Eleanor "Nell" Vance has spent the last eleven years of her life taking care of her ill mother, who has recently died, but unfortunately for her, she left her apartment to her sister, Jane. Jane and her husband, Lou, are planning to sell it, which will force Nell out on the street; regardless, she turns down their offer to work as their maid and babysitter, Ritchie. Once they've left, Nell she gets a phone call that tells her to look in the newspaper for an ad for an insomnia study taking place in an old mansion in New England. She accepts the offer, but little does she know that this is only a cover for what is actually a study of the psychological response to fear, headed by Dr. David Marrow. When Nell arrives at the location, Hill House, which is a gigantic, sprawling mansion that one could easily become lost in, she's shown to her room by one of the caretakers, Mrs. Dudley, who tells her that she and her husband leave before nightfall, that nobody in town will come to their aid, and that there's no way to call for help either. Nell soon meets the other participants in the study: Theo, a bisexual woman who takes an interest in Nell, and Luke Sanderson, who takes an immediate interest in Theo. They also meet Marrow and his two research assistants, Mary and Todd. That night, after dinner, Marrow tells the group the story of Hill House and its builder, Hugh Crain, who had the house constructed for his wife, Renee, in the 1800's, hoping to fill it with a family of children. But, every child they had died during birth, Renee herself committed suicide, and Crain spent the rest of his life as a complete recluse. Mary then says she can sense that there's a darker side to the story but, before she can elaborate, a wire on a piano snaps and slashes her across the side of her face. Todd then promptly takes Mary to the hospital. Strange, possibly supernatural, things begin to that night, such as loud banging, sudden drops in temperature, and something pushing on doors, and then, Nell begins seeing the ghostly images of children, who appear to be asking her to help them. Compelled to investigate, Nell learns the dark secret of Hill House and Hugh Crain, as well as that she has a connection to the place. However, knowing this may cost her and the others their lives, if the evil spirit of Crain that dwells in the house has anything to say about it.
In the original script, there were more scenes with Hill House's caretakers, the Dudleys, but in the final film, they barely have a presence. As Mr. Dudley, Bruce Dern gets to do little more than unlock the house's main gate for Eleanor at the beginning of the film, pontificating the need for so many chains when Nell asks him about them, saying, "What is it about fences? Sometimes, the people on either side of the fence see a locked chain, they feel a little more comfortable. Why do you suppose that is?" Mrs. Dudley (Marian Seldes) has a bit more screentime, as she's seen showing both Nell and Theo to their respective rooms when they arrive. She has almost the exact same dialogue as her 60's counterpart when she tells Nell when she sets dinner and breakfast, that she always leaves before nightfall, and that no one lives any closer to the house than the town, which is nine miles away, but the difference is that, rather than being neurotic, as she was depicted in the original, here she's more of an imposing person, with a severe, solemn manner (the first time you see her, she's brandishing a blade that she was using to make dinner). Although the Dudleys are said to be there every day, with Dr. Marrow telling Nell that Mr. Dudley removed the writing on the wall, you don't ever see them again until the very end, when they drive up to the house to find Nell's car slammed into it and Marrow and Theo waiting for them. Mrs. Dudley remarks, "City people," while Dudley asks Marrow if he found out what he wanted to know.
As in the original, it's revealed that Nell doesn't get along with the other members of her family; in this case, it's over the apartment that she lived in with her mother for the past eleven years. In the opening scene, her sister, Jane (Virginia Madsen), argues with her about the apartment, as she and her husband, Lou (Tom Irwin), are planning to sell it, which will effectively cause Nell to end up on the street. While Jane, if nothing else, tries to be civil about it, offering Nell her mother's car and giving the opportunity to come live with and work for them as their maid and babysitter, Lou just comes off as an unfeeling jerk. When Nell incredulously asks, "You're taking away my home, and giving me a twenty-year old car?", Lou crassly responds, "Absolutely. Oh, we'll deduct the value from the proceeds of the apartment." And, when Nell, having had enough, tells them to get out, Lou tells her, "Well, suit yourself. We'll let the courts handle it." As if they weren't bad enough, they also have their obnoxious little brat of a son, Ritchie (Saul Priever), with them, who knocks stuff over and actually bangs the cane that used to belong to Nell's mother against the wall, before mockingly saying, "Eleanor, help me! I got to pee!", and letting out this laugh that makes you want to slap him. Besides knowing that he had to have learned about that from his parents, it's made worse by how Jane and Lou do nothing to discipline him other than telling him, "Not now," and basically putting him in timeout on the couch. Thankfully, as in the original, they're never seen again after this opening scene.
The characters and acting may be mixed at best but one thing I don't think anyone could deny about The Haunting is that the production design is absolutely amazing. Eugenio Zanetti had worked on films like Last Action Hero and What Dreams May Come and he really got a chance to show off with his design of Hill House. It was already a striking place in the original but for this one, they really jacked it up to the nth degree. It's much, much bigger and more labyrinthine than the original, looking more like castle on the outside than a mansion (said house is Harlaxton Manor in England), while the inside looks as if it were made for a giant. Virtually all of the rooms, including the characters' bedrooms but especially the foyer, are enormous, with huge doors that you have to push open and pull closed with more effort than normal. Even the fireplace is gigantic and big enough to walk in, with a swinging, carved lion head in the flue. The bedrooms that the characters stay in are not only big but feel like fancy suites in an expensive hotel, with Eleanor's room having a lovely red and gold color scheme, and the same fanciness goes for Theo's adjoining room. The place is honeycombed with long, dimly lit corridors and hallways, some of which are a bit enclosed, and there are so many mirrors to be found that you could easily become disoriented and not know where you're supposed to go. There's one random corridor that has a foot or so of water on the water and you have to use small stacks of floating books as stepping stones. While exploring the downstairs hallways, Nell and Theo find this one room that acts as a big, indoor carousel, with a revolving floor, mirrors lining the surrounding walls, star-shaped lamps hanging from the ceiling, and even a circus-like tune that plays when it's activated. The room that feels most inspired by the original is the big, inside garden, with glass windows and walls that give it a greenhouse feeling and a rickety, spiraling staircase that acts as the centerpiece for one of the movie's suspense sequences. While following some bloody footprints at one point, Nell finds a secret door, behind which is a small, spiral staircase that leads down to Hugh Crain's study, a pack-rat kind of room which is full of old books, albums, and the ledger that reveals Crain's true, sinister nature. And there's one room behind a large, golden door that's eventually revealed to be an old, bluish-white colored bedroom, full of old furniture and paraphernalia that's covered with drapes, and a section in the back with a bed that is completely identical to the room that Nell's mother was confined to during her final days, right down to a frame that reads, "A Place For Everything, and Everything in its Place." The most normal of the house's rooms are the dining room, the kitchen, and the library where Dr. Marrow tells the story of Hill House, and even they have their own, unique atmospheres.
Just as striking is the house's decor, which made up of a lot of statues and carvings, most of which are of children and, as Luke comments, are more unsettling than charming. There are also carvings and statues that are more blatantly menacing, like the gryphon and animal statues that decorate the foyer and the staircase, the lions that adorn the top of the fireplace, and the dark, kind of Bosch-like architecture. That carving of Crain in the garden that acts as a fountain is also a bit unsettling, as are the paintings of him here and there, particularly the one at the top of the main staircase that always appears to be watching and listening. In fact, all of the paintings, even those of benevolent characters, look, in classic haunted house tradition, like they're watching the characters. Even the dining room, as lovely as it is, has a large religious mural on the back wall that has a kind of uncomfortable air about it. But the most striking piece of architecture in the house is the door that's carved to represent the souls of children trapped in purgatory and the demons that are keeping them there. Again, it looks like Bosch, mixed with a touch of H.R. Giger, with these anguished children's faces and creepy, human-like figures holding onto them from below, with a skeleton figure above them, pointing upwards.
The film is well shot by Karl Walter Lindenlaub, who actually was not the original cinematographer; that was Caleb Deschanel, who left over creative differences, possibly with Jan de Bont, but it's said some of his work did make it into the final film. However, while the cinematography is nice to look at, it's more successful at showing off the beauty of Hill House in the daytime, employing rich, popping colors and prominent shafts of light coming through the windows, or the evening scenes when the lights are on, rather than making it look creepy at night. The nighttime scenes have a kind of ghostly whitish blue lighting and color scheme to them, in addition to the darkness, but, again, it's really more pretty than it is scary, which actually sums up the movie's biggest problem.
Before we get into that, though, I'll say that another problem is that the movie seems to think it's smarter than it really is, especially at the start. When Dr. Marrow talks with his colleague about why his study at Hill House is important, he gives this spiel about what fear is exactly and why it does to the body and mind what it does, all but saying that these are profound questions that require answers, which is why he's having the group stay at a creepy mansion like Hill House because he knows the environment and the various parts of the place's history that he gives to the individual participants will stimulate the proper responses. Also, after he's been forced to reveal the study's true nature to the participants, he tries to justify it to Theo by saying that he's doing it to help people deal with the feelings of fear by helping them understand why they feel what they feel, only for Theo to slap him and criticize him for his clinical coldness, telling him he doesn't feel anything. In addition, there's a moment early on where the movie touches on possible rational explanations for supposed haunting activity. Luke suggests that the banging sounds Eleanor and Theo heard in their rooms before could have just been the house's creaking pipes, and when they talk about their distinct feelings of cold, Marrow asks which one of them felt it first and then asked the other if they also felt it, getting at that it was merely the power of suggestion. Interesting approach, though it's totally moot since, at this point, we'd already seen evidence that the house actually is haunted when the piano wire loosened itself up and then slashed backwards into Mary's face. What's also moot are Marrow's questions about fear, which become completely irrelevant when it's discovered that there really are ghosts in the house, rather than the uncomfortable atmosphere of the place itself being the cause of what they're seeing and hearing.
It really is the film's depiction of the haunting that completely sinks it and forces me to say that, despite some undeniable pros, it does ultimately suck. While the original film left whether or not there were ghosts in the house, if the house itself was some kind of evil entity, or if Eleanor herself was going mad, to your imagination, this movie comes right out and says, "No, it's ghosts." Moreover, the film gives you a concrete antagonist in the form of the spirit of Hugh Crain. Crain and his family were a small part of the plot in the original movie but they're much more fleshed out here. Like in the original, Crain is said to have built Hill House for his wife and wanted to fill it up with children, only for every child they ever had to have been stillborn. But Eleanor, through the guidance of the benevolent ghosts in the house, discovers that Crain was actually a total monster who had a number of child laborers working in his textile mills and brought them to his house, where he killed them and burned their bodies up in the fireplace. This is believed to have driven his first wife, Renee, to suicide, while Carolyn, the second, escaped with her own baby when she discovered who her husband was. Now, the children's spirits are trapped in the house by Crain, who refuses to let them move on, intending to keep his "family" with him forever. So, rather than being about a group of terrified people who are trying to escape the sinister house they're stuck in, it becomes a standard battle of good and evil, with Nell deciding that she must face and defeat Crain so the children can go to the light. It's also revealed that Nell is descended from the Crain family and that the insomnia study group was brought to her attention by someone other than Marrow, who tells her that his office wasn't who called her in the opening scene. It makes the idea of Nell having "come home" far more literal than it was in the original film.
As cliched and saccharine as this story is, I'm such a sentimental person that I probably would have gotten into it if they hadn't been so damn over-the-top in portraying the ghosts. It starts out fairly subtle, with the recreation of the scene where Eleanor and Theo are menaced by a pounding sound outside their bedrooms that the others don't hear, moments where the carvings appear to move between shots, and the feeling that the portraits, particularly the one of Hugh Crain in the foyer, are watching and listening to everything around them, but when you first see the ghost that appears in the drapes of Nell's bedroom and moves over to her bed, all sense of suggestion goes out the window. I've heard similar criticisms of Poltergeist but, in my opinion, The Haunting takes what Poltergeist did during its latter half and multiplies it a hundred-fold, becoming one of the most needlessly flashy, cartoonish haunted house movies ever. The longer the movie goes on, the more outlandish the supernatural becomes, until you arrive at the point to where you're wondering how you're supposed to take any of it seriously. In addition to the ghosts that take form in the drapes and bed-sheets, you have faces forming in windows, ceilings, and out of large sections of the rooms (a bunch of arms actually bursts out of one such face's mouth), a skeleton that pops out of the fireplace's ashes at Nell, a big hand that forms out of a golden door to knock Nell back, dark shadowy forms that float through rooms (kind of creepy, but the one in the House on Haunted Hill remake the same year was eerier), the statues and carvings coming to life to menace the characters, and Crain's ghost stomping and bursting through parts of the house before finally manifesting himself out of the painting in the foyer for a final confrontation with Nell. Seriously, by the time you get to the third act, where the gryphon statues are moving, the stone lions above the fireplace are roaring, and Crain's ghost, who tries to sound menacing by whipping up a strong vacuum of air around him and bellowing, "No!", when Nell says she's going to save the children from him, gets pulled into the door whose carvings are meant to represent purgatory, you're watching a cartoony freak-show that destroys any sense of drama or story engagement the filmmakers were going for.
That door is a prime example of how crazy literal and overdone this movie gets with the ghosts and the original movie's concept of Hill House itself being "bad." When Eleanor and Theo find that door and Nell explains to Theo what it means, pointing out the writing near its base that reads, All Ye Who Stand Before These Doors Shall Be Judged, you'd think that's the only role it would play in the story. However, at one point, the children's ghosts mention "the doors" being the only thing that can contain Hugh Crain's spirit and, during the climax, she's told to lead him to the purgatory door. As it turns out, that thing is some sort of literal construct of purgatory, with the carvings representing the demons that hold your soul there literally grabbing Crain and forcing him into the door, pulling him back and slamming him in again for good measure when he tries to escape. I was dumbfounded when I saw how literally they went with it. As silly as it looked, I could accept the notion of Crain manifesting himself by possessing the statues that dot the inside of the mansion, and I thought the carvings representing the children's spirit was a nice idea, until they started moving, but this? I just don't know why there would be actual purgatory demons in that door, seeing as how the only spirits in the house should be Crain and the children. How exactly did they come about and how did they create a manifestation of purgatory within that door? They may be some spiritual, metaphorical significance behind it but, like the rest of the movie's latter half, it's so overblown and ridiculous in how it's depicted that it's impossible to take seriously, whatever the thinking behind it was.
Speaking of purgatory, there's a kind of theme going on here about being stuck there, be it in the spiritual sense or in one's own life. This turns out to be another link Eleanor has with the children's ghosts, besides the fact that they're essentially her extended family,. Early on, when she and Theo are looking at that door, Nell tells Theo that she understands what its carvings mean because she was in purgatory herself for eleven years, referring to the time she spent stuck in her mother's apartment taking care of her. At the same time, the spirits of the children Crain murdered in the house are now trapped in there by his own ghost, intending to forever have the family he wanted when he was alive. That's another theme in the movie: family. Nell was apparently called to Hill House by one of the ghosts so she could discover her roots and save her family from the wrath of her great, great grandfather. Once she's managed to banish Crain's spirit and set the children's souls free, Nell herself dies and her own spirit joins them, as she's now free from her own personal purgatory. Interesting ideas, but when the movie unravels the way it does, they end up coming off as pretentious attempts to make it seem smarter than it is.
The writing is also very muddled and has some notable holes and contrivances to it. For one, the idea of the room that Nell's mother was confined to and eventually died in being identical to the room in Hill House where Carolyn secretly had a baby before leaving Crain is given no significance beyond being a connection that adds to the case of Nell being related to the family. In the original film, there was an interesting aspect of the haunting in how one person who died at Hill House banged on the wall with a cane, just like Nell's ailing mother used to, and so, Nell hears that same banging while at the house and, half-asleep, thinks it's her mother. Here, though Nell hears a similar sound to the banging and does think it's her mother for a second, it's now little more than a coincidence that she was awakened by such a noise and it's ultimately another tenuous connection between her and the house. Nell also tends to hum a song to herself that's also played on an old music player in that room, but how she came to know that tune in her life is never given any sort of explanation. Let's not forget how the revelation that Nell is family makes the frame in her mother's bedroom with the phrase, A Place For Everything and Everything In Its Place, and the graffiti on the wall that reads, WELCOME HOME ELEANOR, come off as eye-rollingly corny in hindsight. And isn't it just a little bit coincidental that Luke's theory about what Crain was in reality turns out to be almost exactly right? This may be nitpicking but, if the movie were better, I'd probably be able to let these things go but, because it becomes impossible to take seriously, I found myself thinking about these issues while I was watching it.
Looking back, 1999 seems to have been the year when filmmakers began using CGI for any effect they needed to create, rather than relying on a mixture with practical effects, and The Haunting is a prime example of that mentality at its absolute worst. Not only have these effects not aged well at all but it's doubtful that they were even impressive at the time, and they look so synthetic and cartoonish (I hate that I keep using that word but it's the most appropriate adjective I can think of) that they make the haunting activity, which was already ridiculous in concept, impossible to take seriously. You look at some of these effects and you have to wonder if Jan de Bont and everyone else honestly thought that this looked scary, especially those statues and carvings coming to life. I just can't get over those moments, because they're that silly. Honestly, the CGI there only looks slightly better than the moving topiary animals in The Shining mini-series, but the idea is no less stupid (I don't care if that was in Stephen King's original novel; it's still nigh impossible to do that on film without it looking dumb). To be fair, though, there are some instances of practical makeup effects for moments of blood, like when Mary gets slashed by the piano wire, the statue of Crain in the garden spews blood out of its mouth, and when Marrow gets a piece of glass stuck in his hand while trying to break a window, as well as physical effects for scenes where things are breaking, moving, and exploding, but those are few and far between and don't help the movie at all.
Now that I've seen the movie, I really have to laugh at de Bont's statement in that Fangoria magazine about it being scary rather than flashy because, needless to say, it is all flash and no scare. Early on, when it's trying to be more subtle, it does attempt to create something of an atmosphere with a scene of Nell lying in bed, looking around the dark bedroom, and with some shots of the house's dark, empty interior, but it never quite gets there, mainly because the cinematography is more lovely than it is creepy. Even the discovery of the writing, WELCOME HOME ELEANOR, on the wall isn't creepy at all, unlike the original movie, and then, when the CGI starts going bananas, you can just forget about it. There's only one moment that I found kind of unsettling is a moment near the beginning of the third act, when Nell is chased through the house by Crain and winds up in a room where she looks at herself in a couple of mirrors and sees Mrs. Crain's face on her body. The effect that they used to achieve that is pretty creepy, especially with the bizarre face she's making when she looks in the second mirror in the room, and it's a shame that there aren't more scenes like this here.
The movie's first significant scene comes when Eleanor arrives at Hill House. After meeting Mr. Dudley and talking with him for a bit, he unlocks the gate, allowing her to drive in. She pulls up to a side door, gets out with her suitcase, and knocks on it, calling for Mrs. Dudley. However, she gets no response and finds that the door is ajar. She walks in, greeted by a pair of sphinx statues sitting next to each other in the middle of a large room, and spots a set of double doors leading on into the foyer. She hears a knocking sound coming from a corridor to her right and heads towards it. Pushing back the slightly ajar door to it, she's startled by the sight of a statue depicting a child being held by a menacing, hooded figure. She continues following the sound, which leads her to a door on the hallway's right side. Before she can open it, it swings open to reveal Mrs. Dudley, who's standing there with a meat cleaver in her hand. She explains to Nell that she was making dinner and then leads her to her room. She has Nell follow her up the stairs in the foyer, though Nell can't help but stop here and there to admire the architecture, like the enormous fireplace, the gryphon statues that dot the bottoms and tops of the stairs' railings, and a big portrait of Hugh Crain at the top of the stairs. Mrs. Dudley leads Nell to the "Red Room," opening the doors to reveal an enormous and beautiful bedroom, with a red and gold color scheme and carvings of children's face on the mantel above the small fireplace. As Nell looks around, Mrs. Dudley tells her when she sets dinner and breakfast, that she and her husband leave before dark, and that there's no one else within nine miles. She then leaves her to unpack and, some time later, Nell meets Theo as she's being shown to her room. There, Mrs. Dudley gives Theo the same spiel she gave Nell, though Theo is too busy admiring how lovely her room is to really hear. Plus, Nell makes it harder to take seriously by saying what Mrs. Dudley is about to say before she says it. Once they're alone, Theo immediately starts to show hints of attraction to Nell after admitting that she's bisexual, before having her show her the large bathroom that they both share, since their rooms connected.
The two of them decide to do some exploring, head out of their rooms and down to the main hall, where they find a pair of double-doors with some unsettling carvings on them. Nell says that she believes that the carvings depict purgatory, with the spirits of children trapped there and unable to move on because of demons who are keeping them there. She then tells Theo that she knows because she herself was in purgatory for eleven years, before pointing out some writing on the base of the door that says, All Ye Who Stand Before These Doors Shall Be Judged. Theo suggests they not stand so close then and the two of them continue to explore, heading down another hallway and finding themselves disoriented by the amount of mirrors lining the walls. Finding a pair of doors connected to some gears in the wall beyond an open spot, they open them to reveal a room that's basically an indoor carousel, with a moving floor, mirrors on the walls, and circus-like music playing. They spent a little bit of time in there, having fun and dancing with each other, before heading out and moving on. Beyond another set of doors, they find a hallway with a floor that's full of water and with floating books that they must use as stepping stones. When they head into the next room, they knock into Luke Sanderson, who's just arrived. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Marrow arrives with his assistants, Mary and Todd.
At dinner that night, when Marrow gives them the false details about his research into "insomnia," Nell mentions how she's unable to sleep because she still hears the banging of her mother's cane against the wall, even though she's dead. After dinner, everyone heads to the library, where Marrow passes out cognitive and perception tests to everyone and tells them that they're not allowed to go into town and that they have nothing but his cellphone to use in case they need help. The topic switches to Hill House and Marrow tells the group the story about Hugh Crain, why he built the house, and the tragic events that followed, saying that Crain became a recluse after his wife's death, he kept adding onto the house, and ending by saying that the townspeople claimed to have heard the sounds of children coming from the house at night. Once the story is finished, Mary gets up and says that she thinks there's more to the story and that she can feel it all around them. She approaches the piano, unaware that one of its interior wires is winding and loosening up. She strums her finger across the wires, when the one suddenly snaps and slashes her across the left side of her face. Everyone tries to help and calm her, Nell putting a small glass over her eye to use to collect the blood, and Todd promptly drives her to the hospital. Marrow and Luke see them out, locking the gate behind them (Marrow has a key to the gate, even though he reiterated earlier that the Dudleys lock the gate themselves when they leave, which would imply that they take the key with them), and Marrow confides in him that there's something about the house and Crain that he left out. He asks him not to tell the girls but, in the very next scene, as they head up to bed, he tells them. He tells them that Mrs. Renee Crain actually killed herself and says that he believes it's because Crain was actually a horrible monster of a person and drove her to it. After some talk, they head up to bed. Little do they know that, in his own bedroom, Marrow is recording his personal notes, revealing that he's feeding them various bits of information to see what their ultimate reactions will be. He then goes to bed but finds himself unable to sleep.
The same goes for Luke, who roams the house while tossing a baseball up and down as he walks, while Nell has another moment dealing with Theo's bisexual affections. Nell is then lying in bed, noticing the carvings of children's faces looking down at her, as well as some spikes on the ceiling that are pointing at her. She scans the room, noticing the children heads on the fireplace's mantel but, when she focuses on them, the faces are now looking right at her, as she faintly hears voices calling to her. Although a bit taken aback when she notices this, Nell attempts to get some sleep regardless, and the sound of a child's voice can be heard distantly saying, "Now I lay me down to sleep...", as the camera rises up from her. Following an overlong moment between Dr. Marrow and Luke when they bump into each other, out in the hall (seriously, could Owen Wilson be more melodramatic about being startled by that?), there's a short montage of the house's interior, specifically of the wind blowing the drapes near Hugh Crain's portrait downstairs, in an attempt to create atmosphere. It then cuts back to Nell's room, as she's awakened by the sound of knocking on the wall. Half-asleep and thinking it's her mother, she gets out of bed and puts her slippers on, only to then remember where she is. The sound becomes a thunderous booming, accompanied by the sound of creaking in the walls. Theo yells for Nell, who promptly rushes to her room and hops into bed with her. They try to figure out where the sound is coming from, when it gets quiet for a few moments. The sound promptly starts up again and something pushes on the locked door from the outside. Again, it subsides, and Nell cautiously gets out of bed, as does Theo, who's hit with a feeling of intense cold. Nell feels it as well, and they're both scared when the sounds and the banging on the door start up again. Nell says that whatever it is is moving. The feeling of cold quickly dissipates and Theo thinks it might be over. Nell walks towards the door that connects their rooms and, seeing one of the knobs slowly turning, quickly latches it. Something starts banging on the other side, Nell telling Theo that it's now in her room. They hear banging on the main door to Theo's room, but this turns out to be Luke. Theo turns on the lights and lets Luke in, who says that the only sound he heard was her screaming for his help. Saying that she didn't yell for him, she and Nell have him check out Nell's bedroom but, when he walks in and turns the lights on, he doesn't find anything.
Following a moment down in the kitchen where the group tries to determine what it was Nell and Theo heard, they all go back to bed. While Nell is fast asleep in her bed, the wind blows the drapes of her open window up into the air and occasionally on the foot of her bed. While it's up in the air, the form of a child appears in the drapery and moves down the length of the curtain, managing to get into bed sheets when the cover blows onto them again. The apparition moves up the length of the bed and takes shape in the pillow next to the one Nell is sleeping on. It calls to her, and Nell rolls over in her sleep, facing it, before she awakens and sees the face on the pillow. The ghost tells her, "Find us, Eleanor," before disappearing completely. Instead of freaking out at seeing this, Nell simply looks around the room again before getting out of bed and closing the window. Even then, she's not scared at all; rather, she has a look of wonder and happiness on her face, as she spies the carvings that were looking at her before. The next day, as Nell tries to do her tests in the foyer, sitting by the fireplace, she thinks she hears something coming from it. That's when Luke shows up and comments on how creepy the house's various carvings are, saying that he still believes that Hugh Crain was a despicable business tycoon who ran a sweat shop with children and the carvings are a kind of propaganda. He also says that he has a feeling that Marrow is up to something and is going to find out what, right after he goes to "check on" Theo. He exits the room, closing the door behind him, as Nell tries to get back to her tests. The chains hanging down from the entry to the fireplace suddenly sway from an apparent breeze and Nell looks up to see this. A strand of her hair lifts up by itself, as if by an invisible hand, and she sees a figure move in the fireplace. Whatever it is pushes up against the chains (while making a sound that's recycled from Jurassic Park, I might add; I don't why I'm running into that lately) and sends Nell running out of the room in terror.
She returns with the others in order to investigate the fireplace. Luke and Marrow pull back the chain curtain and look inside and up the flue, but don't see anything. Luke notices a latch on the floor and he and Marrow open it but reveal nothing but ashes and pieces of charred wood. Suddenly, a large, lion-shaped carving swoops in, swinging back and forth inside the flue like a pendulum and startling everybody, especially Luke. They figure that's what Nell saw but she's sure that she didn't, despite how much Marrow tries to convince her otherwise. Luke spots something while looking up the stairs and when they walk up there, they find the words, WELCOME HOME ELEANOR, painted across the wall and the painting of Crain in graffiti that looks similar to blood. Nell demands to know who did it, which causes Luke and Theo to toss accusations back and forth at each other, and for Theo to suggest Nell did it herself for attention. Marrow also demands to know who did it but nobody owns up to it, as Nell storms off down a hallway, noticing the trail of red footprints along the floor. After that, Marrow talks with Nell, assuring her that Mr. Dudley will get rid of the graffiti, and he takes her to see the house's big, indoor garden. Like every other part of the house, Nell is taken by it and tells Marrow that she's actually happy to be on this strange adventure, something she never thought she would experience. Marrow asks her if she honestly thinks someone is messing with her but she says it doesn't matter, as she's decided to be a "volunteer" rather than a victim. She then wanders around the statues that decorate the place, humming a tune that she often sings to herself.
That night, it's once again quiet at Hill House, as another montage reveals. However, a shot of the portrait of Crain shows that Dudley's removal of the graffiti has caused his face to take on a skull-like appearance. The door to Nell's room slowly opens by itself and an unseen presence approaches her bed, where she lies, sleeping. She awakens when she hears a voice faintly call to her and she looks up to see her open door. She sits up, turns on the lamp on the nightstand, and sees a trail of bloody footprints leading away from her bed. Hearing the voices calling to her again, Nell gets out of bed and follows the prints out into the hall. They lead her to the library, where they stop at a glass cabinet connected to the bookcase. She hears them telling her to find them, and when she pokes around, the entire section of the bookcase moves back from the wall, revealing a hidden room with a spiral staircase leading down. Reaching the bottom, the apparition of a child that appears in the window tells her to look at a ledger. Turning on a lamp on a desk in the room, Nell finds that she's in a secret study. She sees an open, dust-covered book on the desk that reads, Concord 1886-1887, and flips through it, finding that it's the aforementioned ledger, detailing who Crain employed at his textile mills and when. Looking through it, she finds that Crain had a lot of young children working in his mills and that they all died when they were only twelve, at the latest. She takes the ledger to Theo's room and tries to tell her about it and how she found it but Theo becomes more concerned about Nell's mental well-being and implores her to go to bed. She does, and when she leaves, Theo looks down the hallway she walked down. Nell returns to her room with the ledger and, spotting the carved faces that are looking at her again, she tells them that she's listening. She sits down at the mirror and combs her way, waiting for something to happen. Almost immediately, an invisible force starts playing with her hair, lifting and twirling around the right side of it (really bad CGI there, by the way). Startled, Nell jumps up and notices a portrait of a woman on the wall across from her, one with her hair done up in the same way the apparition was trying to do hers.
The next day, after searching for Marrow and finding his tape recorder, which reveals that he believes she's delusional and unstable, Nell goes to the garden, where Luke and Theo are. Luke believes that Marrow is behind the weird things that are happening and that he's doing them to study their reactions, but Nell says that it isn't Marrow. While they're talking, Nell looks up and sees a vision of Renee Crain hanging from the walkway at the top of the spiral staircase. Horrified at this, she runs off in a panic, while Theo and Luke see nothing when they look up there. Nell heads back to Crain's study, frantically searching for proof that she's not crazy. In doing so, she knocks over an old photo album that reveals pictures of Crain and a lovely woman other than Renee. Seeing the same woman's portrait across from her, Nell realizes that she's Carolyn, Crain's second wife. Flipping through it, she finds a series of pictures depicting Carolyn standing in front of the large fireplace, pictures that become animated and show Carolyn pointing towards the fireplace while Nell flips through them. Nell also hears Carolyn's voice flat out telling her, "Eleanor, the fireplace." Nell promptly heads to the fireplace and opens the hatch where the ashes are kept. She pokes among the ashes and pieces of wood and, after opening the other half of the hatch, finds human bones among the ashes, including a skull. Said remains lunge up out of the ashes at her, causing her to jump back and drop the hatch. She hears the children's voices calling for her and tries to find where they're coming from. She's led to a gold-colored door at the end of a hallway and tells the children that she'll let them out. Hit by an awful smell, Nell attempts to open the door but is unable to make it budge, and then, a huge hand forms out of it and knocks her back on the floor, before receding back into the door. Nell promptly runs off to warn the others.
She shows up in the library and starts babbling about Crain murdering the children, her finding their remains in the fireplace, and that he had a second wife who learned what he'd done and left him. Thinking she's become delusional, the others bring her over to the couch, as Marrow tries to tell her that it's not real. He's then forced to reveal the true nature of his study, much to the others' shock and anger. He says that he gave them clues and they came up with the story, as he intended for them to do, but announces that he's pulling the plug on it. Marrow, again, tries to convince Nell that none of it is real but she tells him to look in the fireplace and that she saw Renee hanging in the garden, becoming more and more hysterical about it. Theo helps her up to her room and, after a confrontation between Theo and Marrow in the kitchen, where the good doctor tries to explain himself but gets a slap across the face, he goes to inspect the fireplace. However, he finds himself unable to lift the latch, because the tool that Nell used earlier got jammed in there when she was startled and dropped it. Unable to make the latch or the obstruction budge, Marrow gives up. Upstairs, Theo puts Nell to bed and goes to get her some tea, leaving her alone in the dark room. Nell tries to go to sleep but it soon becomes cold in the room, as her breath becomes visible, a draft blows on the lit candle on her nightstand, and frost begins forming on the nearby window. A face starts to form in the frost and Nell opens her eyes to see a dark, menacing form float out of the window. It heads to a corner of the room and manipulates the wall's architecture to form a pair of glaring eyes looking at her. The carved child faces in the room now have horrified expressions, as Nell thrown out of her bed and skids across the floor. She turns a nearby lamp and, immediately, the room turns back to normal. However, the frost reforms on the window to the right of the bed, as does the face of Crain. Again, the carved faces are terrified, and Nell decides to take action, throwing something at the window, yelling that she won't let the entity hurt a child. The window shatters but the shards slowly burst outwards before flying back in, showering Nell and sending her running out of the room.
Nell flees down the hall, a violent pounding across the ceiling, accompanied by impacts and pieces of falling indicating that she's being chased, while Theo comes back to her bedroom and finds that she's gone. Seeing the shattered window, she runs into the main hub of the house, yelling for Luke and Marrow, while Nell is still being chased through the corridors she and Theo explored by the monstrous force of Hugh Crain. She runs into one room and hears the children calling for her. Searching around, she's startled when she looks in a mirror and sees a face other than her own in the reflection, one that smiles at her when she isn't. Freaked out, Nell runs away, exclaiming that's not her, only to be faced with another mirror casting an unfamiliar reflection, one that's even freakier than the last. She hears the sound of the pounding approaching and runs out of the room and back into the halls. She rushes into the carousel room and stumbles across the moving floor, asking Crain why he wants her. A ghostly reflection of herself appears in one of the mirrors lining the wall and, as Nell watches, her stomach swells into that of a pregnant woman. The reflection then says, "Welcome home, Eleanor." Horrified at the implication, Nell runs out of the room and down a hallway where the wind is blowing on drapes of open windows, saying that it's not true. She's stopped by the sound of a child's ghost, who tells her not to be afraid and that only the doors can keep Crain contained. Moving through the drapery, and briefly entering Nell's body, the spirit asks her for help, floating on down the hall. Nell follows after, trying to get the spirit to explain exactly what it means.
The others are searching for Nell in the garden, when they're shocked to see her climbing the spiral staircase and reaching the walkway at the top. Marrow tells Nell not to move, as she looks down at him, appearing to now realize where she is. Marrow begins the treacherous climb up the rickety old staircase, as Theo and Luke watch anxiously. He makes it about three-fourths of the way up, when the old cable holding that section of the staircase begins to break. The section then breaks and falls away, forcing Marrow to hop up to a more stable spot. Holding onto the railing's bars, Marrow tries to stand up, when the wires holding those steps start fraying as well. He manages to stand up, but knows he's running out of time when he hears the sound of metal bending and breaking. He tells Nell to come back onto the platform so they can come together, as the old screws holding in the steps break loose. Nell, however, says that the children need her and she must join them. Marrow, again, tries to coax her down, and Theo begs her to do it as well. More wires and cables break and Marrow has to jump across to the next section of stairs, while everything below him falls apart and crumples into a heap of twisted metal. Marrow is left with nothing supporting his legs and tries to climb up the remaining stairs. While he's struggling, his cellphone falls out of his pocket and shatters on the ground below. Nell, stepping onto the section of stairs above him, offers him her hand and she helps him up there. The two of them quickly get onto the walkway but, once there, Marrow finds it hard to get Nell to come with him, having to pry her hands off the railing to make her follow him. They get her back to her bedroom, Luke taping some plastic over one of the windows, as Nell writhes in bed, clearly in pain. Luke tells Marrow that they need to get her to a doctor but Marrow tells him that they have to wait until morning, as the gate is still locked. Theo has to stop a squabble between them and they decide not to leave Nell alone, with Luke volunteering to take the first watch.
Marrow is back in the garden, continuing to record notes, when it hits him that he should have stopped the experiment from the beginning and that he needs to get everybody out. This statement does not go unheard, though, as the statue of Crain that acts as a fountain suddenly comes to life, grabs Marrow from behind, and pulls him into the water. Blood spews out of the statue's mouth and into the water, as Marrow scrambles out of it, shaking as he wipes his face clean. While he cleans himself up in the kitchen, as Theo asks him what happened, while up in Nell's bedroom, she's lying in bed, looking up at the ceiling. She sees the ceiling beginning to move and twist, the carvings of the children's faces looking down at her and yelling in a panic. The ceiling appears to lower downwards, pushing the spires hanging down towards Nell and crushing and twisting the architecture, causing the portraits to fall off the wall. The walls crunch, floorboards splinter upwards across the room, towards the bed, and the spires inch down towards Nell. Crain's angry, roaring face pushes through the ceiling and the spires pin her to the bed. Her yell gets everyone's attention, including that of Luke, who was sleeping out in the hall. He rushes to the bedroom but the doors shut and latch, while Nell finds herself trapped by Crain's face, as arms burst out of his open mouth and reach for her. Marrow and Theo rush upstairs and join Luke in trying to force the doors open, while in the bedroom, the bed is pushes across the floor towards Crain. Just as he's about to get her, he retreats when he sees that the others are going to get through the door. When they manage to push their way in, they see how Nell is trapped in the bed and try to pull her free, though Luke has to grab a candlestick to smash the wooden spires. Crain's face pushes back through the ceiling and reaches for the others with those arms but they manage to get Nell loose enough to where Marrow can scoop her up in his arms and rush out of the room with her and the others.
They all flee downstairs and out the front door, but find themselves blocked by the main gate, which they're unable to open or climb over. While Luke tries to smash the lock with a shovel he finds, Nell asks Marrow how he knew that the house wanted her, why he told her to look for his ad in the paper, but he tells her that the first time he met her was at the house. Luke finds that the lock won't break and decides to use Nell's car to crash the gate. He guns the engine right at the gate but, when he slams into it, all he manages to do is make it budge slightly and hurt himself. As if that weren't bad enough, a section of the gate with spikes sticking out falls down on the roof of the car, slicing through the metal and coming close to doing the same to Luke's head. Marrow and Theo rush to help Luke but find that the door won't open. Nell hears the children's voices calling to her, asking her not to leave and she turns around to see lights come in many different rooms in the house. Meanwhile, as they're trying to help Luke get out of the car, they tell him to turn the engine off, but it won't work. With gas leaking down to the ground, Marrow helps Luke escape by smashing the back window so he can crawl through it. They help him out and rush away from the car (you expect it to blow up but it never does), only to then realize that Nell is gone. They head back into the house to search for her and quickly find that she's in the room behind the golden door that she got knocked away from before. In that room, they find that it's full of old, dusty pieces of furniture covered with drapes, with a spot separated by a curtain that houses a bed. This spot, which is where Nell is, cranking an old-fashioned music player, is identical to her mother's bedroom in their apartment. Theo tries to get Nell to come with them but she refuses to leave, even when she suggests they go live in her apartment or that they could live in Theo's loft in the city. However, Nell is adamant that she's where she needs to be, that this was the room where Carolyn had her own baby before leaving Crain, and that she was Nell's great, great grandmother. The music player she cranked up starts playing the tune that Nell has been heard humming sporadically throughout the film. She adds that Crain continues to torment the children even in death and that she has to stay in order to save them from him. Hearing the sound of pounding approaching, Nell tells them that her friends aren't safe and tries to lead them out of the house to safety.
They rush down the hall to the stairs in the foyer, as doors and shutters close all around them. They run as fast as they can to the house's front door but it closes and they're unable to open it. Nell tells them that Crain is going to let them out but Marrow has other plans. He and the others use chairs to smash the dining room's windows but, before they can smash through the bars behind the glass, the chairs get pulled up by a vacuum of air and get jammed in the broken spots. Marrow tries to pull one chair he was using loose but cuts himself on the broken glass, getting a shard of it jammed in his palm. Despite the pain he's in, Marrow tries to find another way out, but first, Nell removes the glass from his hand (that does look painful, doesn't it?) Frustrated, Luke hops up onto a cabinet and uses a candlestick to scratch up a painting of Crain. Seeing what he's doing, Nell warns him to stop but, by this point, Luke has slashed open the image of Crain's face. He hops down and declares that he's going to burn the house down. They hear a loud moan rumble through the place and it seems to coming from the fireplace. Suddenly, the rug Luke is standing on is pulled by invisible hands and Luke falls on his back on it. It heads for the fireplace, the others chasing after it, trying to help Luke, but it hits the foot of the fireplace and he gets flung inside, landing on the dusty logs in the back of it. Though he's relatively unhurt when he stands up, that doesn't last long, as the swinging, lion-headed pendulum comes at him, knocking his head clean off with its open mouth and then dumping it to the floor. The panels in front of the fireplace fling open and an explosion of ashes and bones rocks the room, sending the others running for cover. They run up the stairs in the foyer and stop at the top, wondering what to do. Nell tells them that Crain loved to play hide-and-seek with the children, which is why he built the house the way it is, and tells them they have to hide. Marrow becomes frustrated at how Crain thinks this is a game, and he and Theo are almost crushed when his large portrait falls off the wall, the spikes lining its edges slicing across Theo's arm. They barely have time to rest before one of the gryphon statues at the top of the stairs comes to life. Nell grabs a plank of wood and fights it off, giving Marrow and Theo time to run off. It doesn't take much fighting before it reverts back to normal.
Nell then runs down the hallway behind her, searching for Theo and Marrow, when she comes to a portrait of Carolyn at the end of it. Noticing that the locket she's wearing in the picture is the same one she herself wears, Nell decides to stop running and face Crain. She heads back to the foyer and, standing at the top of the stairs, calls for Crain. She appears to get no response, but she doesn't notice that Crain's yelling face appears in the billowing curtain to her left. Not seeing anything when looks at it, she heads down the stairs to the main hub of the room, all the while being watched by the animal statues that dot the room. She sees that the ceiling appears to be breathing, and when she walks to the center of it, the children's ghosts point her to the door depicting purgatory and tell her to bring Crain there. She approaches the door, again calling for Crain, when she hears his voice rumble through the house again. Turning, she looks at the top of the stairs and sees Crain's portrait slam back up on the wall, followed by his huge, shadowy, foggy ghost emerging from it. She stands there, watching as he approaches, when Theo and Marrow come running from a side corridor. Crain threatens them as soon as he sees them but Nell stands in front of them, telling him to leave them alone. She says she's going to set the children free, which angers him, and she moves back, baiting him to approach her. He whips up a powerful vacuum of air all around her, the sight of which terrifies the children, while the stone lions atop the fireplace come to life and roar, as do the gryphons. Marrow tries to get Nell to come away but Crain blows both him and Theo back with a gust of wind. Nell tells Crain that it's about family, always has been, and that she's family as well. Crain yells, "No, you're not!", but as the carvings in the door behind Nell come to life, she tells him, "Purgatory's over. You go to hell!" With that, the demons reach out and grab Crain, pulling him back to the door. However, Nell gets caught up in it and is slammed hard against the door.
As Marrow and Theo watch, the figures of the demons ease Nell down to the floor, where she falls just hard enough to awaken her. She looks up, as Crain attempts to lunge at her from the door, but a demon grabs him and slams him back into place, before they all become carvings once again. The spirits of the children emerge from their carvings on the door, thanking Nell for setting them free. She then lies back down and allows herself to pass away, her own spirit leaving her body and joining the children in heading to heaven. Having seen this, Marrow and Theo rush to Nell's body, Marrow futilely checking for a pulse before putting her hand in position with the other on her torso. The next morning, the Dudleys drive up to the gate to find Nell's car crashed into it and Theo and Marrow waiting for them to unlock it. As he unlocks it, Mr. Dudley asks Marrow, "Did you find out what you wanted to know, doctor?" Neither of them answer, and the movie ends on that note.
Another major talent behind the film was the legendary Jerry Goldsmith for the score but, while he didn't do a bad job at all (I don't think Goldsmith was capable of doing bad music), it's certainly not among his most memorable. There are pieces of it that I think are quite good, like the circus-esque theme he came up with for Hill House's carousel room and I like the really epic music that plays during Nell's final confrontation with Hugh Crain's ghost, but otherwise, I can't recall much specifics about the rest of the score. It did have an appropriately ghostly, otherworldly feel when it needed to, a softer, more sentimental tone in the scenes and moments dealing with the idea of family and the children, and exciting, thrilling music for the chase and action sequences, but I couldn't tell you exactly how those pieces sounded or vocalize them for you if you asked. This was the same year that Goldsmith did the music for Stephen Sommers' The Mummy, a movie, I feel, is much more successful in its depiction of over-the-top, CG-laden horror elements than The Haunting, and the same goes for the wonderful score Goldsmith did for it. I could go on forever about how great that music is, but The Haunting? Eh.
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