Deadlights: Oh No, I Couldn't Possibly

Robert Wise's 1963 movie The Haunting, based on author Shirley Jackson's famous horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, is a great gnarled tree growing from the seed of a lonely woman's repressed longings. Eleanor "Nell" Lance is a spinster whose adult life was consumed by caring for her invalid mother, recently deceased at the start of the film's events, and who now lives with a sister and brother-in-law who treat her chiefly as an inconvenience. Her desire for a life of her own is communicated at first chiefly through nervous voiceover narration. "Journeys end in lovers meeting," she thinks to herself throughout the film, a snatch of song she uses not so much to define her wants but to circle them indefinitely.

The paranormal events which drive the film's action all seem to center on Nell. Spectral forces hammer at her door. Phantom writing on the walls of Hill House calls her home, addressing no one else by name. Early on we learn that during Nell's childhood pebbles and stones once bombarded her house for days on end, flung at its walls and roof and windows by invisible forces. Is Hill House haunted, or does its emptiness only permit some power lying dormant inside Eleanor to uncoil itself for the first time in decades? The film makes it clear that Nell harbors a repressed longing for fellow guest Theo, a brash woman who shows her early attention and affection. When the visible presence bangs on the doors of their connected rooms, could that be not some ghost but Eleanor trying desperately to reach for what she's so long denied herself?

Is Eleanor's mother's ghost really berating her for leaving, or is Eleanor's own guilt oozing out of her through whatever supernatural exit is available to it? The Haunting positions Eleanor's frustrated desires and buried regrets as an incredibly powerful but ultimately hesitant and impotent force. Those desires are capable of raising hell, but not of clearly expressing Eleanor's feelings. They can terrify, but not touch. No change comes of them, and they cannot circumvent Eleanor's own inability to speak for herself or the essential indifference of others toward her childish, stunted emotions. When she suggests going home with Theo, the other woman laughs it off without a second thought. That the film descends from there to its darkest point is no accident.

The Haunting's vision of repression is heartbreaking, manifested outwardly by the titular phantasmal events and internally by Eleanor's increasingly frantic narration, a constant flood of self-recrimination and ruminating on guilty memories. The garish, cluttered interior of Hill House mirrors this inner turmoil, and eventually the two merge in a harrowing episode of sleepwalking as Nell retraces the steps of others who have died in the house, one of whom is heavily implied to have died in bed while calling out for her much younger lesbian companion. The film expresses repression not as something that unfolds into self-actualization but as something which implodes slowly in upon itself until nothing remains but a black hole of blank, sucking self-loathing.