The Haunting (1963 Film) - Reception

Reception

The Haunting was released on September 18, 1963. Audiences were frightened by it. Film critic Dora Jane Hamblin related how four of her female friends, expecting a ho-hum film, took out make-up during the film's first few minutes with the intention of fixing their faces. The film proved so frightening, she said, that the women were jumping out of their seats and losing their items. In Houston, Texas, a local cinema promoted the film as so frightening that it held a contest to see which of four patrons could sit all the way through a midnight screening. (The prize was $100.) Despite incidents such as these, The Haunting did only average box office business.

The Haunting opened to mostly positive reviews. Variety called the acting effective, Davis Boulton's cinematography extraordinarily dexterous and visually exciting, and Elliott Scott's production design of the "monstrous" house "most decidedly the star of the film." But the unnamed reviewer felt Gidding's screenplay had "major shortcomings": The plot was incomprehensible at points, and the motivation for the characters poor. Writing in The Atlantic magazine, critic Pauline Kael called the film "moderately elegant and literate and expensive", but criticized Russ Tamblyn for being "feeble cowardly-comic". Bosley Crowther, writing in The New York Times, thought the film was an "antique chiller" with plenty of scares but that the plot made no sense. He did praise Julie Harris and Claire Bloom for being "very good all the way through".

The film's stature and following has grown steadily since its original release. Director Martin Scorsese placed The Haunting first on his list of the 11 scariest horror films of all time. The Guardian newspaper ranked it in 2010 as the 13th best horror film of all time. Richard Armstrong in Rough Guide to Film (2007) called it "one of the most frightening films ever made", and said Julie Harris' performance is played "with an intensity that is frightening in itself". Lee Pfeiffer in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Classic Movies (2006) said it was "the most terrifying movie ever made". It has subsequently gained widely acknowledged cult movie status. Richard Johnson says that Steven Spielberg considers The Haunting one of the "seminal films" of his youth, and Robert Wise says that Spielberg told him The Haunting was "the scariest film ever made!" Not all praise has been so high. Critics Yoram Allon and Neil Labute call the film "frankly overrated". Professional filmmaker Russell Evans notes that the film was widely considered not very scary. As of November 2012, the film had an 86 percent (7.9/10) rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.7 out of 10 on the Internet Movie Database.

In 2010, Cinema Retro magazine hosted a screening of the film at Ettington Hall. Richard Johnson was a special guest at the event and participated in a Q&A prior to the screening. Johnson said that he had never actually stepped foot in the hall during filming, and that this was the first occasion he had actually been inside the premises. The movie was mentioned in Dan Simmons' 2002 novel A Winter Haunting.