retro review: The Haunting of Hill House

I first read The Haunting of Hill House for a class assignment in the 1990s. Perhaps as a result of the reason for reading it, or perhaps just because of immature tastes, I found the book to be hopelessly dull and forgettable.

Tastes change, though. I recently listened to the audiobook (unabridged) read by David Warner, and my opinion on the story has completely reversed itself. I now agree with countless readers and scholars that it is arguably the best haunted house story of all time (save one exception).

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, it tells the sad tale of a Cinderella-like character, Eleanor "Nell" Vance, who has led an unhappy childhood and an even unhappier adulthood, living with a cruel and ungrateful mother and sister. One day not long after the death of her mother, Eleanor gets an invitation to spend a week in the notoriously haunted mansion known as "Hill House," and thus begins a scary and sorrowful, but sometimes wonderful adventure for this tragic figure.

Despite my current admiration and affection for the story, I do understand why I was at one time bored with it. My  literature professor promised exquisite horror, and my expectations almost definitely led to a great deal of impatience on my part. It would be a drastic understatement to say that author Shirley Jackson takes her sweet time getting to anything supernatural or overtly sinister. After a creepy introductory paragraph that establishes Hill House as an unsafe and "not sane" building, the first chapters of the book deal first with Eleanor's home life, followed by a surprisingly extended sequence involving her drive through the countryside to Hill House. Eleanor's decision to accept the invitation marks her first real act of independence from her stifling family, and she revels in it. Every house she passes, every cafe she visits, on her way to Hill House, is a souce of daydreams and possibilities.

The town near Hill House, in which the residents are alternately unfriendly or simply unhappy, serves as a fluid transition from Eleanor's joyous journey to her foreboding location, where her glee and wonder for life away from home are mixed with the dread everyone feels with Hill House itself. In the atmosphere of Hill House, Eleanor's naivete is a source of both power and vulnerability, compared to the more seemingly sophistocated world views of the other people staying there.

Even after Eleanor's arrival at Hill House, Jackson takes her time establishing atmosphere and character, and the book is well more than a third over before anything sinister or supernatural ever occurs. Again, this might explain why the college-aged Movie Man was so bored with a book that came wrapped in promises of horror.

There is indeed horror in Hill House, but the horrific events are few and far between. This is precisely what makes the book so difficult for adaptation into the cinema. I find the widely respected 1963 movie, considered by many (who I suspect are remembering individual moments more fondly than the movie as a whole) to be a classic, to be wildly overrated. The characters in that version, adapted by screenwriter Nelson Gidding and director Robert Wise, are mostly bland and interchangable. Meanwhile, the 1999 movie version doesn't suffer from the "bland and interchangable characters" problem, but does completely miss the point of what makes the book so successful. The scary parts of the book aren't scary despite the fact that they're so scarce, but because of it. Jackson offers a few tastes of horror just to occasionally remind you of the danger the characters are in -- and even those few scenes of seemingly overt horror are actually vague enough to leave much to the reader's imagination. The 1999 movie, by contrast, is a special effects extravaganza, routinely throwing both physics and any sense of subtlety out the window. Where in the book, characters observe that the statues' eyes seem to follow them, director Jan DeBont and his screenwriters have the statues move constantly, and even attack one of the hapless characters. It's entertaining in its own way, but only in the most mind-numbing way imaginable, a far, far cry from the atmospheric subtleties of Jackson's novel.

That 1999 movie, it's an odd thing in how it makes arguably minor changes for little to no reason. In both the book and the movie, Eleanor and her companions are invited to Hill House because of evidence of psychic activity in their past. Eleanor had a poltergeist-like episode in her childhood, Theo has a tendency to intuit what other people are thinking, and so on. Their host in the book is Doctor John Montague, a parapsychologist who hopes to write a book on the supernatural in general, and the Haunting of Hill House in particular.

In the movie, the host is Doctor David Marrow, a psychologist (no "para") doing research for a paper on fear. To lure in his subjects, he cloaks his true intent behind the false claim that his research is on insomnia. Arguably, none of these changes do much to alter the story (the story is changed more radically in the ways already discussed) but they're all pointless, and completely inexplicable. The writers also chose to expand the doctor's role, making him the main character instead of Eleanor -- perhaps because Eleanor's lead role in the novel is so much due to Jackson's exploration of Eleanor's thoughts, something that can only be translated to screen via voiceover, and then rarely as effectively as when you're simply reading a good book.

Speaking of adaptations, it would be another understatement to say that David Warner's audiobook narration ain't half bad. Audiobook narration, I've found, is far too often a challenge for actors. For reasons I don't understand, such narrators far too often fall into the dulcet patterns of a man tryng to read a bedtime story to little Johnny, hoping he'll fall asleep soon. Take, for example, the many audiobook adaptations of another brilliant haunted house story (the only one I feel that surpasses Jackson's), H.G. Wells's "The Red Room." The explicitly stated point of the narrative is its main character's increasing panic. The pace is extremely obviously supposed to quicken as the story develops. But the narrators unanimously seem to miss this crucial point.

Warner's narration of The Haunting of Hill House is excellent. He communicates different characters with subtle (there's that word again!) changes of voice and speaking pattern, never to the point of caricature, but always to the point of clearly distinguishing one individual from the next.

But the true genius is in Jackson's story itself. If you're only familiar with it through its movie versions, do yourself a favor and read (or listen to) the book itself. If you remember to be patient with Jackson's pacing, you won't be disappointed.