultimate fragmentation, instead of giving expression to a unified
subject.
Picture 15: ‘It’s happening to you, Nell.’
Picture 16: ‘We who walk here, walk alone…’
Unlike the book, the film does not really make the suggestion of a self-chosen death.
The house made her do it, or she was scared by the strange appearance of Mrs. Markway
(who does not appear in the ending of the novel). The depressing behaviour of Julie Harris’
Nell (‘I sleep on my left side…I heard it wears the heart out quicker’) is only passively
suicidal. She would not have the guts to drive into the tree herself. This makes the filmic
Eleanor, in a way, even more of a Jacksonian heroine than her literary counterpart, because
Jackson’s characters frequently have too little agency, and they see themselves as a product of
circumstances, rather than an active producer of them.92 Yet the film ends on an ambiguous
note. Dr. Markway’s group tries to make sense of what just happened in this fatal accident.
Markway expresses his belief that there was indeed something in the car that drove Nell to it,
and that the house ‘got what it wanted’. The film tends towards an external explanation of
haunting then, although this still does not validate Nell’s sanity, because she was the only one
92
Hattenhauer 2003: 3.
28
susceptible to the house’s evil forces. Yet Theodora thinks that Nell’s fate was not poor, and
that she maybe ‘got what she wanted…to stay here’. This is followed by a total shot of the
house, in the dark again (picture 16), and a voice-over of Nell’s – at this point no longer
embodied. The quality of the voice is unchanged: it sounds hollow and it is accompanied by
eerie tones. The voice says:
Hill House has stood for ninety years and might stand for ninety more. Within, walls continue upright,
bricks meet, floors are firm, and doors are sensibly shut. Silence lies steadily against the wood and stone
of Hill House, and we who walk here, walk alone...
Through the ‘objective’ shot of the house, the film has the same kind of parallelism between
beginning and ending that the novel had in its opening and closing descriptions of the house.
The novel, too, echoed these lines. These supposedly objective descriptions framed, or walled
in Nell’s subjective experience, as if she were incorporated into the story, and in the fabula.
Although the lines are as ambivalent as in the opening, one might conclude that the poor
woman has simply died and that the house, unchanged, continues to stand the way it did in the
beginning. However, the description of the house is altered in the film – ‘whatever walked
there’ becomes ‘we who walk here’, spoken by Nell. The deictic centre has moved: the house
is no longer ‘there’ but ‘here’. Nell is inside the house and she concludes the story. By this
ultimate and endless dwelling (no longer held within the story) the film’s ending differs
considerably from the novel’s, but at the same time it is reminiscent of the final part of the
nineteenth century short story classic The yellow wallpaper (1891) by Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, which no doubt influenced Shirley Jackson and is haunting this text (itself being
haunted perhaps by the madwoman in the attic of Jane Eyre93). In this story, a woman
suffering from that most vague diagnosis of hysteria, starts to see strange things in the
patterns of her wallpaper. Thinking she sees women creeping out of the wall, she can no
longer identify herself and the surface as separate, and the only thing she can do is creep
around the room herself.94 At the end of The haunting, Nell is walking around too, only in her
93
Mary Jacobus paraphrased in Showalter 266.
The story’s disturbing ending:
‘It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!
I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jennie asks me to.
For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.
But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so
I cannot lose my way.
Why there's John at the door!
It is no use, young man, you can't open it!
How he does call and pound!
Now he's crying for an axe.
It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!
"John dear!" said I in the gentlest voice, "the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain leaf!"
94
29
case it is her spirit, dead and disembodied. The ending moreover suggests that there was
already somebody else in the house (another woman?) instead of the ‘whatever’ of the novel.
One can see how the use of voice-over is certainly not always the same as an external
narrator and that the choice of Nell’s voice has consequences for the ending (even if the lines
would be the same). Her free-floating soul is now captured in her voice. In the words of
Chion:
What could be more natural in a film than a dead person continuing to speak as a bodiless voice?
Particularly in the cinema, the voice enjoys a certain proximity to the soul, the shadow, the double –
these immaterial, detachable representations of the body, which survive its death and sometimes even
leave it during its life.95
The voice has indeed become Nell’s true uncanny double.96 In primitive cultures, the double
was ‘originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego […] and probably the
‘immortal’ soul was the first “double” of the body’.97 The double made it possible to live
forever. This was a perfectly natural idea in the primary narcissism of children and primitive
men, but once this stage was surmounted, the double became ‘the uncanny harbinger of
death’, thus becoming a cause of dread.98 The uncanny, disembodied voice goes beyond being
a sign once it belongs to a dead person: the filmic signifier (hollow, acousmatic voice of the
dead) becomes the equivalent of the signified (the soul) and cannot mean anything else.
Even if the spirit voice is disturbing, it is now a powerful one. The voice-over has
risen above its interior position that the female voice usually occupies in the diegesis, or at
least it has done so partly (for it is still, unlike Markway’s a-temporal voice-over, in the
present tense). As Nell enters the realm of ghosts, her voice is now the one ‘that knows’.
Moreover, Nell has become the ultimate acousmêtre. Acousmatic powers can only disappear
with embodiment, like Markway’s, so they can never be taken away from Nell. Chion sees an
That silenced him for a few moments.
Then he said--very quietly indeed, "Open the door, my darling!"
"I can't," said I. "The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!"
And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see,
and he got it of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door.
"What is the matter?" he cried. "For God's sake, what are you doing!"
I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.
"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put
me back!"
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to
creep over him every time!
(Perkins Gilman 1891).
95
Chion 1999: 47.
96
Theo is also a kind of double to Nell, but rather as an incorporation of an idealized mirror-image; a woman
that is not really her.
97
Freud 1975: 235.
98
Freud 1975: 235.
30
uncanny connection between embodiment (mise-en-corps), entombment (mise en bière) and
interment (mise en terre). The embodiment of an acousmatic voice is much like burial, and it
is ‘the purpose of burial ceremonies to say to the soul of the deceased: “you must no longer
wander, your grave is here”.99 As a free-floating spirit voice that will never be embodied/
buried again, Nell’s voice will always go on ‘wandering along the surface, at once inside and
outside’.100 The voice now revolves around a location, but no longer around a body. It is the
opposite of a zombie: instead of a walking body without a soul it is a walking soul without a
body. It is ironic that the woman’s voice can only reach the acousmatic level once she speaks
from the grave. The Jacksonian heroine rarely ‘wins, succeeds or transcends’.101 Although her
voice has transcended its textual position, whether Eleanor has really ‘won’ is of course yet to
be answered, as I shall in the next chapter.
An unsettling voice (conclusion)
The literally creepy, unsettling voice that ends the story is typical for the film’s refusal of
closure. The deployment of narratological terms does not make any clearer what exactly is
going on in The haunting…, rather it clarifies, to a degree, how everything can seem all so
ambiguous. The house, for example, is a location with the traits of a character, and yet it
seems to be suspended in space and time. More importantly, it was the identification in the
novel of a ‘telepathic’ external narrator, and the focalization through Nell, that could account
for how it seems that the outside world and Nell’s subjective experience are not easily
distinguishable. In the film, some of the initial narration is done partly by a disembodied
voice with acousmatic traits. The disembodied voice in general in this film shifts in both
‘embodiedness’ and purpose. It goes from the disembodied male acousmêtre, to the soon-tobe-embodied and intimate male I-voice (both belonging to Markway), to the embodied voiceover of Nell. It goes from authorative to explicative to the private thoughts of Nell, which are
not really utterances but nevertheless expressed by speech, through cinematic convention).102
The fact that Nell’s voice is embodied does not take away the uncanny effect of the
‘telepathy’ that arises when the spectator hears her thoughts.
99
Chion 1999: 140.
Chion 1999: 23.
101
Hattenhauer 2003: 3.
102
I have not gone into what perhaps constitutes another shift in other films, namely who the addressee of the
disembodied voice is; the acousmêtre usually speaks to diegetic characters, whereas the storyteller voice often
address an extra-diegetic audience, and the ‘internal speech’ voice, finally, that does not address anyone at all
but is aimed at the extra-diegetic audience.
100
31
How can the uncanny, which robs the eyes of the wish to see (thus causing a crisis in
phenomenality), be grasped in the auditory dimension? In classical cinema, the source of the
sound always needs to be confirmed by the image (the sound hermeneutic), so that it is
ultimately about what the eyes can or cannot see. The ‘untrustworthiness’ of sound operating
by itself is particularly effective in suggesting a haunting presence, as we shall see in the next
chapter. Nell’s voice-over, however, although it is of a somewhat ventriloquist nature, is
certified by the sight of her body. The abseits-ness of the uncanny and crisis of perception,
however, manifests itself when Nell’s thoughts are represented visually: something seems to
be watching Nell, but she cannot see it directly as it happens outside of her point of view.
Although intuitions like these are not very credible, they cannot be refuted either: the
narration seems to be aligned with Nell. Although Eleanor is not in a privileged position and
has no ‘higher knowledge’, she is certainly highly sensitive to her environment and thinks she
knows the house’s intentions, which the others do not (except maybe Theodora).
Her voice, however, is in the position of that of a paranoid woman’s: internalized,
embodied and, although not nonsensical, it is not really an instrument for Nell but rather an
involuntary medium to her inside fears. Her voice is really two-fold. Its sound quality and
private-ness possibly signify delusion, but it also seems as if the house is in dialogue with her
and responds to her sentiments. Thus the subjective merges with the objective world. Also,
Nell’s voice really does and does not belong to her at the same time. It sounds very personal
and intimate and yet abstracted from her, due to its close/hollow quality (and the strange
music it is accompanied by). Through her voice it seems as if the house is really trying to kill
her in the end, while it may also signify her fragmented subjectivity and delusion. Because it
is practically only her we hear, we are invited into a narcissistic world that revolves around
her as a subject, a fantasy world where she is singled out by the house.
The effective voice-over literally gives a voice to Nell’s world and accounts for a large
part for the sense of uncanny telepathy and interiority and thus for ‘faithfulness’ to the novel.
After the male ‘acousmatic’ voice of Dr. Markway, Nell’s embodied, subjective and internally
positioned voice-over makes a turn at the ending as her voice too transcends its position. Nell
has become acousmatic as well, although in a dubious way: as the cinematic incarnation (for
lack of a better term) to the soul her voice starts to lead a life of its own, beyond her death.
From a medium to Nell’s soul it becomes a sign for her delusion and then stands on its own as
her psyche. Ironically, when in the ending it comes to the preservation of a ‘spirit’ it is that of
the character Nell’s, not that of the author Jackson’s, who had a different fate in store for Nell.
32
Her domain, the house, is marked by the voice. With Nell gaining acousmatic powers
the problem of the marginalized (and disembodied) female voice, as addressed by Doane and
Silverman (yet unresolved by Chion), does not disappear. Rather, it becomes more evident
that this discursive authority of the disembodied voice is only possible once the woman’s
body is destroyed literally. The ending is therefore unsettling: Nell’s voice/soul is doomed to
always wander around Hill House. Its questionable sound quality, and therefore, questionable
authority, remains. Whereas this adaptation was haunted by authorial spirit and the spirit of
the novel, it has now released the character of Nell who can subsequently haunt the following
adaptation in her turn.
The wandering quality of the disembodied voice is medium-specific to film. Film is
not inherently uncanny as the novel, though, because the use of a voice-over is one of many
narrative choices, moreover, it depends on the voice-over’s function and pretensions whether
it is also uncanny. (One might also consider if the telepathic narration in the novel still causes
an uncanny effect if it is an inherent part of the medium, although I will not go into that here).
Having dwelled considerable time inside the head of Nell, as it were, it is now time to truly
enter Hill House.
33
‘THE HOUSE DOES HAVE ITS LITTLE ODDITIES’ - SPACE, DISTORTION AND
THE SURFACE
An obscure house (introduction)
So far I have explored the mechanisms and qualities of Nell’s voice, through which her spirit
can stay in the house. However, this still leaves unanswered what Nell ultimately finds in the
house and how it incorporates her, or rather, how she lets herself be incorporated. Hill House
is very obscure, not only in the sense that it is obviously dark and gloomy, but also because it
is difficult to determine what kind of space it is; what it embodies. Like the Usher mansion in
Edgar Allan Poe’s The fall of the house of Usher, or the Overlook hotel in Stephen King’s The
shining, the mansion and its inhabitant are impossible to disentangle from each other. Like
The Navidson record house in Mark Z. Danielewski’s The house of leaves, the house has an
intriguing logic of its own, by itself leading its tenants in a certain direction (even if the
building in the latter example opens up spaces of infinitude, while Hill House is really a
closed, sealed space). Despite its huge interior it sometimes gets very claustrophobic, and
although things go bump in the night, the men and women wake up feeling remarkably rested.
‘The house does have its little oddities’ is how Dr. Markway dryly puts it.
Is the house evil in itself? Are the strange phenomena caused by ghosts from the past?
Does the house respond to the people in it? Or is everything a mere optical illusion? A house,
as an intricate structure, can be a metaphor for a lot of things, although the human body and
the mind are the most obvious ones (metaphors also applicable to the adaptation process
discussed later on). What I argue is that the house is symbolical for Nell initially, but that it
ruthlessly confronts her with the reality of her old life with her mother. Hill House at first
represents for her the Symbolic Order, where the Law of the Father rules and where Nell must
inevitably ‘grow up’, but it regressively turns into ‘the body of the mother’. By this I still
leave open, as much as the film itself does, whether this is all in Nell’s perception or that the
house is really doing this.
In this chapter I will discuss more thoroughly the structure of the paranoid woman’s
film, which, again, consists of (1) the foregrounding of epistemology in relation to paranoid
speculation; (2) a destabilization of the oppositions between internal and external; (3) the
foreclosure of the paternal signifier and corresponding fusion with the maternal and (4) the
mobilization of the auditory and the visual as the two most important material registers of the
paranoid delusion.103 In ‘He built his house to suit his mind’ I will focus on the relation
103
Doane 1987: 134.
34
between the house and its maker, Hugh Crain, and the mirror-like qualities of the house. The
metaphor of the mirror, which was already present in Nell’s idealized and competitive
opposite, Theo, manifests itself literally in the architecture of Hill House. Its distorted interior
can be seen to reflect the psyche of its disturbed builder Hugh Crain. Or does it rather reflect
Eleanor’s mind as a paranoid woman? The evil father figure is after all but a character in a
Gothic story and not real. I will therefore identify the use of mirror-text (Mieke Bal) in the
story. The mirror is the ultimate Foucauldian heterotopia, being both real and illusionist, and
this is also a possible approach to Hill House’s ambivalent status.
Key aspect to Hill House’s architecture is the surface (not only in the shape of mirrors,
but also in walls, curtains, tapestries etcetera), that skin-like border area where the opposition
between Nell’s body and the building surrounding her, between the subject and object, self
and (m)other, uncannily breaks down. This will be the focus of ‘A housemother, a mother
house’. It is here, by understanding the house as a (maternal) body/embodiment, that Laura
Marks haptic visuality, which is aimed at the surface, is particularly relevant. The surface is
constituent for the paranoid woman, who essentially projects sound and image on the house.
This also leads back to Silverman’s involuntary sound and various theorists’ adoption of the
voice of the mother as a sonorous envelope.
‘He built his house to suit his mind’
The house is no static entity but seems to move by a unique logic. It likes to play tricks on
people: doors close by themselves, and it is impossible for anyone to go from A to B without
losing their way (except perhaps for Mr. and Mrs. Dudley, the not-so-very warm and
welcoming caretakers), because familiar rooms are never where people remembered them to
be. Nell and Theo are already disoriented upon their arrival. When they first meet Dr.
Markway, he explains to them, with a typical sense of understatement, that the house was
deliberately designed to cause distortion:
This house does have its little oddities. The man who built it was a misfit who hated people and their
conventional ideas. He built his house to suit his mind. For instance, all the doors are hung slightly offcentre. Probably explains why they swing shut by themselves. Watch... [Nothing happens]… anyway,
all the angles are slightly off. There isn’t a square corner in the place.
Nell adds: ‘It’s impossible to find your way around. Add up all these angles that are off and
you get one big distortion in the house as a whole’. She has quickly grasped how space works
in Hill House, which, strangely enough, was built as a family home.
35
Yet it is not at all strange in the Gothic tradition that places adopt the character of their
owner, or reflect the horror of the terrible things that took place there, and that these buildings
may take on an animistic character.104 The history of Hill House is a notorious one, and the
people that died in it may still be haunting the place. The story of the page companion and the
old Abigail Crain that initiated the film, later recounted to the group by Dr. Markway, bears
an obvious resemblance to the life of Eleanor and her mother. This is emphasized to an even
greater extent when the group finds the statues of the former inhabitants in the greenhouse,
and Theo compares Nell to the companion, who hanged herself. Whatever was in the house
drove the companion mad, although it is suggested that it was the ghost of the old Abigail
Crain.105 This older fabula is haunting the present. It is what Bal calls a mirror-text that can
serve to shed new light on the main fabula.106 In this case it creates a fatal sense of
foreboding, or perhaps rather becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy for Nell. Everyone’s
attitude to this story and the house’s Gothic make-up is rather ironic and jokily107; it forms a
basis for some comic relief. Except for Nell. For her, stories are a part of reality. As
Hattenhauer points out in regards to the novel, there is ‘a manifest text (a parody of the Gothic
ghost story), referring to the latent text (… a Gothic allegory of the uncanny’).108 According
to Jackson, the ‘ghost is a statement and a resolution of a problem that cannot be faced or
solved realistically’.109 Nell likes to believe in the ghostly part of it. The Nell in the film also
takes this mirror text seriously, but she is more down to earth. When the topic of her mother
comes up in an honest conversation between her and Theodora, she says ‘Oh my mother! The
story of my dull life’. So the film mostly shows Nell’s reality of tiresome isolation at home,
and the nightmarish story that will ultimate become reality as history uncannily repeats itself.
In many Gothic stories, the passive agent of terror is the castle, and the active agent is
the villain living there.110 If the house’s interior reflects the disturbed mind of Hugh Crain,
then moving through Hill House is like subjecting oneself to the laws of this cruel man, just
like his wives did who died for mysterious reasons. For Nell, the house initially stands for
something greater: the Law (or Name) of the Father. A symbol of this is the instruction book
they find, which Crain wrote for his daughter Abigail. It contains pictures of sins for her to
104
Morgan 2002: 189.
The tale is slightly different and more elaborate in the novel; there is not one but two Crain sisters, who fight
over the Hill House property, much like the Vance sisters who fight over the car. Thus, there is more than just
one parallelism here (the other one being that between Eleanor and the companion).
106
Bal 2004:
107
Hattenhauer 2003: 170.
108
Hattenhauer 2003: 173.
109
Jackson quoted in Hattenhauer 2003: 173.
110
Varma 1966: 19.
105
36
keep away from, and life lessons about everything forbidden. In other words, the book teaches
what Lacan calls le non-du-père, the no of the symbolic father (in homophony with le-nomdu-père, the Name of the Father or Law of the Father111). Nell realizes that here in the house
she will need to interact with others and make friends, participate in their word-games, be able
to tell interesting stories and act like a grown-up woman. She even develops a crush on the
flirty Dr. Markway, which makes her want to be in the house even more. Yet this affair is
doomed to fail as he is married and she not quite ‘of this world’.112 Nell does not really
succeed coming along with the group.
When the group notices her awkwardness and accuses her of trying to be the centre of
attention all the time, Nell crawls back into her own protective shell and isolates herself. She
is indeed like one of many of Jackson’s protagonists ‘decentred and estranged from Others,
[…] borne back ceaselessly into the Imaginary’.113 After its association with the Symbolic
(which came rather late for Nell), the house seems to adapt itself to her regressive state. Upon
entering the house Nell sees her reflection in the neatly polished floor, and the first thing that
frightens her, only seconds later, is her reflection in the mirror (picture 17). Her great surprise
with the confrontation in the mirror can be related to her ‘unfinished induction into the
Symbolic’.114 Apparently the house mirrors more than simply the figure of Hugh Crain.
Picture 17: The first scare in Hill House
Picture 18: the statue of the Crain family
In fact, Crain’s importance in the building of Hill House can be questioned. He is not
really portrayed as more than ‘a misfit’, an eccentric who liked a little experimenting in
architecture. (Even the book, with its more elaborate family history, does not really give Hugh
Crain much credit as a true Gothic villain). Exactly why his wives died is unclear (in the
prologue, the first wife falls out of the carriage when the horses bolt upon seeing the house;
the other wife, overcome by terror, simply flings herself downstairs). Crain is, rather, a stock
figure in a familiar tale,115 who is long since gone and only present in statues and illustrations
(picture 18). He only appeals to Nell. She never had a father (figure) in her life before she
111
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_the_Father .
In the novel, Nell takes a romantic interest in Luke, which is bound to fail as well.
113
Hattenhauer 2003: 3.
114
Hattenhauer 2003: 160.
115
Hattenhauer 2003: 170.
112
37
came at the house. She has always lived in servitude of her mother (being ‘walled up alive on
a desert island’) and has not gained any experience outside of the house. Not once is her
father mentioned. This blocks her entrance to the Symbolic Order. In the words of Doane:
The subject/object distinction, and hence access to the Symbolic Order, is predicated on absence. This is
why Lacan defines paranoia as the foreclosure of the paternal signifier, that is, the phallus, the signifier
of difference itself. Paranoia, in its repudiation of the Father, allies itself with the dyadic structure of
narcissism, the imaginary, the pre-Oedipal.116
Only the paternal signifier enables the constitution between subject and object, and its
foreclosure leads to the collapse of the subject and object.117 This substitute for the paternal
signifier comes too late for Nell, which relates to her being, or becoming a ‘paranoid woman’,
but this is something I will come back to later.
In the novel sometimes even the house seems to repudiate its father/builder, as if it
really had a part in its own creation and wicked distortions:
This House, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern
under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great
head back against the sky without concession to humanity.118
(‘Seem’ is of course the magic word in a lot of observations about the house. There is always
the appearance of a house that lives and acts, but this is not necessarily real. Similarly,
‘reared’ can still very well apply to a house that continues to stand up straight). The film
adaptation can simply show the house in all its grotesque dimensions and thereby make it
seem like a malevolent entity, for its distorted structures, ‘in their very geometry [violating]
aesthetic rightness’ immediately work their evil on the minds of its inhabitants.119 Or is the
house in its disturbing structures rather as distorted as
Nell’s distorted mind, as Jackson intended?120 Robert
Wise and cinematographer Davis Boulton have
wonderfully managed to make Hill House look like
Picture 19: Even dinner is staring at Nell
an immense villain, by shooting the film in Panavision
widescreen, and using a hugely distortive 30-mm wide-angle ‘fish eye’ lens for the exterior
and interior of the house (the lens’ prominence is announced by a visual pun, the eye of a
salmon, in an early scene at dinner, picture 19).121 Everything at the side of the frame seems
to turn to the centre (pictures 20 & 21). Since the whole story, except for the first few
116
Doane 1987: 131.
Doane 1987: 144.
118
Jackson 1987: 35.
119
Morgan 2002: 194.
120
Hattenhauer 2003: 159.
121
Robert Wise, DVD audio commentary.
117
38
minutes, takes place inside the house, seeing the film is like seeing its world through a built-in
carnival mirror. This effect is even stronger because many of the scenes (the particularly
frightening ones) are shot from ‘crazy’ angles and canted frames.
Picture 20: Exterior
Picture 21: Interior
The house, with its unreal, mirror-like qualities brings us to its essence as a heterotopia.
Although having both utopian and dystopian qualities, this abnormal place may actually exist,
as Foucault states:
[Heterotopias] are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in
reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about,
I shall call them, in contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other
sites, [...] there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. [...] It is a
heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the
position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I
am since I see myself over there.122
The house is like a mirror as it has both real and unreal qualities. Hill House’s impossible
construction and disorienting design are making the people delusional. But at the same time
the house is real and material, anchored in (but not affected by) time and space, and the
disorientation is only a trompe l’oeil effect, a ‘brilliant example of architectural misdirection’. It is like ‘that crazy house at the carnival’, as Theo remarks. Entering the place is
stepping through a distorted looking glass where meaning becomes diffuse; it is not exactly
clear where which outside reflection originates from.
In a greater context, heterotopias unite contradictory functions in themselves. Gothic
stories, according to Botting, are full of these heterotopias, such as haunted castles, ‘inhabited
by subjects who move from one space to another, by heroines whose only desire is to escape
their threatening boundaries’123 (only finding themselves locked up again in the end). In their
various forms,
Heterotopias are real places on the subordinated or excluded fringes of a particular social formation.
Psychiatric hospitals, boarding schools, prisons, barracks, brothels, theatres, gardens, according to
different historical and cultural contingencies, remain distinct from and yet adjacent to the privileged
sites of social organization. Heterotopias are sites where subjects and behaviours that fit only partially
within dominant norms can be both contained and excluded. Among these other spaces are sites that
122
123
Foucault 1967: 3.
Botting 1993: 255.
39
[…] relate to temporal disjunctions such as the cemetery or the museum. Heterotopias are thus
necessary in the constitution and maintenance of social formations: their otherness enables the
differentiation, ordering and policing of the limits of their own space as well as the boundaries of
society.124
The temporally and spatially remote Hill House is one of those marginal sites. It needs to be
kept out of society and monitored. At the same time it can also function as a kind of
institution to shelter those who do not belong (as Nelson Gidding suggested). The spinsterlike Nell does not fit in the traditional society that rests on moms, dads and children, nor does
Theo, who is unmarried and is probably in a lesbian relationship. The women’s involvement
in supernatural manifestations (telekinesis, extra-sensory perception) naturally marks them as
‘different’, as well. Through his ‘research’, Dr. Markway can learn more about the supernatural and give it a kind of place in everyday life. Thus everything abnormal is policed; all
that is irrational and terrible is safely sealed off from the everyday world.
Nell longs to be at the remote Hill House, because it is part of her romantic escapist
fantasy, but when she first arrives there, it looks in every way as nightmarish and abnormal as
it could be. The wide-angle lens makes it look as if the tops of Hill House crazily bend over
the building (picture 20). The walls do not in the least have that imperturbable straightness of
the Hill House from the book, but that does not take away any of the menace of the building
standing there. Also, the house looks unnaturally dark for daylight, because the exterior was
filmed with an infra-red lens (picture 22).125 Shot from a very low angle (Nell’s perspective),
the house stands out as a menacing, awe-inspiring building.
The interior looks just as immense and
distorted. A lot of scenes are shot in deep
space and deep focus, so that the empty
corridors look quite large. However, the effect
of depth of the wide angle lens, which captures
Picture 22: An impossibly dark house
so much of the interior on the horizontal axis,
is muddled in the scenes in the various rooms.126 The camera is often positioned in such a way
that it captures various doorways and walls and makes the room look so intricate that it is
impossible to figure out its construction, and how the different corners relate to each other.
The effect is enhanced by the mise-en-scène. The house is crammed with furniture and little
statues, and every inch of the wall is covered with panels, drapes, mirrors, pictures, wall paper
124
Foucault paraphrased in Botting 1993: 255.
Robert Wise, DVD audio commentary.
126
Bordwell & Thompson 2001: 200.
125
40
or wood carvings. The abundance of details makes one lose perspective and become
disoriented (picture 23).
Picture 23: Confusing perspective and mise-en-scène
Of course the wide angle lens does a lot to the shape of the interior too. Whenever the camera
moves, everything that goes to the edges of the frame loses the straightness it had in the
centre. The effect is particularly strong with great rectangular shapes like doors, columns,
curtains, big furniture, mirrors; their straight lines get rounded off. It often looks as if Hill
House is closing in on the characters, especially in corridors (picture 24). Also, static objects
seem to be in motion by their changing shapes. It corresponds to what is happening in the
book:
This overall distortion, which causes doors to close automatically, stairs to slant inwards, and objects to
“shift position” as it were, contributes to a sense of “motion” within the architecture itself. That is, the
doors, stairs and familiar landmarks may themselves be at rest, but the perception of motion effected by
the architectural design causes visitors to attribute their own altered sense of motion, occasioned by
their loss of balance or direction, to the house.127
Only in the film does this motion
become
really
visualized,
of
course. Theodora notices it too,
when
she
says
‘Haven't
you
noticed how nothing in this house
seems to move until you look away
and then you just... catch some-
Picture 24: Hill House wrapping itself around Nell
thing out of the corner of your eye?’. Whatever is happening is abseits; it is uncanny and
127
Haines 2007: 138.
41
cannot be looked at directly. Only when the subject moves, does the architecture start to
‘move’ as well.
The excessive interior decoration also adds up to the perception of motion. The
wallpaper and curtains, ornamented with rich patterns of flowers and curls make it seem as if
there is always something going on at the background. Other items are heavily decorated as
well, so that the interior as seen from the camera, flattened and ornamented, looks almost like
a giant patchwork quilt sometimes, but this homely illusion is actually rather grotesque: ‘The
grotesque was originally a decorative art. Its monstrous figures appear twisting and twining
around friezes that also contain flowers and animal figures. The effect is one of motionless
movement.’128 Thus the cosy and homely patterns in themselves become unheimlich and
threatening (picture 25). ‘Now I know who your fiend of Hill House is. The interior
decorator!’ shouts Mrs. Markway, who does not understand her husband’s appreciation for it.
Picture 25: Grotesque decoration surrounding Mrs. Dudley, the caretaker
Another result of the ‘fish eye’ lens, which relates to these micro-movements, is the
feeling of interiority and of a claustrophobic movement that can only go round in circles. This
is a specific quality of the house that determines how subjects move in it. The house in the
book was built in concentric circles, which means that there are separate layers of rooms
around the parlour centre. In the film, there is no explicit reference to this, but all the rooms
and corridors look very round. Dr. Markway, Luke, Theo and Nell can never go somewhere in
a straight line, but always need to circle around. The building lures them into dwelling instead
of goal-oriented moving. Although some of the rooms are cosy retreats, the corridors are
128
MacAndrew 1978: 161.
42
dwellings, ‘in-between spaces where one goes astray, hesitates, delays’ (picture 24).129 It is
this dwelling that allows for so much introspection, as Anne Troutman so eloquently puts it
(even if in her words the dwelling is an almost Piranesian expansion of the mind):
The dwelling is intimate, immediate, a resonant chamber, a mirror of the self, opening
up in infinite perspectives, depth, and reflection. Soul, body, and dwelling are but expansions
and projections of each other. For the house is not merely walls, doors and windows, but a
doorway to things beyond, a “capacity” of the senses and spirit. Finally, there is no distinction
between outward and inward. We dwell in the home; the home dwells in us.130
At the same time, the dwelling results in a loss of agency in the subjects moving around. They
are taken up into the house’s flow, as it were. If they just keep going forward, they will
always uncannily return at the same point. In a way, this is like the uncanny experience of
involuntary repetition that Freud experienced; as he tried to find his way in a small Italian
town he ended up in an unpleasant part of town, with ‘painted women’. Every time he found
his way out his path lead him back to that spot, as he kept moving in circles.131 The
‘expeditioners’ of Hill House, too, are led astray.
The movement inside Hill House that circles around the centre makes the house the
ultimate interior space; it is like the mind of Nell that is turned inside itself and whether
voluntarily or not, she must inevitably confront her deepest anxieties locked away in her
memory. In their exploration of the house the group is centripetally led to the heart of the
house, the nursery. Once they enter, there is a sickroom smell, and Nell shrieks ‘Mother’
because the olfactory brings back the awful experience of taking care of her ill mother, and
the guilt of not helping her when she called, and died. What Nell involuntarily confronts,
then, is a return of the repressed; her inability to detach herself from her mother. The things
that she had put away in her mind uncannily resurface.132 Thus the exploration of space is
literally like a traumatic trip down memory lane.
Although the house may mirror Nell or react to her, it is crucial to note that the strange
things that happen are, to an extent, a shared experience. Everyone feels the inexplicable cold
spot near the nursery, and witnesses the phrase on the wall that reads ‘Help Eleanor come
129
Troutman 1997: 147.
Troutman 1997: 143.
131
Freud 1975: 237.
(As Susan Bernstein points out, it was repressed desire which made him come back every time, something he
failed to acknowledge in his essay - Bernstein 2003: 1118.)
132
Freud 1975: 220.
130
43
home’. They all know there is ‘something’ going on. This is important for Hill House’s
heterotopic status, and also for ‘the foregrounding of epistemology in relation to paranoid
speculation and the systematicity of the delusion’, one of the structural elements in the
paranoid woman’s film. On the one hand, in the study of the supernatural the exact point is to
question the spooky phenomena at Hill House. This also relates to setting the heterotopia
apart from society and being able to separate fact from fiction, the abnormal from normal. On
the other hand, the meaning of ‘epistemology’ and ‘systematicity’ becomes ambiguous in the
approach of Dr. Markway, and the fact that it is not just Eleanor who feels that something is
wrong. Markway, the man of science, seems to be the biggest believer in the supernatural of
all. That is, he believes that one shouldn’t force and ‘give a name to that which hasn’t got a
name’ and that ultimately, a right explanation can be found, because ‘the preternatural of the
past has now become natural’, for instance magnetism. He reproaches Luke for his ‘closed
mind’, when the latter comes up with ‘earth tremors’ or ‘subterranean waters’ as explanations
for the strange noises, and tries to explain the cold air in the corridors as a mere draft (picture
26), even if all the doors constantly close by themselves. Thus, Markway is confident that the
irrational and terrible of today will some day be a normal part of society. Here one can see the
dynamic of how a standard of normalcy is established through the irrational.
Picture 26: Luke (left):‘Don’t give me any of that supernatural jazz. This is something I can feel…and see’
Also, Dr. Markway is not sceptical towards Nell’s observations: he is sceptical
towards the conclusions she draws from them; the children’s voice she heard was only a noise
and could not have been a child’s (one wonders what else it could have been, by a rational
explanation). Only once does he suggest that Nell might have had a hallucination. She,
however, is convinced that something was after them in the night, but she is willing to play
44
along and think of other explanations. ‘What if the haunting is all in my mind?’ she asks. Yet
Markway tells her that ‘the easiest way to dismiss the supernatural [is] by pleading insanity’
He is more than understanding towards her sensitivity and tells her not to be afraid. What Nell
hears and sees is not questioned, unlike in the case of the typical ‘delusional’ paranoid
woman. However, she is the only one who truly thinks that the house is alive and after her,
and there are plenty moments where only she sees things – things that might indeed come
from inside her head. In the next part, I will go into these haunting phenomena and how Nell
becomes convinced that she should really stay at the house. This all relates to the house as a
maternal embodiment, instead of a paternal construction.
‘A mother house, a housemother...’
Whereas the house to an extent reflects the psyche of the ‘father’ and that of Nell (and is
perhaps even evil-spirited itself), some very ‘pregnant’ metaphors for describing the interior
of the house - often combined - are the maternal, and the bodily/organic. If The haunting
belongs to the body genre of horror at all, it is rather about the ‘body’ that the characters move
in; their own bodies are not in physical danger. Even if the house’s terrible history may have
left its mark in the building, in itself it appears to be a bad environment. It seems that an evil
spirit necessarily resides in a diseased body, because Dr. Markway refers to the house as
‘diseased, ‘sick’, ‘crazy’, ‘deranged’, and ‘born bad’ but also calls it ‘a house of Hades’ and
‘leprous’. In the novel, Dr. Montague elaborates on this by referring to the use, in the Bible
book of Leviticus, of the Hebrew word for leprous, tsaaras (or tsara’at)133, which referred to
both people (the skin) and houses (corrupted walls).134 The obvious parallel is drawn already.
As the group moves through the house there is a constant draft that seems to come from
nowhere, as if the building is breathing through its labyrinthine system of corridors, and in a
particularly frightening scene of haunting, a door bends through like a membrane.
In the book, Luke Sanderson notes that ‘It’s all so motherly… everything so soft.
Everything so padded’, and, going out down the veranda, mumbles ‘a mother house […] a
housemother, a headmistress, a housemistress’, conflating house and woman.135 The house is
not just a body but a maternal corpus. Despite lacking this explicit reference, the film house is
also full of symbols of fertility (lots of flowers, fruits and so on, picture 27) and rich tex133
Jackson 1987: 60.
Clazien Verheul. ‘Heeft Naäman huidvraat of is het huis melaats? De vertaling van tsara’at in de Nieuwe
Bijbelvertaling. Stichting LEPRAzending Nederland. Version 13 July 2008.
http://www.leprazending.nl/web/pages/informatie/docs/weg.doc
135
Jackson 1987: 207.
134
45
tures136, not to mention its roundness and other features (which will be pointed out later). Yet
it is impure; it is rotting and flourishing at the same time. Its fecundity is horrific. Markway
refers to the nursery, the ultimate maternal/infantile space (and the room that evaporates the
awful smell) as ‘the cold rotting heart of Hill House’. All this abject maternal energy is
constantly imposing on Nell as she moves through the corridors, in particular near the
nursery. The maternal even manifests itself as writing on the wall (the phrase in chalk
mentioned earlier that reads ‘Help Eleanor come home’), a mystery that is never explained,
although the others suggest that she herself wrote it to be the centre of attention. (Of course,
because of the lack of interpunction the phrase may not be a question; ‘Help, Eleanor, come
home’, but a request to the other group members: ‘Help Eleanor, come home’137). Thus the
mother is there in absence; she is never seen in a flashback or otherwise, and yet she is all
around the house.138
Picture 27: Signs of fecundity everywhere
The haunting is in this sense an essential Female Gothic text, as Claire Kahane argues
in ‘The Gothic mirror’. The Female Gothic is concerned with ‘self-hatred and self-disgust
towards the female body, sexuality, and reproduction’ and ‘women’s anxiety about birth and
creativity’.139 Nell - although having no motherly feelings herself - struggles with her body
image and self-fulfilment, but the house pulls her right back. In the words of Kahane:
136
Haines 2007: 137.
Schneider 2002: 174.
138
Patricia White connects this exploration of space to the film’s opening, in which Dr. Markway said that ‘a
haunted house is like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored’. For White, this has an ‘uncanny
resonance with a description of woman as “the dark continent” (White 1998: 134). This imperialistic trope might
actually also bring to mind associations of the virginal, but this is at odds with the idea of Hill House as an
embodiment of the maternal.
139
Ellen Moers paraphrased in Showalter 1995: 260-261.
137
46
The heroine is imprisoned not in a house but in the female body, which is itself the maternal legacy. The
problematics of femininity is thus reduced to the problematics of the female body, perceived as
antagonistic to the sense of self, as therefore freakish’. The Gothic castle is, above all, the house of the
dead mother. The heroine thinks that she is trapped in the haunted castle by a sinister and seductive
older man; but she is really on a quest to find the mother…140
However, in Kahane, the heroine is aided on this quest by clues, and finding her mother gives
her ‘the secrets of feminine existence’.141 One wonders whether the path in Hill House is
ultimately leading anywhere meaningful. The ‘problematics of the female body’ lies in the
uneasy relation to femaleness that both men and women have, springing from the early
infancy, where ‘mother and infant are locked into a symbiotic relation, an experience of
oneness characterized by a blurring of boundaries between mother and infant - a dual unity
preceding the sense of separate sense’. This explains why the mother’s world is the body ‘awesome and powerful, […] both our habitat and our prison’ - and why ‘the female child,
who shares the female body and its symbolic place in our culture, remains locked in a more
tenuous and fundamentally ambivalent struggle for a separate identity’.142 The father,
however, is not threatening to basic ego integration and is seen as separate.143
Doane, too, writes that ‘separation from the mother and the acknowledgement of
difference as represented by the paternal signifier’ are more difficult for the female, so that
she cannot fully resolve her Oedipus complex.144 With this in mind, ‘the obsession with a
potentially murderous father-like husband is thus a cover for a more intense fear concerning
the maternal figure and the annihilation of subjectivity’. Paranoia is a mechanism to fill the
lack of the Name of the Father.145 When Nell, in a burst of rage after finding Crain’s
instruction book, lifts her fist and calls out angrily ‘Hugh Crain you are a dirty man and you
made a dirty house...I hope you spend eternity in that foul, rotten book and never stop burning
for a minute’, she not only surprises the others, but she is also perhaps not aware of the real
problem. Nell’s exact purpose is to get away from her mother, but she finds herself in a
regressive situation.
The scary Hill House is, in a strange way, a protective and sheltered environment. It is
really isolated: unlike other prominent mansions it is standing not on top of the hills but
between them (in the book) and in the remotest part of New England (the film). In the house
itself, some of the rooms are inside rooms without any windows or doors that lead directly
140
Kahane quoted in Showalter 1995: 261.
Kahane paraphrased in Showalter 1995: 261.
142
Kahane 1980: 336/337.
143
Newman in Murphy 2004: 170-171.
144
Doane 1987: 144.
145
Doane 1987: 145.
141
47
outside. The few windows are always curtained. The house does ‘hold darkness within’; there
is no transparency. In this sense, it really is where the dreamer, from the novel’s opening
paragraph, would find an appropriate spot. After the first nightly haunting, Nell and the others
wake up feeling strangely cheerful and rested. Perhaps there is something in the house that
gives them comfort.
The building is, in fact, rather womb-like, which is unheimlich, because as a point of
origin it has become de-familiarized146, moreover, it is frighteningly associated with the tomb
as well. It feels both safe and terrifying. Despite being grand and massive, from the inside Hill
House is sometimes uncannily claustrophobic and suffocating. Even if the house itself seems
to have a draft going through the corridors, the residents themselves cannot breathe freely
upon entering certain rooms, for instance the library, where ‘dead air’ meets them. In his
study of architecture in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Jacobs observes that the Bates
mansion in Psycho ‘contains conspicuous carpets that contribute to the hushed, smothering
atmosphere of the house’.147 This observation applies to Hill House as well, with its many
carpets and curtains that may be very cosy, yet smothering. Also, in his analysis of The
haunting, Jeremy Dyson notes that Hill House, contrary to most houses in movie sets, has
actual ceilings. This makes it seem more like a real house (and the things that are happening
inside all-the-more disturbing). At the same time, it also contributes to an immense sense of
claustrophobia, of being trapped. The presence of ceilings allows the actors to be shot from a
low angle, so that their surroundings dangerously hover over them. 148
The following scene is a good example, although here the inside of Hill House is
associated with the stomach, not so much with the womb. Nell first enters her room (medium
shot, picture 28). Then, the camera moves from high up the room, and circles around her
(pictures 29-31), ending in a very low-angle close shot, so that it seems as if the canopy of the
bed and the ceiling are dangerously hovering over Nell and are going to eat her up (picture
32). She thinks: ‘I’m like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster. And the monster
feels my tiny movements inside’. It seems as if ‘something’ is after Nell, and is allied with the
camera. At the same time, it is also allied with Nell, because when she tells herself ‘Oh
Eleanor Lance you just stop it’, there is a medium shot again from a neutral level (picture 33).
The whole sequence suggests that there is an active, evil force, and yet the last shot implies
that (although it was no point-of-view shot), it might have been happening only in her
146
Freud 1919: 247.
Jacobs 2007: 128.
148
Dyson 1997: 238.
147
48
perception. (A similar thing happens when Nell, on a balcony, looks up at the tower, when
suddenly the camera, from very high up, comes down at her in a dizzying move, almost
throwing her over the edge). This scene is another example of the blurring between what is
objective and subjective - of what Doane calls the latent paranoia in cinema itself, which
‘consistently confuses subjectivity and objectivity’ and which of course works very
unfavourably in the case of the paranoid woman.149
Picture 28
Picture 29
Picture 30
Picture 31
Picture 32: ‘I’m like a small creature…’
Picture 33: ‘Eleanor Lance, you just stop it’
By cinematographically embodying this womb/stomach-like experience, Kamilla
Elliott’s ‘incarnational concept of adaptation’ comes to mind. In this concept, ‘the words [of
the novel] which merely hint at sight, sound, taste, and smell, tantalize readers into longing
for their incarnation in signs offering more direct access to these phenomenological
experiences’.150 Yet at the same time, the scene is very much in line with the psychic concept
of adaptation. The grotesque fear of being eaten by a monstrous (maternal) figure is not an
infrequent and altogether quite personal theme in the work of Shirley Jackson, as Roberta
149
150
Doane 1987: 147.
Elliott 2004: 235.
49
Rubenstein argues. In some works this maternal imago extends to an incorporating house.151
Rubenstein has identified some typically Female Gothic ‘pairs of strongly marked elements’
in Jackson’s oeuvre: inside/outside, mother/self, home/lost, and eat or be eaten. The last pair
is the key to all these other oppositions:
Food involves a transition across boundaries as it is transformed from “outside” to “inside” the self by
the act of consumption; less literally, incorporation may signal a predatory “consume or be consumed”
relationship, as indeed exists between several mother-daughter pairs in Jackson’s fiction.152
Nell only gets fully incorporated at the end of her stay, but before this happens, it is like she is
both in and outside of the maternal body. The various surfaces in the house (wall paper,
tapestries, curtains etcetera) are like tissue (the inside), but at the same time they are like skin
(the outside). It is through these surfaces that the over-proximity to other women, typical for
the ‘paranoid woman’, manifests itself, because of the surface’s ‘function of articulating the
poles of the opposition which most concerns [her]: internal/external’. This is because of her
difficulty of keeping them apart.153
The surface is an integral part of the house’s maternal architecture. Laura Marks has
theorized haptic visuality, a mode of looking that is based on the surface and which relates to
the relation between mother and child. This relation is thus not phallically determined (as an
‘empowered’ male gaze would be), but by the touch of the skin. Haptic visuality is like
grazing over the surface with the eyes, without really seeing what it is one is looking at
(unlike ‘traditional’ optical visuality, where one can clearly see an object from a distance). It
‘privileges the representational power of the image’ by which ‘the eyes themselves function
like organs of touch’.154 This applies to the house as a whole. Rather than having a clear
overview of the whole building, its disoriented inhabitants and us viewers only see little
patches of the house – it is a fragmented space because of the total disregard of suture
(working out how the different rooms are ‘stitched’ together; Jeremy Dyson has made a
particularly great analysis of the film in this respect).155 It explains why everybody moves so
carefully through the house.
The walls are naturally a site of haptic visuality. Since The haunting is photographed
in black and white, the surface’s textures are very prominent, especially in close-up. Even in
deep focus, when all the patterns are clearly discernible, there is a haptic quality to the walls,
151
Rubenstein 1995: 309.
Rubenstein 1995: 309.
153
Doane 1987: 130.
154
Marks 2000: 162-163.
155
Dyson 1997: 233-236.
152
50
as the camera slowly pans over the room. Exactly because of the distance to the surface does
the distortion of the camera get bigger, so that the ‘motionless movement’ effect mentioned
earlier is also created through the camera’s lens moving over the surface, or the viewer’s eye
over the film.
Of course, this is all still from a safe distance. However, there is a gradual line
between what is haptic and optical, and the film effectively combines the two visual modes.
This combination results in various affection images; they are impressions of faces that seem
to be watching Nell. Marks regards (only) the haptic image as a Deleuzian affection image: ‘a
sensuous engagement with a tactile [...] image is pure affection, prior to any extension into
movement’156, even if the optical side of the image - the fact that one can obviously identify a
face in it - seems to heighten its status as an affection image. After all, the affection image is
about recognizing an expression in something; it is a ‘combination of a reflecting, immobile
unity and of intensive expressive movements’.157 Gilles Deleuze distinguished between two
kinds: a face or object in stasis (or only displaying micro-movements), which expresses a
certain Quality, and a face with a very intense, changing expression that shows Power.158
A prominent example is the house’s façade, clearly personified in the book:
The face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee
in the eyebrow of a cornice. Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a
deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney or a dormer-like
dimple, can catch a beholder with a sense of fellowship, but a house arrogant and hating, never off
guard, can only be evil.159
Hill House indeed looks sentient and surveillant. When Nell, upon her arrival, first looks at
the building, there is an establishing shot (picture 34), followed by parts of the building
(picture 35), and close-ups, in particular of the windows (picture 36). That these windows are
like eyes, is suggested through the following shot of Nell’s own eyes (picture 37), and her
voice-over that ‘thinks’: ‘It’s staring at me. Vile. Vile! Get away from here at once’ (picture
38). Then the windows are shown in an even more extreme close-up (picture 40), as menacing
music reaches a climax. Finally, there is the strange point-of-view shot from the house onto
Nell’s car (picture 41). It is scenes like these that create so much tension throughout the film,
even if few things actually happen:
The affection image is power or quality considered for themselves, as expressed. It is clear that powers
and qualities can also exist in a completely different way: as actualised, embodied in states of things. A
156
Marks 2000: 163.
Deleuze 1986: 87.
158
Deleuze 1986: 88-91.
159
Jackson 1987: 34.
157
51
state of things includes a determinate space-time, spatio-temporal co-ordinates, objects and people, real
connections between all these givens. […] But now we are no longer in the domain of the affection
image, we have entered the domain of the action-image. The affection-image, for its part, is abstracted
from the station-temporal co-ordinates which would relate it to a state of things, and abstracts the face
from the person to which it belongs in the state of things.160
This abstract quality of the affection images is what makes the film terrifying. Action-images
are not ‘necessary’ to evoke terror in this film’s system, where there is such power of
suggestion. Other examples include the many statues in the house, whose expression seem to
slightly alter whenever their shadows change.
Picture 34
Picture 35
Picture 36
Picture 37: ‘It’s staring at me’
Picture 38: ‘This is my last chance to get away’
Picture 39
Picture 40
Picture 41
160
Deleuze 1986: 97.
52
Now let us move closer to the surface. Once Nell has taken up her room inside the house, she
too can pay the house a closer look. During the night, she is awake and stares at the wall in
her bedroom. For Nell, this ‘grazing over the surface’ is not at all a pleasurable or safe
experience, which relates perhaps to the fact that the image is not entirely haptic (even in
extreme close-up the image quality is not fuzzy and vague, but crisp). In these patterns, Nell
(and the viewer) starts to see things. Robert Wise commented that ‘the film is about seeing
things that are not there’.161 It is quite a long scene; it begins with a ‘neutral’ medium shot of
the wall (picture 42) followed by a close-up of Nell (picture 43). The camera zooms in on the
wall (picture 44 and 45), then jumps to Nell again. It keeps alternating between them,
although the ‘face’ that starts to appear is darkened and lit up again, so that parts of the
structure start to look like a mouth and eyes. By cinematography, something deliberately
becomes visible. The face seems to stare back, and change its expression (picture 46).
Picture 42
Picture 43
Picture 44
Picture 45
It is not a coincidence that monsters out of the
wallpaper seem to be looking at Nell, because
the paranoiac is fixated at the surface, and the
most important symptom of paranoia is the fear
of being watched, even if the quite sane TheoPicture 46
dora also has the feeling of being watched.162
A paranoiac constantly fears persecution of some kind, or always being watched by others.
For Nell, this might have begun with the ever scrutinizing look of her over-demanding and
161
162
Robert Wise, DVD audio commentary.
Doane 1987: 126.
53
critical mother. She then feels that others are always judging her. Yet the reason for this
fixation on the surface is because the paranoiac compensates for her delusions through the
mechanism of projection, because this allows her to ‘reassert, reconstitute the opposition
between subject and object’. In the words of Doane: ‘In Freudian theory, the infant expels and
projects into the external world what it finds in itself of the unpleasurable, and incorporates or
retains what is pleasurable’.163 Projection is part of the Imaginary Order; it is pre-Oedipal
(which explains the insignificance of the father figure in this film164). However, projection is
also fragile, because ‘by constantly transforming an internal representation into an exterior
perception, projection destabilizes the opposition between internal and external, subject and
object, so that the boundary between the two is continually in flux’.165 So the problem
becomes circular. Eleanor wants to be in the house, then feels that the house ‘wants her’ there
so that it would be wrong to leave, but really her impossibility of cutting loose from the
mother makes her project her feelings on the ‘maternal’ entity of Hill House.
It is through projection that we can make the link to the sound in this scene, which
comes out of the surface, as it were, and is equally subjected to (or a product of?) projection.
Although the image’s ‘truth value’ cannot really be questioned (a pattern is a pattern, even
from Nell’s point of view), the sound and its (apparent lack of) sources are more ambiguous.
The terrifying noises of the scene are perhaps only heard by Eleanor. When the face starts to
appear, there is also a low mumbling voice of a man, but it is not clear what it says. As the
camera zooms in on the ‘face’ a young woman’s voice starts to laugh. When the creature’s
eyes and mouth darken and seem to pop out, there is the sound of a child crying, and Nell
cries ‘I will not let it hurt a child!’. So there are three different voices associated with the face.
They do not correspond with Rick Altman’s sound hermeneutic, where a disembodied voice
needs a plausible body166 (especially because there are three). Nell does not really identify the
other voices besides the child’s. This scene corresponds to the following passage in the book:
Theodora, [Eleanor] tried to ask, why is it dark? And the voice went on, babbling, low and steady, a
little liquid gloating sound. She thought she might be able to distinguish words if she lay perfectly still,
and listened and heard the voice going on and on, never ceasing […]
Then the little gurgling laugh came again, and the rising mad sound of it drowned out the
voice, and then suddenly absolute silence. Eleanor took a breath, wondering if she could speak now, and
then she heard a soft little cry which broke her heart […] It is a child, she thought with disbelief, a child
is crying somewhere, and then, upon that thought, came the wild shrieking voice she had never heard
before and yet knew she had always heard in her nightmares167.
163
Doane 1987: 130.
Doane 1987: 131.
165
Doane 1987: 130.
166
Altman 1980: 73.
167
Jackson 1987: 162.
164
54
The novel contains particularly long stretches of sound descriptions like these, and in the film
the noises become really audible. The film merely incarnates these signifiers without directly
supplying it with a signified (which does not happen in the novel, either). In fact, one might
almost speak of over-incarnation, for in the most frightening moments of haunting in the
novel, like in this one, there are no references to seeing anything, there is only sound (only in
the beginning, a reference is made to the lovely blue, yet hopeless looking wallpaper168).
Again, the film seems to be influenced by The yellow wallpaper as well (as Shirley Jackson
was, probably), because this story is all about seeing things that are not there. The visual
component of the scene might be inspired by one of the wallpaper delusions in this story.169
The sound in the passage is what one might imagine the sonorous envelope to be, an
undifferentiated wall of sound, except that the voice is not exactly maternal; it is not even
sexed. It is just an endless stream of nonsensical sound. In the film, the male voice is perhaps
Hugh Crain’s. Even though the voices are disembodied, they are not acousmatic. They are
unpleasant but not comprehensible, they do not seem to know or see anything; thus they are
not powerful. In fact, Eleanor can end the sound herself by screaming. If she can put it to an
end, perhaps it was also she who started it? (Moreover, the hand that seems to clasp her own
Nell herself might be an agent of haunting.
If the sources and meanings of these voices are vague, there is another sound that is
more significant; a sign associated with the mother. Just like in Psycho, there is a kind of
acousmère170; a dominant and demanding mother that beyond her death still has presence
through sound, yet whereas ‘Norma’ Bates/her voice is ventriloqually enacted through
Norman, mother Lance is never heard vocally. The real maternal, sonorous envelope is the
constant banging on the wall, that returns in all three nights of haunting (of which this was the
168
169
Jackson 1987: 40.
The following passage, for instance, might have influenced the look of the scene:
‘This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!
There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside
down.
I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they
crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breaths didn't match, and
the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.
I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they
have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture
than most children could find in a toy-store.’
(Perkins Gilman 1891).
170
Of course, I apply the term rather loosely here, because the objectified, banging noise is obviously not the
equivalent to a personal voice that, amongst other things, knows and sees everything, and yet, the banging is
undeniably bound with the maternal.
55
second one). In the prologue story, Dr. Markway tells about the old Crain daughter who
desperately banged on the wall for help, and died, while the companion was fooling around
(so there is the possibility that it is the ghost of this woman that still haunts the house). But the
story is doubled in Nell’s experience. She as a companion was constantly stirred in her sleep
by her invalid mother in the next room, who was demanding attention and could only knock
with her cane. (Note that the roles are reversed; in the sonorous envelope of infancy, it is of
course the mother who cares for her daughter and makes gentle sounds. Now the daughter
mothers her mother). This blanket of sound is a perverse kind of sonorous envelope. Although
Nell’s mother is never shown in for example a flashback, in retrospect the image of the old
Abigail Crain holding a cane in her hand is a visual stand-in for Eleanor’s mother. A recurrent
figure in Jackson’s fiction is the ‘phallic mother’171 and this image captures that notion
particularly well (picture 47). Interestingly, it is at the same time a symbol of helplessness.
Picture 47: Flashback of Abigail Crain
Picture 48: The noise behind the door
Pictures 49 & 50: Tracing the noise…
…around the door
It is in the first night that Eleanor wakes up by the noise, knocks back on the wall and calls
out: ‘Alright mother alright. Just a minute, I’m coming…’ only realising later that her mother
is dead. It is so loud that even Theo in the other room hears it. She shouts out to Nell who
runs into her room, and Theo says ‘I thought it was you pounding’ whereupon Nell answers
‘…it was…I mean I did…’, suggesting that maybe Eleanor caused this sound. The noise does
not stay at one place but moves through the corridor, finally stopping behind the door (picture
48). The camera, in accordance with the sound hermeneutic, wants to confirm the auditory
source visually and follows the contours of the door (pictures 49 and 50). Just like the corresponding scene in the book, there are only scary noises and there is really nothing to see, but
171
Hattenhauer 2003: 161.
56
its unsettling effect is perhaps even greater in the film which necessarily plays by the sound
hermeneutic.
The importance of sound becomes apparent when it is switched off; all one sees is a
camera panning over the walls (the face in the wall was the only kind of visualization).
Stephen King called The haunting ‘one of the few radio horror movies’ because ‘something is
scratching at that ornate, panelled door, something horrible… but it is a door Wise elects
never to open’.172 There cannot be some sort of visual gratification of the sound exactly
because there is nothing really to show if it all comes from inside Eleanor’s head.173 She
herself is not aware that it emanates from her. It is the nonsensical and ‘involuntary sound
demanded from woman’ that Silverman speaks of.174 This would put the female child in a
problematic alignment with the mother, but in this case they are connected through the
involuntary pounding sound The terrible noise is moving around and surrounds the bedroom,
so that the negative bias of Chion’s ‘umbilical web’ is not at all inappropriate here. Possibly
the sound is something she has repressed that comes back in this environment - she then
projects it outside onto the house, by her unacknowledged powers. In the book she resists that
it is the sound of her mother: ‘She thought: “Bang” is the best word for it; it sounds like
something children do, not mothers knocking against the wall for help’.175 Only much later
does she realize that it might be produced inside her head:
Eleanor, rocking to the pounding, which seemed inside her head as much as in the hall, holding tight to
Theodora, said, “They know where we are,” and the others, assuming that she meant Arthur and Mrs.
Montague, nodded and listened. The knocking, Eleanor told herself, will go on down the hall … and
turn and come back again… [...]
I will never be able to sleep again with all this noise coming from inside my head; how can
these others hear the noise when it is coming from inside my head?176
In the film she does not acknowledge the sound as hers or her mother’s or even as human.
Nell rather hears it as a sign of the house. Having become increasingly alienated from the rest
of the group, who are put off by her strange behaviour, Nell has but one to turn to - the
house/the mother. In the final instance of haunting (where the whole group is witness to the
pounding noises), Eleanor thinks ‘I’ll come. I’ll come! Whatever it wants from me it can
have’. After this apparent resistance, the banging stops and Nell runs away from the group.
The house starts shaking and objects fall down. ‘The house is coming down around me. It’s
destroying itself!’ Eleanor thinks (pictures 51 & 52). Running through the house, she walks
172
King 1991: 135.
Of course this reading only holds exactly because of the visual ambiguity.
174
Silverman 1988: 81.
175
Jackson 1987: 185.
176
Jackson 1987: 200.
173
57
up against a mirror. She is drawn to the nursery, the heart of the house, where she thinks the
haunting is. Nothing much happens, but Nell’s voice-over testifies: ‘I’m coming apart a little
at a time... Now I know where I’m going. I’m disappearing inch by inch into this house…’ At
this point, the room gets really dark around her, until finally her face, a beacon of whiteness,
becomes dark too (pictures 53 & 54). The womb/tomb closes itself and incorporates her. Like
a true Jacksonian heroine, Eleanor does not really grow as much as she disintegrates.177 Yet
by becoming fragmented herself, she can finally become whole with the house.
Picture 51: ‘The house is destroying itself!’
Picture 52
Picture 53: ‘Now I know where I’m going…’
Picture 54: ‘I’m disappearing inch by inch…’
Only a short while later there is the rest of the group on the lookout for Nell and Mrs.
Markway, who has disappeared as well. The house is, strangely enough, not damaged or
altered in any possible way. When Nell opens her eyes, she is standing in front of Crain’s
statue and triumphantly grasps his hands. The cold spot is gone; the house is now breathing
warm and pleasant air. Nell dances around in circles, both happy and thrilled. The music has
become like a lullaby; a woman’s voice (not Nell’s) is soothingly humming along with the
melody. No explanation is given for this sudden change - Nell seems to acknowledge the
influence of Crain, but it also seems that by giving in to the house and confronting the
maternal room, Hill House has become welcoming and heimlich. Nell still believes in the
Crain ghost story, and thinks she has broken the spell of Hill House, although perhaps Hill
House finally put its spell on Nell. It looks like her succumbing to this inescapable maternal
energy provides all the comfort. Nell regresses into the familiar and harmonizes with the
house. Although she has felt that the house wanted her throughout her stay, it is only now that
177
Hattenhauer 2003: 3.
58
she is convinced that she does not want to go anywhere else. As if centripetally lead to the
room at first Nell now drifts on a kind of centrifugal flow and becomes scattered throughout
the house, as it were. She then circles towards the spiral staircase, although it is unclear what
exactly brings her there (picture 55).
Picture 55
Picture 56
This final moment of Eleanor’s climbing the staircase could be seen as a last opportunity for
transgression. She is delighted in going up, her eyes fixated at the top (picture 56). Even after
the staircase dangerously starts to shake and she is momentarily dizzied by vertigo, she goes
on, with high-pitched music reaching a climax. Finally at the top, however, she is discovered
by Dr. Markway and the others, who call out to her to stop immediately. Yet Nell thinks ‘All
that is gone and left behind’ (picture 57), and keeps going. According to Doane, the spiral
staircase is a typical signifier:
An icon of crucial and repetitive insistence in the classical representations of the cinema, the staircase is
traditionally the locus of specularization of the woman, it is on the stairway that she is displayed as
spectacle for the male gaze. […] But the staircase in the paranoid woman’s films also (and sometimes
simultaneously) becomes the passageway to the “image of the worst” or “screen of the worst,” in
Bonitzer’s terms. […] The woman’s exercise of an active investigating gaze can only be simultaneous
with her own victimization. The place of her specularization (the stairway) is transformed into the locus
of a process of seeing designed to unveil an aggression against itself.178
Picture 57
Picture 58: Mrs. Markway
What exactly Nell hopes to discover at the top is uncertain, because Markway follows her,
takes her in his arms and saves her from the same fate as the suicidal page companion (which
is just a postponement of her fate, of course). Nell is on display for the others (although not
178
Doane 1987: 135-136.
59
typically as a ‘spectacle for the male gaze’); on her bare feet and in her nightgown, and
behaving unreasonably, the others cannot see her as anything else but a madwoman. Nell does
seem to expect some kind of revelation at the top, but she herself does not really have an
‘investigative gaze’, or it is a false one, because there is nothing to look for. We realize that
the staircase only leads to the ceiling and nowhere else. Something drives her up there and
would probably drive her over the edge, and Nell, in trance, does not really know what she is
after. Or does she? Just before being taken down, Nell sees the face of Mrs. Markway appear
through a trapdoor, in a really quick flash, but this is not really something she expected to see
(picture 58). Only after Nell’s death (by car accident) does Mrs. Markway appear normally
again and does she give her strange explanation; she, too, was under the spell of Hill House
and got lost in and around the house. The house, as it were, led Nell towards this ‘image of
the worst’ of Mrs. Markway, yet what this is supposed to mean is unclear and altogether not
auite significant. although it did not really signify much. In that sense, Nell’s ‘gaze’, leading
her upstairs, was indeed simultaneous with her victimization. Everyone is shocked with Nell’s
fate. Theodora is the only one who thinks perhaps Nell is happy, after her fatal crash. ‘It was
what she wanted, to stay here. She had nowhere else to go…’ Theo says, before Nell’s final
voice-over, which is both reassuring and unsettling.
Moving in circles (conclusion)
In the myriad of meanings that the house embodies I have stressed that several readings can
coexist. It is therefore not necessarily self-evident to speak of the psychic concept of
adaptation, because that would imply that there is a single ‘meaning’; a spirit of the novel
(although one could say that the film respects the novel’s ambiguity). The incarnational
concept is sometimes appropriate in regards to the phenomena at the house, because the
incarnated signifiers need not entail a signified, a clear meaning, they are merely audiovisual
depictions of sights and sounds described in the novel. It is attractive, however, to ‘go with
the flow’ inside Hill House, that is, be taken into the spiralling movement that is inherent in
its architecture, and be led to think that it all revolves around ‘the Mother’, which is the most
plausible reading in the novel as well. As a heterotopia, the most abstract meaning of the
mirror is probably most apt to describe it, because it allows one to relate the house to a highly
personal and pre-Symbolic, pre-Oedipal state, rather than seeing it in a grander context.
Although it can be seen as an institution or a site to study the supernatural out of normal
society, for Nell it is really about finding a retreat and home, and although it initially
represents the Law of the Father to her, the space adopts itself to her sensibility and becomes
60
a mate, regressive environment. What is familiar terrifies but ultimately comforts her. As her
own subjectivity disintegrates she can now merge with the house/mother, so that the safe
symbiosis between mother and child can be reinstated. Perhaps she finds the space she was
looking for, but of course, it is disturbing that she never steps outside of her own little world.
It is convenient to not exclude the possibility that the supernatural exists and that Nell
has special powers. Also it is convenient to see her as a paranoid and ‘projecting’ woman, not
so much because it is very certain that everything is a delusion and is happening in her mind
only, but because the circular mechanism of projection keeps intact the entangled bonds
between house and subject, what is real and what is imagined; in short it allows keeping the
ambiguity that cannot be explained. This goes hand in hand with cinema’s ‘latent paranoia’;
the difficulty of localizing subjectivity - after all, even when there is no typical point of view
shot through Nell, there still seems to be the perspective of her, for instance in the ‘devouring
bed’ scene. Sound also has a double perspective: inexplicable noises are associated with the
internal world of Nell (just like her own voice-over), but some of them are surely heard by
others, such as the pounding. In some extended scenes, sound is the most important
component to suggest haunting, for there is nothing really to see (except for the face out of the
wall, and even this is a questionable observation). The workings of the sound hermeneutic are
illustrated by the searching camera. It is sound that crosses boundaries; from inside Nell’s
head to being projected outside onto the house. This involuntary, nonsensical sound connects
her to her environment, but also to her mother.
The haunting offers no resolutions as to whether Nell’s intuitions were right or that
she was really delusional, although it makes her, more than the novel, look like a victim of the
house. It is disturbing that there is no tangible person for her to fight, or some big secret to
reveal, so that whatever strange ideas she might have can be proven at some point. Just
because Nell is the only one who is really susceptible to the house’s influence does not mean
that the others ‘write her off’ immediately. Regarding the structure of the paranoid woman’s
film, Doane identified the foregrounding of epistemology in relation to paranoid speculation
and the systematicity of the delusion. Although everyone in the house certainly speculates a
lot on the nature of the haunting, Nell is, interestingly enough, not accused of being
delusional. Nor do any of the other characters have a privileged access to knowledge; they do
not see whatever is haunting them either. As such, Nell is not the typical paranoid woman that
no-one believes from the start.
Although the mirror-text in the film - the classical ghost story of the sinister Hugh
Crain - is a Gothic parody, it is typical that Nell is a very serious Female Gothic heroine (or
61
victim) who struggles with her relation to her mother and her own womanhood. Hill House is
supposedly the construction of a male figure, much as the individual is ‘made’ by language
and experience in the Symbolic Order. But the maternal, organic metaphors prevail in Hill
House, it just ‘is’ and incorporates Nell. In this sense The haunting comes closer to being a
paranoid woman’s film than it seemed at first sight: the villainous father figure is really a
cover-up for the real struggle with the mother and with selfhood, and all this is embodied in
the house. Although Doane’s model is rather essentialist because she only acknowledges a
problematic position of the protagonist, it is fit for this particular film, where Eleanor does
ascend, but does not transcend.
62
BLUEBEARD REVISITED: THE REVENGE OF THE FATHER FIGURE
‘De Bonting of Hill House’ (introduction)
No live organism can continue to exist sanely without a little creativity or originality; even larks and
katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hollywood, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding
emptiness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, sequels
continued mindlessly, agents met neatly, salaries and egos were inflated, and minds were sensibly shut;
stupidity lay steadily against the sequels and remakes of Hollywood, and whatever filmed there, filmed
awry.179
I creatively borrowed this funny reference to the novel’s opening paragraph from the web
page (‘De Bonting of Hill House’) of an avid horror fan. It not only alludes to the negative
influence of Jan De Bont as the latest adaptation’s director, but, more importantly, it is
exemplary for how many people thought about The haunting (1999) – a rather ‘stupid’ film,
as it is implied. This relates to the popular belief, found here, that sequels and remakes in
general are bad and not very original. Hollywood is the place of commonplace. However,
exactly what the ‘creativity and originality’ referred to here means is vague, because after all,
the earlier adaptation also necessarily owes much of its greatness to staying ‘faithful’ to a
previous novel, whereas the latest adaptation reworks the novel’s fabula only rather loosely. It
trades in Nell’s personal demons for actual demons that haunt her in the form of an evil father
figure (instead of a spectral mother). The ‘Bluebeardish’ aristocrat Hugh Crain, who only
vaguely cast his shadow on the events in the earlier stories, now appears for real and seeks
revenge on the ones who dare to enter his domain.
Critics and fans did not appreciate the changes in fabula, or the shift of focus from
subtle spectral suggestions to special effects.180 Even if this Haunting was not intended to be
an adaptation of the ‘63 film, but only of the novel181, after their respective artistic successes
and the general fondness for faithful adaptations, it was to be expected that the new Haunting
was not going to be compared favourably to both texts. It was felt by many to betray the
‘spirit’ of the book182, countering Kamilla Elliott’s psychic concept of adaptation. However,
there are other ways as to how this adaptation can be positioned in relation to the novel, as I
will demonstrate. It is tempting to describe the film as lacking a great deal of things that made
the previous film and novel so great (the storyline is very straightforward and stripped from
many ambiguities and possible interpretations), but the film can also add new meaning, of
179
Laughlin 1999.
Schneider 2002: 169.
181
Jensen 1999.
182
Hattenhauer 2005: 251.
180
63
course. Naturally, this is no exhaustive comparison between this film and the previous texts,
nor is it a history of its production and reception.
What I argue in ‘Find us, Eleanor!’ is that Nell is not really in the house as her
mother’s daughter, but rather as a wife and mother herself who seeks to uncover Crain’s
secrets. She is not over-attached to her mother. The ghosts of children are really calling out to
her and are waiting to be rescued. As such, Nell’s ultimate role in the house, not as a typical
paranoid woman but as an investigator, is very different from that in the first film and novel.
In the latter case, Nell was believed at first and gradually lost her credibility, whereas this
time the others do not believe Nell in the least (in the beginning), which makes it all the more
important for Nell to prove that she is ultimately right - the epistemology of the paranoid
speculation and systematicity of the delusion is therefore vital in this adaptation, until the
moment Nell’s suspicions are confirmed. The auditory and visual (on the other hand) are
spectacularly mobilized to help in this process, instead of making her seem paranoid. And
there are other ways in which this Haunting is not like Doane’s type of film. I will demonstrate, then, how the characterization of the heroine, the straightforward storyline, the nature
of haunting, and Nell’s incorporation into the house are all interdependent.
‘Find us, Eleanor!’
The film’s script, written by David Self, apparently followed the book quite closely.183 Darryl
Hattenhauer has made an embittered comparison between Self’s original script and the final
film, and it almost reads like a personal defence for Self, as if the film (and its reviewers) did
not do justice to the innovative genius, and intertextual cleverness of the latter’s work in
adapting the novel. In Hattenhauer’s article it is as if the spirit of The haunting of Hill House
spoke to Self and mingled with his authorial genius, the result of which got lost in the final
adaptation (producer and initiator Steven Spielberg wanted to ‘travel the road not taken by
Wise’ by adding supernatural manifestations, as he told Self; Jan De Bont was inspired by
The shining’s ‘head-trip ambiguity’, and the studio finally demanded a rewrite of the script by
Michael Tolkin, including the ending which they thought ‘lacked clarity’184). Questions of
(authorial) spirit, indebtedness to previous sources and who really takes credit for certain
creative decisions are muddled (or: can we really speak of De Bonting?). Yet it is the final
film that really counts, of course.
183
184
Hattenhauer 2005: 251.
Jensen 1999.
64
Indeed, a lot of changes are noticeable from the beginning on. The psychologist David
Marrow (Liam Neeson) sets up a rather unethical study about fear, and plans to tell the
participants that he is going to investigate the causes and effects of insomnia. Dr. Marrow will
place his subjects in a scary-looking house and spread the rumour that it is haunted. His
insomniac subjects are Eleanor Vance, Theodora and Luke Sanderson. The set-up of the
research is entirely different: the house is not really supposed to be haunted, ghosts are not
assumed to exist, and none of the participants have supernatural powers. Hill House is no
heterotopia in this sense. It does not function as a place to safely keep the abnormal away
from society, nor is it any Romantic place of refuge for Nell (Lili Taylor), who simply needs
some quick cash and a place to temporarily stay. She is not quite the spiteful character from
the book but much more saintly. She could not help the fact that her mother died, and she still
lives in her apartment, which her sister plans to sell. As a gift for the long time she took care
of their mother Nell is offered an old car. Having ‘mopped up urine for years’ and having
sacrificed her good night’s sleep for a mother who was always making demands with her
cane, Nell feels insulted by this petty solace. In the bedroom is a plate that reads ‘A place for
everything and everything in its place’. Obviously Nell should not stay in this place, even if
her mother’s things comfort her. However, she never would have dreamed of going to Hill
House, had she not received a phone call about the lucrative insomniac investigation. In the
end, it turns out that neither Dr. Marrow nor anyone else ever called. It was the house itself or
some ghost in it that picked up the telephone! The idea of a house calling out to Nell has been
taken a bit too literally.
A trivial alteration seems to be the fact that Nell’s rather cute niece is now a nephew,
but perhaps this little Richie is significant in that he is a peculiar bridge between the traumatic past events and the future in Hill House. He knocks over one of Nell’s porcelain dolls and
randomly pounds on the wall with a hat stand, unnerving Nell. Then out of a sudden he turns
and exclaims ‘Help me Eleanor! I gotta pee!’, whereupon he starts laughing diabolically, like
a second-rate Bond villain (picture 59). The boy wielding a cane-like object is a rather clumsy
omen of the fact that evil will no longer come in the form of a ‘phallic’ mother, but in the
form of a male figure, namely the rich (!) tyrant Hugh Crain. At the same time, the mischievous little man forms a curious contrast with the angelic children/girls at Hill House,
whose spirits Nell chooses to save.
65
Picture 59: Nell’s little nephew Richie
Of course, this cruelty is not without its effect on Nell, but exactly what thoughts race through
her mind remains a mystery, because there is no voice-over (not that the novel dictated one, of
course); there is no telepathy of her thoughts. Because of this, subtleties like her possible
feelings of isolation and fragmentation, and her tendency to victimize herself simply do not
exist, which automatically makes Nell into a more unified and stable person. It fits in with her
overall characterization. On the road all one hears from her is happy singing. She is not much
intimidated by the immensity of Hill House and confidently knocks on its door. When no one
answers, she does not wait to be led inside but just finds her way through its long corridors.
Even after meeting the unpleasant caretaker Mrs. Dudley, who shows her the way to her
room, the look on Nell’s face is full of expectation and adventure, rather than unease (picture
60). Instead of jumping up from her own mirror image, she is confronted with the rather
unsavoury image of Hugh Crain on a big painting (picture 61). After Nell the flamboyant
artist Theodora (Catherine Zeta Jones) arrives. This dark lady, prancing around in sexy
outfits, sees a ‘blank canvas’ in Nell. If there should be anything troubling Nell, it does not
really show much in her face or reflection in the house.
Picture 60: Nell, happy to be at Hill House
Picture 61: The portrait of Hugh Crain
66
From early on, then, it is established that there is not really a confrontation with
herself and her own problems, but with the possible threat of Hugh Crain. Also, it is obvious
that only the ghost of a man is the antagonist, not the house as an evil entity. I can be quite
short about how the house, as impressive as it looks, is not personified and anthropomorphised into a villain, for Steven Jay Schneider has concisely pointed out some of the most
prominent ways in which the house is depersonalized:
David Self’s script features few direct addresses to the house by the characters. Little effort is made to
visually disorient the audience […] And although he makes abundant use of high overhead shots,
DeBont almost always has the camera close in on his characters via Steadicam, thereby depersonalizing
the house at the same time that he supplies it with consciousness.185
As such, Hill House is, at first, more like a curiosity, an amusement park ride, instead of an
unsettling, sentient environment. No wonder that Nell and Theo run off excitedly to explore
the extravagant and colourful space of Hill House. They find a room flooded with water that
can be crossed by hopping on floating books, and there is a carrousel room full of revolving
mirrors (picture 62). In the hall, there are also gigantic doors (reminiscent of Auguste Rodin’s
The Gates of Hell), which read: ‘All ye who stand before these doors shall be judged’. It
depicts heaven, hell, and the poor souls of children trapped in purgatory (picture 63). Nell
then allows herself to open up a bit to Theo about her own eleven years of ‘purgatory’ at
home.
Picture 62: The carrousel room
Picture 63: The children trapped in purgatory
Still, Nell is quite a cheerful and normal woman. She may have her problems but so do
the others. Nell is taken into the group of insomniacs, ‘a basket case, like the rest of us’ as the
tatter tale Luke (Owen Wilson) puts it. It is him that Dr. Marrow confides in about the Crain
‘fairy tale’. In this version, the eccentric man again built the house, a family home, to suit his
mind. Furthermore, one of Crain’s wives committed suicide because her husband probably
drove her to it. Dr. Marrow tells all this in the hope that Luke will tell the women, so that their
imaginations will start running wild. Apparently, the expectation is that they (and Luke too)
will start to have paranoid delusions in no time.
185
Schneider 2002: 172.
67
Yet the spectres that show up pretty soon do seem to be real and do seem to have
singled out Nell. The first time they appear is during her first night at the house, when she is
trying to fall asleep. Perfectly still Nell lies in bed with her eyes closed. Outside of her view,
the curtains are moving in the wind and shapes of human figures begin to take form in the
fabric. Then, in the curtains and sheets, the figure of a little girl starts to form as she crawls
towards her (pictures 63 & 64). Nell opens her eyes and sees and hears the face crying out to
her (whiney, rather than eerie): ‘Find us Eleanor. Find us!’ (picture 65). On the background is
the same melody that Nell sung on her way to the house. Apparently her destiny is to fulfil a
quest, and she accepts the invitation with a smile. There is not much reason to think that Nell
is delusional, for the shape of the spectre is clearly discernible and appears out of her sight.
Pictures 63 & 64: A figure appears in the curtain…
then moves under the bed sheet towards Nell
The next day, the Crain portrait is
smudged with blood. It reads ‘Welcome home
Eleanor’. Later that night, Nell wakes again as
the girl’s voice calls her name for the second
time. On the floor are bloody foot prints that
Picture 65: ‘Find us, Eleanor!’
she immediately follows. Are they coming
from the child ghost or does Crain perhaps want Nell to find something? With this
‘welcoming’ father/husband figure, and the invitation to and arousal of a morbid female
curiosity, the story turns towards the tale of Bluebeard.186 This grand folk tale finds various
expressions throughout the past three centuries but they all centre around a woman on the
search for forbidden knowledge.187 Whereas this young wife used to be known for her
reckless and transgressive curiosity, a ‘treacherous deceiver, guilty of moral and sexual
186
Maria Tatar: ‘The Bluebeard plot, in its standard folkloric form, features a sinister figure whose wealth wins
him the hand of two sisters, each of whom mysteriously disappears. The third and youngest in the trio of young
women reluctantly marries Bluebeard, who arranges a test of her fidelity when he hands over the keys to all the
rooms in his mansion but expressly forbids entering one remote chamber. As soon as Bluebeard leaves for an
extended journey, his wife rushed to the forbidden chamber, opens the door, and finds the corpses of her
husband’s previous wives. A stained key, a blood-spattered egg, a withered flower, or a bruised apple betray the
wife’s transgression to the husband, who, in a murderous rage, is about to behead his wife, when her brothers
come to the rescue and cut Bluebeard down with their swords’. (Tatar 2004: 12).
187
Tatar 2004: 15.
68
betrayal’, in our culture, Maria Tatar argues, she has gained the more respectable and heroic
image of a ‘resourceful investigator’.188 The spinster-like and not so lustful Nell is one of the
heroines. Unlike the earlier Nell, who merely dwells in the house and is taken into the house’s
flow, as it were, involuntarily confronted with repressed anxieties, this protagonist seeks her
own path.
Picture 66: Nell snooping around in Crain’s secret study
At the same time, however, this path is also initiated by temptation, like the situation
of Bluebeard’s wife who is given the key to all rooms, except that here it is the children’s
ghosts that call attention to themselves and want Nell to go exploring. The bloody foot prints
next to Nell’s bed lead to a bookcase which opens almost immediately and brings her to
Crain’s secret study (picture 66). As if waiting to be found there is a huge and dusty book that
registers all the child labourers from Crain’s textile industry who died at an early age. Nell’s
finding of the Crain book is no longer a symbolic recognition of the Law of the Father. It is
now simply a concrete record of Crain’s dubious affairs, which must be taken seriously. Nell
thinks that the house is trying to tell her something. Theodora does not believe that,
obviously. It is from this point on that Nell continues to make new discoveries, and that the
others increasingly start to doubt her sanity. She finds Dr. Marrow’s Dictaphone, on which
she hears him calling Nell ‘alienated’ and ‘emtionally unstable’, although he is inconclusive
about her observations.
In a family book Nell later finds sepia-toned photographs of the rather furry man Crain
(who actually resembles Chewbacca or the Wolf Man, rather than the aristocratic Bluebeard),
and his first wife (picture 67). Nell is also curious about his second wife, Caroline. She turns
188
Tatar 2004: 4.
69
out to be Nell’s great-grandmother (which is suggested when her spirit turns Nell’s hair into a
twist, just like her own hairstyle depicted in her portrait, picture 68). Nell is thus associated
with the Crain wives through family lineage, which explains why Crain’s ghost welcomes her
in his house. As she flips through the photo book, an animated film appears from a sequence
of photographs of Caroline, who points towards the fireplace. Here, Nell discovers human
bones. She then tells everybody that Crain has killed his own children and the ones working
in his textile mill, and that both his and their spirits are still in the house. In a later scene Nell
sees her reflection in the ‘carrousel room’ with its revolving mirrors (picture 69). Her mirror
image smiles back at her and turns to show a steadily growing belly (picture 70). It is clear
that Crain wants to make babies with Nell. Portrayed as a libidinous, oriental looking, wealthy
and despotic murderer (and living in a house that, according to Theo, looks like ‘Charles
Foster Kane meets The Munsters’), Crain is really a modern-day Bluebeard.189 The mirrors in
the house do not really reflect him, or Nell. They are his very own projection screens, but not
in any psychoanalytical sense. They act as a kind of crystal ball where he shows the future he
has in store for Nell.
Picture 67: Crain and his first wife
Picture 68: Crain’s second wife Caroline (‘s hair)
Picture 69: A look into the future
Picture 70
In the novel there are some fairly explicit and implicit references to the Bluebeard tale, which
seem to have taken up a life of their own in this film.190 Eleanor, for one thing, is supposed to
189
Tatar 2004: 19.
A similar thing seems to have happened in the case of Stephen King’s Rose Red - which is basically a loose
adaptation of The haunting of Hill House - and its prequel, The diary of Ellen Rimbauer. The source of the evil
hauntings in the house is the misbehaviour of malevolent oil tycoon John Rimbauer. As an extra backup,
however, the house is also built on Indian burial ground, and it was ‘born bad’. This is comparable to the
confusing explanations of the phenomena in Hill House (a house simply born bad, or haunted by the ghosts of
190
70
sleep in the Blue Room. Once inside, she thinks ‘Sister Anne, sister Anne’191, like the
youngest wife who desperately calls out to her sister before her execution. It shows the author
Shirley Jackson’s awareness of the cultural framework she operates in, and at the same time
reflects the character’s perception of the house. Also, a modest motif is the beard/letter B, but
just like the blue room, it is a self-conscious and ironic reference. The beard and letter B are
associated with Dr. Montague, who has the virility of a garden gnome, ‘round and rosy and
bearded’.192 As such, Jackson herself has turned the beard as sign upside down: in the folk
tales it signifies male power and libidinousness, but she has turned it into a signifier of
cosiness and ‘castrated’ manhood, a figure of mockery. Like the ironic reference to ‘Sister
Anne’, the Bluebeard reference forms part of the manifest text/mirror-text level of the novel,
which is detached from reality yet helps to put it in perspective.193
By foregrounding the dormant Bluebeard element The haunting ‘99 is like a
de(re)composition of the novel, whereby ‘a subtext may become the main text of a reading at
the expense of a whole’ and any kind of ‘spirit’ (of the author, the novel) is ignored, for ‘dead
people that died there, or Crain’s distorted architecture), and the Overlook Hotel in The shining (Dir. Stanley
Kubrick. Warner Bros: 1980) that was built on Indian burial ground, and made Jack Torrance suffer from cabin
fever, and had evil ghosts from the past...
191
Jackson 1987: 38.
192
Jackson 1987: 60.
193
This motif appears for the first time when Luke invites all to introduce themselves:
“I know that it is Eleanor here, who is wearing a red sweater, and consequently it must be Theodora
who wears yellow - ”
“Doctor Montague has a beard,” Theodora said, “so you must be Luke.”
“And you are Theodora,” Eleanor said, “because I am Eleanor.” […]
“Therefore you are wearing the red sweater,” Theodora explained to her soberly.
“I have no beard,” Luke said, “so he must be Doctor Montague.”
“I have a beard,” Dr. Montague said, pleased, and looked around with a happy beam. “My wife,” he
told them, “likes a man to wear a beard. Many women, on the other hand, find a beard distasteful. A cleanshaven man – you’ll excuse me, my boy – never looks fully dressed, my wife tells me.” He held out his glass to
Luke.
“Now that I know which of us is me,” Luke said, “let me identify myself further. I am, in private life
[…] – let me see, a bullfighter. Yes. A bullfighter.”
“I love my love with a B,” Eleanor said in spite of herself, “because he is bearded.”
“Very true.” Luke nodded at her. “That makes me Doctor Montague. I live in Bangkok, and my hobby
is bothering women.”
“Not at all,” Dr. Montague protested, amused. “I live in Belmont.” [end of quote]
Then the others present their respective personas; Nell is an artist’s model, Theo is a lord’s daughter, and Dr.
Montague is a pilgrim (Jackson 1987: 60-62).
Towards the end of the story is the following fragment:
“Journeys end in lovers meeting,” Luke said, and smiled across the room at Eleanor. “Does that blue
dress on Theo really belong to you? I’ve never seen it before.”
“I am Eleanor,” Theodora said wickedly, “because I have a beard.”
“You were wise to bring clothes for two,” Luke told Eleanor. “Theo would never have looked half so
well in my old blazer.”
“I am Eleanor,” Theo said, “because I am wearing blue. I love my love with an E because she is
ethereal. Her name is Eleanor, and she lives in expectation.” (Jackson 1987: 222-223).
71
matter becomes organic life underground’, in the words of Kamilla Elliott.194 She notes that
what are perceived as infidelities to the original text are actually often there (which is a matter
of degree in this case: the Crain story is there in the novel, but it is never explicitly stated that
Crain is still alive in the present). The de(re)composing concept counters the psychic one, for
the supposed intention behind the work is disregarded and gets lost. One might say that De
Bont, Spielberg and others did not comprehend Jackson’s likely intention with Hugh Crain,
but then, they seem to have had their own agenda with him too, as we shall see.
A point that seems to be overlooked in both adaptations is the various elaborate
descriptions of colour (in the rooms, the clothing, etcetera). On her arrival Nell first wears red
clothes and later trades them in for blue ones (becoming, as a sort of Bluebeard wife, an
object of Theo’s mockery). The vivacious Theo likes to wear bright colours such as yellow in
order to be as visible as possible in the dark house. She gets to stay in the green room, a
mixture of the blue and yellow and signalling her close relation to Nell. When Theo finds her
own wardrobe smudged with (menstrual?) blood, she has to wear Nell’s things. Whereas the
‘63 film (favouring the dark corners of the house with its black and white photography), did
not have the opportunity to incarnate this colour coding, the ‘99 film could obviously do so.
However this adaptation seems to have followed the earlier one by having Theo dressed in a
sexy dark palette and Nell in dull colours and pastels, and in a white nightgown eventually
(moreover, there is again a mousy blonde and a mysterious, dark-eyed brunette, which was
not specified in the novel). In the same film, Nell is supposed to stay in the red, not blue room
(a purple one in the shooting script!), by which Nell becomes, strangely enough, not
associated with Bluebeard’s wife but with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), who, as a
child, was punished by sleeping in the unpleasant Red Room. This further illustrates the
newest adaptation as de(re)composition, where ‘textual and filmic signs [merge] in audience
consciousness together with other cultural narratives’, and exactly what elements came out of
the novel and earlier film has been blurred.195 The filmmakers stuck to familiar imagery of the
earlier film themselves; moreover, where they seem to have made deliberate changes it is
impossible not to think of these alterations as having to do with other familiar symbols. In the
case of the Jane Eyre association, we think of the Red Room as a room of oppression - which
actually comes down to the same thing as the Blue(beard) Room, and one wonders why it is
altered (and what the initial purple room signified, for that matter).
194
195
Elliott 2004: 234.
Elliott 2004: 233.
72
Indeed, classics like Jane Eyre and many films of the paranoid woman’s genre also
resemble the Bluebeard story196 (Rebecca [1940], Secret beyond the door, [1948]).197
Although the Gothic and the Bluebeard story are not always easily distinguishable, there is a
difference. Tatar: ‘Unlike the Gothic novel, which delights in a proliferation of family secrets
and intrigues, the Bluebeard story - like Jane Eyre and Rebecca - remains narrowly focused
on one enigma and its effect on one couple. […] In the end, [the woman] devotes her real
energies to unravelling the mystery of the man to whom she is attached.’198 In the earlier film
and novel, Crain was also a twisted man, but he had not committed any murders or other
crimes. It was not about discovering his dark secrets. Moreover, he was just one of many
possible explanations for the strange phenomena in the house, a foil really to the uncanniness
that came with the confrontation of the maternal energy in the house.
Also, this ‘original’ Nell was a different type of woman. In dwelling through the
house, not looking for anything in particular, she was really passive (‘Finally, something is
happening to me!’), and by being the centre of attention all the time, she was narcissistic.199 In
the book she identified with a young disobedient girl, rather than her mother. Nell was
wrapped up inside her own little world. But the new Eleanor is not victimized. She tells Dr.
Marrow: ‘I can be a victim or a volunteer. I choose to be a volunteer’. It is as if the makers of
the film deliberately inserted this phrase in order to distance this Nell from her passive
predecessor. Without any problems of over-attachment to a mother it looks like she has
already entered her Oedipal path before and knows how to stand up for herself against an evil
antagonist such as Crain, who is revived not without reason. One might also argue that Nell
thrives in the house exactly because of Crain’s presence, and that he is a paternal signifier by
which she can become part of the Symbolic Order. Yet Nell’s characterization from the
beginning on was unproblematic, active and mature, not like a ‘mother’s girl’. Hill House is
merely another test for her after standing through the period with her mother.
Picture 71: Nell amidst the children
Picture 72: The double helix staircase
196
Tatar 2004: 68.
Secret beyond the door. Dir. Fritz Lang. DPC, 1948.
198
Tatar 2004: 69.
199
Hattenhauer 2005: 256.
197
73
In fact, she looks like a mother herself as she then steps amidst a circle of statues of
the small Crain children, after her little chat with Marrow. With a tender expression she looks
down upon them (picture 71). (In David Self’s screen play there was also a scene before
Nell’s arrival at Hill House, where she is at a gas station and comforts a crying baby in a car.
When its mother returns, she tells Nell that she is excellent with children. Nell then replies
that she would really like to work with children some day...).200 The same imagery from the
novel (the statues) is used again, but not to identify Nell with an instable figure such as the
page companion, but with the wholesome Crain wife who mothered her own children so very
well. Like the ventriloquist concept of adaptation (not to be confused with Rick Altman’s
sound hermeneutic), this sign is taken as a mere signifier and ‘filled with filmic spirits’, with
new ideological content201, namely the importance and self-evidence of motherhood. The
novel is used as a dummy to speak a wholly different message - after all, in The haunting of
Hill House, motherhood is a painful and problematic experience. What the ventriloquist
concept shares with the adaptation as de(re)composition is that the novel is taken as dead
matter and the authorial spirit is disregarded. The difference might be that the latter concept is
an organic process, whereas in the ventriloquist concept any alterations were made
deliberately to ‘speak a new message’.
A similar thing happens with the spiral staircase standing in the greenhouse. It is in the
shape of double helix DNA strings (picture 72), so that its (likely) ‘signified’ of uncanny
repetition and a transgressive path towards death is overshadowed with the signified of
‘family’. (Recall the spiral knot in both Nell’s and her grandmother Caroline’s hair, which
also signified family relations). The importance of family values for Nell gives her an aura of
benignity, and her identification with a responsible and mature figure makes her more
credible for the spectator, although the other characters still doubt her. The scene in the
greenhouse, however, is one where her observations are not only dubious for the other
characters, but also for the spectator. With Theo and Luke, Nell is in the green house. In a
point-of-view shot, Nell sees the first Crain wife hanging down from the top of the stairs, and,
in shock, leaves the others, but when they look at the same spot there is nothing to see
(pictures 73-75). (When Nell later goes up the stairs she is not driven by anything else but her
own curiosity). Or can Nell only sense what has happened in the house?
One only really knows for sure that the house is really haunted, and that Nell’s
suspicions are actually right when Dr. Marrow, too, is the target of Crain’s evil actions. When
200
201
Self & Tolkin 1998.
Elliott 2004: 226.
74
walking through the greenhouse all by himself, reporting to his Dictaphone that things get out
of hand and that it is better for everyone to leave, a giant statue lying in a basin of water
suddenly comes to life (picture 76), snatches him, and pushes him under, blood pouring out of
the monster’s mouth. Seeing is believing, so Nell must be right at some point. Mary Ann
Doane, too, acknowledges that the paranoid woman’s film revolves around the woman’s
search for knowledge. However, in her model this is a woman who is ultimately wrong in her
suspicions. Her gaze is objectless because the female subject, unlike the male subject, cannot
see that ‘other’, castrated body by which she can define her identity; she is that body herself:
Picture 73: Nell looks up…
Picture 74: POV shot of Crain’s first wife
Picture 75: Nell still sees, but Theo does not
Picture 76: A giant hand reaches out for Marrow
In this particular cycle of Gothic films, the very process of seeing is now invested with fear, anxiety,
horror, precisely because it is objectless, free-floating. Female scopophilia is a drive without an object,
an undirected and free-floating drive which is conducive to the operation of the phobia. True horror is
fear without a definable or specifiable object. Because female vision is objectless, free-floating, it is
more proper to what Kristeva, in Powers of Horror, calls the “abject” (and abjection, according to
Kristeva, is stronger than the uncanny). The abject, which is anterior to the opposition between subject
and object, is the “not yet object”; it is the non-object of the search for “something to be scared of”. [...]
So when the woman in filmic narrative confronts the non-object of her own fear, what she confronts is
herself.202
This seems to hold for the first film only. The ‘old’ Nell, unable to distinguish between
subject and object, can only hear but not see whatever is haunting her. In the climactic moment before she thinks the house is ‘coming down around her’ and destroying itself, she runs
through the corridors and walks up into a mirror, terrified. This corresponds with her earlier
frightening moment where the first thing in the house that scared her was her own mirrorimage. The ‘new’ Eleanor, too, has a significant mirror moment, but of a wholly different
202
Doane 1987: 141.
75
kind. This is right before she sees herself with a budding belly. Nell sees her face in the
mirror, but her eyes and mouth look strangely different. Her reflection does and does not
resemble her. It is Crain that tries to tell her something, but it is unclear if this woman is
supposed to be one of Nell’s ancestors or herself. Yet Nell knows: ‘That is not me!’. She will
not be disturbed by the distorted image and will not allow herself to become her predecessor.
Moreover, she knows perfectly well what her object of fear is, namely Hugh Crain.
The choice of making the protagonist into a more active and investigative heroine is in
itself certainly not a bad thing (even if it goes against the Jacksonian depiction of her female
protagonists). However, it means that Nell’s suspicions need to be clearly represented; that
there is really something to see. If this is not just in her imagination, the ghosts need to be part
of the ‘real’ world. It is at this point that the film turns into a roller coaster ride of special
effects, losing all possible ambiguity regarding the nature of the haunting. Despite using the
novel as the primary source of adaptation, DreamWorks producer Steven Spielberg intended
to ‘deliver the goods to modern audiences’.203 He probably meant dazzling the audience with
spectacular special effects that had not been possible at the time when the first adaptation was
made, despite De Bont’s insistence that ‘effects [were] definitely not the emphasis’.204 This
time it seems to be about seeing things that are there. The film goes beyond the epistemology
and systematicity of the paranoid delusion: Nell was right after all and there is no need to
prove her wrong anymore now that everything is visible. What is terrifying is no longer
abseits but can be faced directly. Gargoyles, for example, start moving in the presence of her
friends. It is no longer a matter of the camera moving and changing perspectives, so that
inanimate objects seem to start moving; the objects really do move by themselves. Like in the
ventriloquist concept, the ghosts as signs are filmed with filmic spirits - literally - or should
one speak of computer generated spirits? At the same time, this Haunting seems to have
borrowed imagery from the ’63 film, for children’s faces on the walls, carved out in wood,
change expressions. In the novel no faces appear from the surface, but there was the face
coming out of the wallpaper in the earlier adaptation.
The house is haunted by actual ghosts, which means that the haunting is not in Nell’s
mind, nor is the house itself evil. There is ‘unfinished business’ in the house, so to speak. By
accepting the supernatural as a part of real life, this Haunting moves away from the uncanny.
There is no longer a crisis of phenomenality: the ghosts are for our very eyes to see. The
uncanny effect that rests on intellectual certainty as to whether there are actual spirits or not,
203
204
Jensen 1999.
Bonin 1999.
76
whether inanimate objects are alive or not, does not occur here. Freud acknowledges that what
may be uncanny in real life is not necessarily so in works of fiction, and yet stories that
pretend to begin from the framework of ‘real life’ can be uncanny when inexplicable things
start happening.205 Not in this film, where the intellectual certainty is ultimately resolved. The
house is not a creature itself, it is merely a site where several monsters appear by the hand of
an evil ghost. If these phenomena are all caused by Crain’s spirit, then the house can be
purified and the problem solved, too.
Contrary to Mary Ann Doane, Andrea Walsh does not speak of the paranoid woman’s
film, but rather of ‘Suspicion confirmed’ as in the case of Gaslight (1944)206, Secret beyond
the door (1948) and many other films in the genre. In other words, the female protagonist is
not a lunatic and her suspicions are not all ‘in her head’. This characterization probably relates
to the fact that Walsh does not work from a psychoanalytical framework, and that she distinguishes between internal madness (paranoid delusion etcetera) and external madness (for
instance, men with evil intentions). (Doane, on the other hand, characterizes the cinematic
narrative structure as inherently subjective and biased towards the paranoid). In this Haunting,
the madness is external. Like in Gaslight, there is a man (in this case Dr. Marrow) who
stimulates the women to see things that are not really there, although Dr. Marrow at some
point realises he went too far. He is not the one responsible for the hauntings, however, for
unlike Gaslight, there are actual supernatural manifestations caused by Crain. Still, in both
cases both female protagonists are not mad themselves.207 Obviously, in this type there can be
a resolution to the threats and mysteries if the heroine stands up to this man.
Picture 77
Picture 78: A monster appears from the ceiling
However, Nell has to endure some hardships first, because Crain will not let her go so
easily: the organ pipes over her bed turn into a kind of spider legs and throw themselves all
over her (pictures 77 & 78), preventing her to leave (again, the film borrows imagery from the
earlier film, for this animated, devouring bed was not in the novel). The others then free her,
205
Freud 1975: 246.
Gaslight. Dir. George Cukor. MGM: 1944.
207
In the earlier film this is more difficult to define; certainly the haunting was not all experienced by Nell only,
and yet the causes were unclear.
206
77
but all statues come to life and Nell starts to fight one of them with a stick as the rest runs
away (pictures 79 & 80). When they reunite, Nell is found in a room which is an exact replica
of her mother’s bedroom. She tells them that it is her task to stay in the house and protect the
children’s ghosts who are still haunted by the spirit of Hugh Crain. She has found her home
and purpose. Her friends, however, try to get away but fail to do so. When Luke attacks the
portrait of Crain, an evil carpet (!) scoops him up and steers him towards the fireplace, where
he is decapitated.
Picture 79: A gargoyle starts to move
Picture 80: Nell as action heroine
Picture 81: Crain finally appears from the portrait hanging upstairs
Picture 82: ‘Hugh Crain, you go to hell’
Picture 83: Crain is pulled towards the door
In the gigantic hall, the tiny figure of Nell then tries to call out the spirit of Crain. The
huge spectre of Crain appears before the three of them (picture 81), and Nell tries to protect
her friends. ‘It’s not about them!’ she shouts. ‘It’s about Caroline, and the children in the
mills. They are my family! It’s always been about family! Hugh Crain, I’m gonna stop you
78
now’. She then wishes him to hell (picture 82). Apparently she has supernatural powers too,
because the gate keeper figures from the ‘Heaven and Hell door’ fly towards Crain and pull
him (picture 83) in, where Crain, in agony, descends. The house is not shut off, but has a
portal to dispense with evil forces. Nell, however, is pulled along, and Christ-like, with her
arms spread and still in her white nightgown, she is held up (picture 84). Then, the spirits of
the children carved out in the walls are released from purgatory and ascend to heaven. Nell
joins them (pictures 85 & 86). She has become a martyr who sacrificed herself for the
children. At the same time she has become like the Virgin Mother to these children, by acting
as their protective mother without having conceived them. Released right before the new
millennium, the new Haunting celebrates Christian imagery and morality.
Picture 84: Nell carried by ‘gate keepers’ in the Heaven and Hell door
Pictures 85 & 86: Nell’s spirit goes to heaven…
along with the spirits of the children
The ending is probably the ultimate change to the earlier story. In the previous texts,
Nell chose to do whatever she thought was best for herself, and drove off in an act of
desperation. She did not really gain anything. This time, in the ‘99 film, Nell’s spirit can truly
transcend because she has served a higher purpose. Nell has become an altruistic and
wholesome character, not at all like the narcissistic and fragmented, passive heroines found in
Jackson’s fiction - and the earliest adaptation, for that matter.
79
Moreover, the theme of the impossibility of forming a family and the desire to cut
loose from the mother has been perverted into a politically correct pamphlet for family values,
and specifically, the bonding between mothers and daughters (after all, little boy Richie from
the beginning was not a model child, and the father/husband figure of Crain is dispensed
with). Despite the sympathetic portrayal of the hip, hedonist and bi-sexual Theo, who is afraid
to commit to her partners, the film tells us that self-sacrifice and nurturing a family is the best
thing to do for a woman. In the earlier film and novel, Nell has sacrificed a good deal of her
youth to her mother, but resents doing so and finally chooses for herself. In The haunting
1999, total sacrifice is an admirable thing. By making self-sacrifice for a higher purpose the
point of Nell’s existence, this film can, curiously enough, be placed in the same tradition as
the woman’s film of the 1940s, which centres around a kind of sacrifice of some sort on the
part of the heroine: sacrificing her career for the sake of love, sacrificing her own welfare for
that of children, sacrificing health and wealth to fight for a good cause…208 Judging by the
blissful expression on Nell’s face she cannot think of anything better than her personal fate.
From a greater perspective however, it is ironic that the attempt to transform and modernize
Nell ultimately turns around into old-fashioned, familiar notions of womanhood.
‘A place for everything and everything in its place’ (conclusion)
The neat resolution to Nell’s ending, where she finds her true purpose and place as a selfsacrificing mother type, is best described by this old proverb that her own mother liked so
much. What resonates the most after this Haunting is Nell’s almost epiphanous ‘It’s always
been about family!’. It is a line spoken with such resoluteness that it seems to stretch beyond
the context of this particular production, as if Nell, meta-textually, is making the only true
claim about what The hauntings (all three texts) were about, and that the previous film and
novel failed to truly bring the family full circle. Indeed, in the latter texts it was about the
family, but in a different sense, as I argued: the impossibility of cutting loose from the
family/mother and the difficulty of standing on your own. If there can be such a thing as the
‘spirit’ of the work, then that is it, and the 1999 film counters it instead of finally showing the
right direction. Yet maybe this is me ‘reading into’ the line too much, which is actually a
good illustration of the de(re)-composing concept of adaptation, for it is almost impossible to
look at Jan De Bont’s (or Self’s or Spielberg’s?) Haunting without having the other film in
mind as well, and thinking of how everything relates to it. Although I have tried to compare
208
Molly Haskell in Walsh 1984: 25.
80
the latest adaptation to the novel in the first place, it seems as if the filmmakers had Robert
Wise’s version in the back of their own minds sometimes, not only because they tried to turn
away with such force from the old, victimized character of Nell (by having the new one say ‘I
choose to be a volunteer’), but also because some of the imagery of the ’63 film, which was
not in the novel, returns.
Some of it is merely copied and not very significant, for instance the choice of having
a blonde and a brunette as female leads. Different things, however, happen with imagery such
as the ‘devouring bed’ and the ‘observing (children’s) faces’ from the wall. These ambivalent
signs (signifying both Nell’s possible paranoia and the possibility of an actual evil force) are
literalized: the bed and the children’s faces really start moving. The haunting becomes really
visible. Yet is seeing believing? Certainly the epistemology of the delusion, as in the paranoid
woman’s film, is foregrounded. Nell’s observations are constantly discredited, and she keeps
trying to prove that she is right. Quite early on does the spectator think she is right, when
strange things happen out of her sight (for instance the girl in the bed sheets). This does not
take away Doane’s claim, though, that in cinema, subjectivity is more difficult to localize (as
in ambivalent scenes like the woman hanging down from the staircase). However, the makers
of this film have actively chosen to disambiguate many scenes of haunting. In this way, one
identifies with Nell as a kind of detective who has been misjudged, not a woman who is
losing it. At a certain point do the characters realise this as well, when they too see what Nell
sees, and they no longer question her.
The haunting does not really allow a further reading of itself as a typical paranoid
woman’s film. Hugh Crain may be an evil father figure, but he does not stand for the Law of
the Father. There has not been any obvious foreclosure of a paternal signifier and Nell does
not become paranoid as a result of this. Family can be constituted without this father figure,
and so can Nell, who is not passive and narcissistic and has already entered the Symbolic
Order (if any in this context). Rather than a daughter, she becomes a mother (but chooses not
to become Crain’s bride). She is not over-attached to her mother or her predecessors in the
house. The mirrors in the house do not reflect herself or Crain, they are more like screens
where Crain projects his evil intentions. Her obsession with him and getting rid of him does
not really have any greater meaning to it than helping the souls of the poor children and
wives. Nell is like Bluebeard’s wife, as she tries to uncover Crain’s secret and gets punished
for it, but she is also nobler: whereas the latter only saved herself, this Nell saves others too.
To reclaim Hill House as a home, Nell must first see it as an arena where she must battle the
81
evil spirits. Yet this modern heroism goes hand in hand with old-fashioned female selfsacrifice.
Apart from the binary oppositions of self/other, those of inside/outside and safe/unsafe
are also relatively clear. This is in part because of the way things are audio-visualized. I have
not paid much attention to sound, because it has a supportive function in this film; smaller in
comparison to the other adaptation. In most scary scenes, sound alone does not operate by
itself to suggest haunting. Sight is foregrounded. In this respect, there is no abseits uncannyness of disembodied sound and other sounds without sources. The lack of voice-over does not
allow us to hear what goes on inside Nell. Her soul, as voice, does not come through.
Her soul, however, transcends in the end when she rises up to heaven. Although this
film pays no respect to the ‘spirit’ of the novel or that of Shirley Jackson (one might think the
film’s makers have misunderstood the novel’s ambiguity), it does to that of the character of
Nell. Regarding Elliott’s concepts of adaptation, the de(re)composing and the ventriloquist
concepts come to mind. In both, the novel (and film) are regarded as dead or dormant texts
not animated by any spirit or intentions. This Haunting can be regarded as a de(re)composition of the novel and earlier adaptation, because the latter’s mirror-text has been
isolated and magnified as the main storyline, resulting in a loss of any ironic distance towards
it. The film was made with a modern audience in mind and testifies to how the makers were
aware of how this popular cultural narrative of The haunting must have been developing in
audience consciousness and how it would have to turn out in a more modern age. They
thought making the protagonist more active and showing lots of special effects (‘the road not
taken by Wise’) would appeal to that. (In the appendix, I have included a funny ‘rewrite’ of
the film’s script, another example of a de(re)composition of the text. It is not so much relevant
for all its intertextual references, but for pointing out major points of critique in the
adaptation: Nell’s overly sympathetic characterization; Jan De Bont who merely directed ‘a
glorified technical job’ and did not know what he was talking about, etc). At the same time,
the film ventriloqually takes familiar signs (the statues, the spiral form, which stand for the
uncanny repetition of the fate of the page companion) and takes them as mere signifiers for
the importance of family values. They are filled with new ideological content. It’s always
been about family, after all.
82
BECOMING HOMELY (CONCLUSION)
The two Haunting adaptations are like mirror opposites, even though they are both based on
the same novel. Whereas the first is an obscure, dark and twisted tale, the second is a clarified
and straightforward reinterpretation that tries to shed new light on the character of Nell.
Robert Wise’s Nell, a troubled daughter, must deal with the ghost of her mother; Jan De
Bont’s Nell becomes a mother herself for the children in the house (and must, moreover, deal
with the ghost of an evil father figure). Whereas in the first film the possibility of supernatural
phenomena is not ruled out and Nell is believed initially, but discredited in the end, in the
second, the supernatural is not supposed to exist and Nell is regarded as a lunatic, yet her
name is cleared when ghosts actually show up. The first Nell, passive and narcissistic,
ultimately does not gain anything in the house; the new Nell, active and altruistic, who does
not seek any higher purpose, does win after all. In the first adaptation, the characters are not
physically jeopardized and it is the house they move in that represents bodily horror; in the
second they are physically harmed, and the house is not any corporeal entity at all. In the first
film, the haunting is suggested mostly by hearing strange noises, in the second, by seeing
actual ghosts appear. One would think that this tendency to mark everything in binary
oppositions would have disappeared after seeing the first film, where boundaries uncannily
blur and become untenable, and yet it resurfaces again after the second adaptation that moves
away from the uncanny and clearly distinguishes between inside/outside, subject/object and
self/other.
It was therefore no coincidence that I focused on the first Haunting, for the simple
reason that it is difficult to put one’s finger on what exactly is going on in that house, which
makes the whole film very compelling and rather terrifying. Even at this point there are things
about it that are still puzzling. To recapitulate from the first chapter, there is the prominence
of Nell’s voice-over, that medium-specific component that uncannily takes us inside her
unstable psyche and guides us throughout the haunting, yet takes up a life of its own beyond
her death. Its interior position and function is typical of the paranoid woman’s film, although
that does not necessarily mean that what it mediates is a delusional observation or thought.
The voice (-over) has uncanny possibilities, especially in a disembodied form, although it is
no equivalent to the inherently uncanny ‘telepathic’ narration found in novels. Along with
visual components, like camera perspective, editing and lighting it creates an elusive and
ambiguous sense of haunting.
The second chapter was about the house and what it materializes. The house as a
reflection of father figure Hugh Crain’s mind is really a cover for its embodiment of the
83
maternal, just as beyond the ironic Gothic mirror-text about this villain is the serious Female
Gothic story of a woman struggling (and failing) to rise out of the Imaginary Order; a woman
afraid of her own face in the mirror. Being inside this house leads to a return of the repressed
and makes her see and hear things in its various surfaces; things that seem to be after her and
watch her too. The house is heterotopic in all its contradictions, although finally for Nell it is
all about finding the familiar and homely.
Finally, in the Jan De Bont adaptation Hugh Crain appears to take revenge, this time
as an unambiguous villain to really stand up to. With her cunning ways Nell manages to
outwit this modern Bluebeard as more and more spectres start to appear. She can clearly
recognize him as an antagonist and can also clearly see the ghosts. In regard to the paranoid
woman’s film, the epistemology of the so-called delusions are, to an extent, important in both
Hauntings, since in both of them the idea behind going to the house in the first place, is to
investigate phenomena that defy the normal and rational. In the first film, however, they
cannot and need not be explained by any logic in the eyes of Dr. Markway, whereas in the
later one the validity of Nell’s observations are constantly at stake. Yet whereas the first film
in other respects fits the label of paranoid woman’s film rather well, the latter defies any
further psychoanalytical reading. Indeed Nell, to an extent, gains wisdom and independence
by investigating the story behind the Bluebeard-like, father-like Crain, by which she comes
closer to the maternal, yet the themes and mechanisms of the paranoid woman’s film cannot
really apply. In this model, the feminine position is a problematic one; the female
protagonist’s gaze is objectless and she is merged with the mother, as a result of which she is
paranoid, to put it rather simply. All of this does not apply to the modern Nell. She does not
encounter das Unheimliche either, but simply finds her true home.
Robert Wise’s film seems almost made to illustrate psychoanalytical film theory. He is
faithful in depicting one of Shirley Jackson’s typical, passive female protagonists, in her
problematic relationship with her mother, which is why I would apply Doane’s model only to
this kind of ambiguous film, and not to films where the heroine is not victimized and where
her suspicions are actually confirmed. Indeed in his fidelity approach Wise has managed to
stay true to a kind of spirit of the novel and the author, if any, or at least he has managed to
keep the ambivalence of Jackson’s novel. Partly he does so by sometimes merely incarnating
sensory descriptions and not directly attach any meaning to them. Jan De Bont’s version,
however, is like Jackson’s (and Wise’s) house of fiction decomposed and built up again to
appeal to a modern audience, but this time, the mirror-text is foregrounded and becomes
reality. In Hill House, mirrors become projection screens for Hugh Crain, and whatever the
84
‘paranoid’ Nell from Robert Wise’s film projected onto the house now becomes real
(creatures that start moving, etcetera). Still, the film employs self-referentiality and gains a
sense of meta-textuality with the characterization of Nell, who seems to distance herself from
her ‘old self’. In this sense, the film uses Nell and other elements to speak a new message
about womanhood and the woman’s film, and preach an active and investigative role. Here
one witnesses the further hybridization of the Gothic, or phantomization of its form: it does
indeed feed upon itself in a self-referential manner.209 However, the final film ultimately
regresses into familiar notions of womanhood, namely the importance of self-sacrifice and
being a mother. It tries to find a final resting place, as it were, for Nell’s wandering spirit that
got released by the previous film as her unsettling, acousmatic voice.
209
Wolfreys 2002: 8/9.
85
Bibliography
Altman, Rick. ‘Moving lips. Cinema as ventriloquism’. Yale French Studies, No. 60, (1980),
p. 67-79.
Bal, Mieke. Narratology. Introduction to the theory of narrative. 2nd edition. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Bernstein. Susan. ‘It walks. The ambulatory uncanny’. MLN, V. 118, No. 5, (2003), p. 11111139.
Bonin, Liane. ‘All the Old Haunts’ [report on The haunting, 1999]. Published on EW
online 20-07-1999. 04-06-2008.
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,84530,00.html.
Bordwell, David, Kristin Thompson. Film art. An introduction. 6th edition. New York:
McGraw Hill, 2001.
Botting, Fred. ‘Power in the darkness. Heterotopias, literature and Gothic labyrinths’. Genre,
No. 26 (1993): 253-282.
--- Gothic. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Chandler, Marilyn R. Dwelling in the text. Houses in American fiction. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991.
Chatman, Seymour. Story and discourse. Narrative structure in fiction and film. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1986.
--- Coming to terms. The rhetoric of narrative in fiction and film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.
Chion, Michel. The voice in cinema (1982). New York: Columbia UP, 1999.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparant minds. Narrative modes for presenting consciousness in fiction.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.
86
Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck. A cultural history of ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford UP,
2000.
Deleuze, Gilles. ‘The affection image’. Cinema 1. The movement-image. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986: 87-101.
Doane, Mary Ann. ‘Paranoia and the specular’. The desire to desire. The woman’s film of the
1940s. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987: 123-154.
Dyson, Jeremy. Bright darkness. The lost art of the supernatural horror film. London:
Cassell, 1997.
Elliott, Kamilla. ‘Literary film adaptation and the form/content dilemma’. Narrative across
Media. The languages of storytelling. Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.) Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2004: 220-243.
Fischer, Lucy. Shot/countershot. Film tradition and women’s cinema. Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1989.
Foucault, Michel. ‘Of other spaces’ (1967). 09-05-2008.
http://www.foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html
Freud, Sigmund. ‘The uncanny’ (1919). The standard edition of the complete psychological
works of Sigmund Freud. V. 17. London: The Hogarth Press, 1975: 219- 252.
Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975.
Gledhill, Christine. Home is where the heart is. Studies in melodrama and the woman’s film.
London: BFI, 1987.
Haines, Colin. “Frightened by a word”. Shirley Jackson and lesbian Gothic. Uppsala:
Uppsala Universitet, 2007.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: State University of New
87
York Press, 2003.
--- ‘Stephen Spielberg’s The haunting: A reconsideration of David Self’s script. Shirley
Jackson. Essays on the literary legacy. Bernice M. Murphy (ed.) Jefferson:
McFarland, 2005: 251-266.
Henderson, Brian. ‘Tense, mood, and voice in film (Notes after Genette)’. Film Quarterly.
V. 36, No. 4 (1983): 4-17. Reprinted in Film Quarterly. Forty years – a selection.
Brian Henderson, Ann Martin (ed.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999: 5475.
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Amazon.com. Daily update. 31-08-2008.
www.imdb.com
Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House (1959). New York etc: Penguin Books, 1987.
Jacobs, Steven. The wrong house. The architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Rotterdam: 010
Publishers, 2007.
Jensen, Jeff. ‘A shiver runs through it’ [report on The haunting, 1999]. Entertainment Weekly
No. 495 (1999). EW online. 04-06-2008. www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,272437,00.html
Kahane, Claire. ‘Gothic mirrors and feminine identity’. Centennial Review, No. 24 (1980):
43-64.
King, Stephen. Danse macabre. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991.
Laughlin, Will. ‘De Bonting of Hill House’. 04-06-2008.
http://www.braineater.com/haunting99.html
Leemann, Sergio. Robert Wise on his films: from editing room to director’s chair. Los
Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1995.
MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic tradition in fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1978.
88
Marks, Laura. ‘Haptic visuality’. The skin of the film. Durham: Duke UP, 2000: 162-193.
Morgan, Jack. The biology of horror: Gothic literature and film. Carbondale: Illinois
UP, 2002.
Murphy, Bernice M. (ed.) Shirley Jackson. Essays on the literary legacy. Jefferson:
McFarland: 2005.
Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. The yellow wallpaper (1891). 17-05-2008.
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html
Royle, Nicholas. The uncanny. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003.
Rubenstein, Roberta. ‘House mothers and haunted daughters. Shirley Jackson and the Female
Gothic’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. V. 15, No. 2 (1996): 309-331.
Schneider, Steven Jay. ‘Thrice-told tales. The haunting, from novel to film...to film’. Journal
of popular film & television, V. 30, No. 3 (2002): 167-176.
Self, David, Michael Tolkin. ‘The haunting of Hill House’ [initial shooting script of The
haunting, 1999, revisions by Michael Tolkin] (1998). 04-06-2008.
http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/the-haunting_production.html
Showalter, Elaine. ‘American female Gothic’. Sister’s choice. Tradition and change in
American women’s writing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995: 127-144.
Silverman, Kaja. ‘Dis-embodying the female voice.’Re-Vision. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia
Mellencamp, Linda Williams (ed.) Los Angeles: AFI, 1984: 131-149.
--- ‘The fantasy of the maternal voice: Paranoia and compensation’. The acoustic mirror. The
female voice in psychoanalysis and cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988: 72-100.
Tatar, Maria. Secrets beyond the door. The story of Bluebeard and his wives. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2004.
89
Tibbetts, John, James Welsh. The encyclopedia of novels into film. New York: Checkmark
Books, 2005.
Troutman, Anne. ‘Inside fear. Secret places and hidden spaces in dwellings’. Architecture of
fear. Nan Ellin (ed.) New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997: 143-157.
Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic flame. New York: Russell, 1966.
Waldman, Diane. Horror and domesticity. The modern Gothic romance film of the 1940s.
Diss. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1981. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms
International, 1987.
Walsh, Andrea S. Women’s film and female experience, 1940-1950. New York: Praeger,
1984.
Weber, Samuel. ‘The sideshow, or: Remarks on a canny moment’ (1973). The legend of
Freud. Expanded edition. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2000: 207-238.
White, Patricia. ‘Female spectator, lesbian spectre’. The Haunting. Women in film noir. E.
Ann Kaplan, ed. London: BFI, 1998: 130-150.
Williams, Linda. ‘When the woman looks’. Re-Vision. Essays in feminist film criticism. Mary
Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, Linda Williams (ed.) Los Angeles: AFI, 1984: 8399.
Williams, Linda. ‘Film bodies: Gender, genre, and excess. Film Quarterly, V. 44, No. 4
(1991), p 2-13.
Wise, Robert. Audio commentary The Haunting. Dir. Robert Wise. MGM, 1963. DVD
Warner Brothers, 2003.
Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian hauntings. Spectrality, Gothic, the uncanny and literature.
Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002.
90
Films
The haunting (1)
Country
USA
Year
1963
Production company
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Producers
Denis Johnson, Robert Wise
Screenwriter
Nelson Gidding
Director
Robert Wise
Cinematographer
Davis Boulton
Production designer
Elliott Scott
Editor
Ernest Walter
Composer
Humphrey Searle
Actors
Julie Harris (Eleanor Lance), Claire Bloom (Theodora), Richard
Johnson (Dr. John Markway), Russ Tamblyn (Luke Sanderson)
The haunting (2)
Country
USA
Year
1999
Production Company
DreamWorks SKG
Producers
Susan Arnold, Donna Arkoff Roth e.a.
Executive producers
Steven Spielberg, Jan De Bont e.a.
Screenplay
David Self
Director
Jan De Bont
Cinematographer
Karl Walter Lindenlaub
Production designer
Eugenio Zanetti
Editor
Michael Kahn
Composer
Jerry Goldsmith
Actors
Lili Taylor (Eleanor Vance), Catherine Zeta Jones (Theodora),
Liam Neeson (Dr. David Marrow), Owen Wilson (Luke
Sanderson)
91
Appendix I: Summary of The Haunting of Hill House
The Haunting of Hill House takes place over a single week in rural 1950s America. The story begins with a brief
introduction to the cast of characters. Dr. John Montague is the psychic researcher who instigates the adventure
in Hill House. An anthropologist and doctor of philosophy, Dr. Montague's true passion lies in the study of
supernatural phenomena. All of his life he has searched for a truly haunted house. His search leads him to Hill
House. After interviewing several former tenants as well as researching the personal effects and papers left
behind by the family that built Hill House some eighty years ago, Dr. Montague is elated to realize that he has
found the real thing. Hill House is the quintessential haunted house and a perfect location for him to study. Dr.
Montague hopes to gather incontrovertible evidence of the haunting of Hill House. Afterwards, he plans to
publish his findings with the goal of legitimizing his field of study in the academic arena.
To that end, Dr. Montague seeks out assistants to join him for a summer stay in Hill House. He combs through
the records of psychic societies and paranormal laboratories to obtain a short list of twelve promising candidates.
To each of these, he writes a letter of invitation. Dr. Montague is a circumspect man and does not state directly
in his letters that Hill House is haunted. He refers to troubling rumours about the house, hoping to catch the
imagination of just the right sort of assistant. From this exhaustive search, Dr. Montague nets two assistants: Nell
Vance and Theodora. Nell is invited because of her past experience with poltergeist phenomena. Dr. Montague
has found a reliable account of a rain of stones, which pelted Nell's family home when she was just twelve-yearsold.
Theodora, a modern woman who eschews the use of her last name, is valuable to Dr. Montague because she
once, on a lark, took some laboratory tests to gauge her psychic ability. She scored amongst the top candidates
ever seen by the lab. The final member of the party is Luke Sanderson, a rakish young man whose family owns
Hill House. He is sent along to ensure that no one steals the family silver; however, his rich aunt, who owns Hill
House, is actually just trying to give him a useful occupation for a few weeks, hoping to help him stay out of
trouble. Hill House is hardly the best place for staying out of trouble. From the moment they arrive, they can
each sense the malevolence of the house.
Nell and Theodora both choose to accept Dr. Montague's invitation for personal rather than professional reasons.
Theodora has a huge fight with her female roommate and thinks a summer in the country at Hill House might be
the best way to cool off their overheated tempers. Nell decides to take Dr. Montague up on his offer in hopes of
having an adventure. She has spent the past eleven years caring for her sick mother, who has recently died. Nell
has sacrificed much of her youth and personal happiness for her mother and now lives unhappily with her sister's
family. She desperately longs for a home and a life of her own. When her sister and her husband refuse to let
Nell drive the car to Hill House, Nell sneaks out early one morning and takes the car without permission. Nell
spends the journey to Hill House dreaming of living in the various houses she passes along the way. She hopes
that, finally, something interesting will happen to her at Hill House. An old song echoes in her mind as she
approaches Hill House; the song's refrain is journeys end in lovers meeting.
Nell is the first to arrive and she is greeted by Mr. and Mrs. Dudley, the caretakers of Hill House. Villagers from
nearby Hillsdale, the Dudleys don't care much for outsiders staying in Hill House. Mr. Dudley warns Nell away
92
and Mrs. Dudley advises her that no one will hear if Nell screams for help in the night. Given this chilly
reception and the palpable evil she can sense in the house, Nell is terrified to be alone in the huge, old manor.
Thankfully, Theo arrives in short order and her sunny presence mitigates the gloom of Hill House. She and Nell
set off to explore the grounds before it grows dark. They become fast friends as they walk along a picturesque
path, which takes them to a babbling brook. Nell quickly realizes that Theo is highly perceptive. Theodora picks
up on Nell's social awkwardness and fear and treats her with gentle kindness. Suddenly, Nell becomes alarmed
by something in the shadows. Theo feels it, too and the two women race back to the relative safety of Hill
House. When they arrive back at the house, they see Luke for the first time. Nell thinks to herself, journeys end
in lovers meeting.
Dr. Montague welcomes them all inside and that night the foursome convenes for the first time in the parlour,
which is to become their headquarters. The parlour, with its fireplace, is the cosiest room in Hill House, yet it
falls short of actually being cosy. The group does its best to liven up the haunted house with their high spirits.
Everyone is looking forward to their adventure and they spend their time together convivially. In the spirit of
adventure, none of them discusses their ordinary, mundane lives. Nell, Theo, Luke and Dr. Montague all
introduce themselves playfully, making up entertaining stories about their supposed pasts. The first night, Dr.
Montague reveals why he selected Theo and Nell. Nell is visibly upset to be reminded of the rain of stones, an
incident she had put out of her mind completely. She reacts defensively and Theodora's attempts to soothe Nell
betray Theo's belief that Nell herself was responsible for the falling stones. Nevertheless, the first night ends
well, although Nell chides herself for being so openly grateful at having been accepted by their social circle.
Time loses all meaning at Hill House as the participants in Dr. Montague's study settle into a routine. They spend
their days exploring Hill House and napping, because beginning on the second night they are kept awake by
ghostly disturbances. Nonetheless, the little group is elated by the evidence they find of a bona fide haunting.
Montague's prize piece of evidence is the undeniable cold spot, which exists at the entrance to the decrepit
nursery. At night the group feels frightened, but during the day the spirit of adventure lifts their spirits. Their
time at Hill House, at least during the day, feels like a leisurely vacation at a summer home, complemented by
the wonderful cooking of old Mrs. Dudley.
Things become more complicated, however, when a lovers' triangle develops between Theo, Nell and Luke.
Both Theo and Nell pursue Luke, or rather, in deference to the morality of the era; both women encourage and
allow Luke to pursue them. Yet behind the scenes, sparks fly between Theo and Nell. Theo's vaguely defined
relationship with her female roommate hints at her sexual preference. Nell finds herself responding more to
Theo's seductive ways than to Luke's flirtation. However, unlike Theo and Luke, who are both just looking for a
summer fling, Nell is looking for her happily ever after. She chooses Theo as her life's companion and
announces to the shocked Theo that she intends to follow her home and move in with her. To dissuade Nell,
Theo's interest in Luke takes a sharp upswing. Nell's jealousy simmers below the surface and gradually builds to
a boiling point.
When a message about Nell appears on the walls, followed by a supernatural attack on Theo's room and
belongings, the party begins to fear for their physical safety. Although the learned Dr. Montague insists that the
93
ghosts of Hill House cannot harm them, he pointedly comments that poltergeist phenomena can cause damage in
the physical world. Everyone begins to suspect Nell of causing the frightening phenomena, especially Theo, who
outright accuses her of seeking revenge and attention.
The evil that lurks in Hill House thrives on the growing enmity between the two women. In fact, Hill House
seems to be waging psychological warfare on Nell and Theo, driving a wedge between them. The behaviour,
thoughts and feelings of these two women eerily echo the relationship between the Crain sisters, two little girls
who grew up in Hill House decades ago. The Crain sisters also had a falling out over a man and it seems at times
that the resentment Nell feels is really the resentment of the eldest Crain sister. The older sister, like Nell,
became an old maid after losing her beau to the younger sister. The vindictive and painful emotions of this
family battle still reside within Hill House and feed Nell's own sense of loss and thirst for revenge. The reader
cannot be sure whether it is Nell or Hill House that is truly responsible for the increasingly threatening
manifestations. In Nell, Hill House has found a perfect vehicle for reliving the tragic struggles of the past.
When Dr. Montague notices how deeply ensnared Nell has become by the ghosts of the house, he insists that she
leave for her own safety. Hill House, however, having claimed Nell, has no intention of letting her go. As Nell
drives away from the house, she feels compelled to speed up and turn her car towards an ancient tree at the bend
in the driveway. Feeling triumphant, Nell thinks she's discovered a way to stay at Hill House despite having been
so rudely kicked out. Only in the final moment before her car smashes against the tree does Nell's lucidity return.
She wonders why she is doing such a disastrous thing, but it is already too late. Hill House has claimed yet
another victim to add to the long list of mysterious deaths and supposed suicides which have taken place on the
grounds.
Source: http://litsum.com/haunting-of-hill-house/
94
Appendix II: An intertextual response to The haunting (1999)
The haunting (1999): An abridged script
By: Peter Rauch on Jul 23rd, 1999
FADE IN:
INT. LILI TAYLOR’S APARTMENT
LILI is talking to her EVIL BITCH SISTER and her HUSBAND.
EVIL BITCH SISTER
Thanks for taking care of our invalid mom for the past eleven years, during
which time you haven’t slept at all, judging by your facial expression.
LILI TAYLOR
No, I always look like that.
EVIL BITCH SISTER
Anyway, now that she’s dead we’re going to sell the apartment, leaving you
homeless as well as emotionally scarred.
(to HUSBAND)
Honey, is there anything you can do to arouse more sympathy for Lili’s
character?
EVIL BITCH SISTER’S HUSBAND punches LILI in the stomach.
INT. LIAM NEESON’S OFFICE
LIAM NEESON
Ok, here’s the deal. I’m going to take a bunch of insomniacs, who are generally
one step closer to psychosis than most people anyway, and put them in a house
from some movie I saw when I was a kid. Then when they get scared and
irrational I’ll make notes and shit. Because…um…I’m a scientist.
YODA
Fear is the path to the dark side. Dangerous, this is, and possibly unethical.
Always changing, the future is…
LIAM NEESON
Oh, shut up.
EXT. HILL HOUSE
LILI arrives at the door. The CARETAKER’S WIFE opens the door.
95
LILI TAYLOR
Hi. I’m from the insomnia experiment thing that for some reason I was
specifically asked to participate in.
CARETAKER’S WIFE
I am Frau Blucher.
HORSES neigh.
INT. HILL HOUSE
LIAM arrives with his MOUSY ASSISTANT and THE GUY FROM THE
‘EYES WIDE SHUT’ PREVIEW.
LIAM NEESON
Here we are in a secluded, gothic mansion, in which it would be very easy to get
lost or injured. The townspeople are afraid of it and the gate is locked from the
outside, so if anyone gets hurt they’re pretty much screwed.
LILI TAYLOR
What a great place to conduct an experiment involving potentially psychotic
insomniacs! I certainly hope there’s at least one drug-user stereotype among us.
CATHERINE ZETA-JONES
I’m actually an artist stereotype, which means I’m bisexual and obsessed with
fashion and my appearance. I’m also way too hot to realistically be doing
anything creative with my life.
CATHERINE begins taking her shirt off for no reason.
OWEN WILSON
I’m…wait, who the hell am I? I don’t even have a stereotype.
LIAM NEESON
You’re the guy. Go hit on Catherine.
Suddenly someone from the SPECIAL EFFECTS TEAM spills espresso onto
their ONYX WORKSTATION, and something flings up and rips out the
MOUSY ASSISTANT’s eye.
MOUSY ASSISTANT
Ow! Fuck!
LIAM NEESON
You, the guy from the Eyes Wide Shut preview, take her to a hospital. Call me
as soon as she sees a doctor, but I won’t find it odd or anything if you never call
despite being totally uninvolved in the supernatural part of the story.
96
THE GUY FROM THE ‘EYES WIDE SHUT’ PREVIEW exits with the ONEEYED, MOUSY ASSISTANT.
LIAM NEESON (cont’d):
Now, we’re here to study the effects of insomnia on, among other things, the
part of the brain responsible for rational decision. For example, Lili here has
obviously not slept in her entire life, which is why she’s throwing away all the
credibility as an actress she gained from I Shot Andy Warhol and The Addiction
to appear in this overproduced retread.
LILI TAYLOR
Hey, fuck you, Darkman!
LIAM NEESON
(enraged)
I told you never to speak of that!
OWEN WILSON
Um…Catherine, wanna have sex?
CATHERINE ZETA-JONES
(ignoring him)
Does this house have any kind of history we should know about, for plot
purposes?
LIAM NEESON
Funny you should ask. It was built by an eccentric millionaire who for some
reason looked like Cro-Magnon man in a cravat. He wanted children but his kept
dying in childbirth, so he’d trap the souls of his employees’ children in the
house.
LILI TAYLOR
Wait a minute. Didn’t Stauf do that in The 7th Guest?
OWEN WILSON
And Carno in Phantasmagoria?
AUDIENCE
Is he implying that this movie is derivate of those games? Doesn’t he realize that
they were both themselves inspired by the 1963 movie this is a remake of and
the Shirley Jackson novel it was based on?
PETER RAUCH
Shut up.
97
EXT. HILL HOUSE
It gets dark. I mean, this isn’t unusual or anything, but it’s worth mentioning.
INT. HILL HOUSE
Someone notices that ‘Welcome Home Eleanor’ has been painted in blood on
the wall, and someone has painted a skull over CRO-MAGNON MAN’s face.
CATHERINE ZETA-JONES
Who the fuck is Eleanor?
LILI TAYLOR
That’s supposed to be my name. I hate this stupid format.
OWEN WILSON
I bet Catherine put wrote it, since she’s, like, artistic and stuff!
CATHERINE ZETA-JONES
Oh yeah? Well YOU probably did it, because you’re…who are you again?
LILI TAYLOR
Well, one of you has to have done it, since I didn’t do it and there’s obviously no
reason to suspect the guy who brought us here for the sole purpose of studying
how we react to things like this.
Suddenly OWEN is decapitated.
OWEN WILSON
That’s it? That’s my part? Dammit.
OWEN walks off the set in disgust, severed head held under his arm.
Suddenly the house goes batshit, gargoyles come to life, walls bend, windows
form faces.
LIAM NEESON
Why the hell is happening?
LILI TAYLOR
I think it has something to do with the fact that I’m the great- granddaughter of
Cro-Magnon Man’s second wife, and that it’s my destiny to free the souls of the
children imprisoned here.
CATHERINE ZETA-JONES
And you somehow failed to mention this!?
98
LILI TAYLOR
(shrugs)
Never came up.
Various parts of the house try to kill them. Using his high midichlorian count,
LIAM allows them to escape to the front hall in front of CRO-MAGNON
MAN’s portrait, which comes to life in an orgy of CG that, well, actually looks
kinda cool.
LILI TAYLOR (cont’d):
I’m freeing the children, fartknocker! Get into that bas relief over there!
After a great deal of CG things happening, he does, and LILI dies. Something
that looks sort of like CRO-MAGNON MAN’s second wife and sort of like LILI
rises from her corpse.
AUDIENCE
What the fuck!?
DIRECTOR JAN DE BONT
It’s symbolic of how the second wife had been present in Lili all along.
AUDIENCE
How the fuck would you know? You’re the director! It’s a glorified technical
job! You didn’t even write the screenplay based the a movie based the novel!
How could you possibly have any perspective on the symbolism?
DIRECTOR JAN DE BONT
Um…
DIRECTOR JAN DE BONT blows up a bus and escapes in the confusion.
END
Source: http://www.the-editing-room.com/thehaunting.html
99
‘Haven't you noticed how nothing in this house seems to move until
you look away and then you just... catch something out of the corner
of your eye?’ After seeing The haunting far too often, Floor began to
see ghosts herself… (photographer Jossy Albertus)
100