#177: Haunted (1995 film)
Ghost movie ain’t got no spirit
This review was originally posted to Twitter on August 31, 2019.
It must have sucked to be James Herbert. Sure, the British author made fat stacks of cash selling his books (he’s the guy who wrote that book about the mutant rats) but it can’t have felt good to be perpetually referred to as “the British Stephen King.” And yet… if your book gets optioned for a movie, well, that’s something isn’t it?
In Haunted, a potboiler chiller adapted from the 1988 novel of the same name, it’s 1928 and David Ash, an Englishman who grew up in America and returned to teach at university, has a hobby debunking mystics and “unexplained phenomena,” partly out of guilt over the death of his sister. Lately he’s been getting increasingly desperate letters from an old woman in Sussex who claims she’s being tormented by ghosts. Feeling guilty for ignoring her so long, he packs up and hops a train to the palatial Edbrook Hall, where the old woman was a former nanny.
At Edbrook he’s greeted by the three adult children of the family, all quite eccentric, and in case of Christina, the only woman of the siblings, quite alluring — which, alongside her breasts, the film makes no attempt to hide. Well, that’s in keeping with James Herbert, anyway. At first he remains resolute that the only thing haunting the poor old nanny is some practical jokester. But little by little, as the things he sees out of the corner of his eyes start to come into clearer focus, his long-standing skepticism begins to crumble.
Unfortunately it takes most of the film to get to the truth; in the meantime we spend the 108 minute runtime alternating between a few fumbling attempts at ghostbusting, interacting with the very eccentric (and incestuous) siblings and a saccharine romance with Christina. I spent large amounts of the film waiting for something interesting to happen. On rare occasion I was rewarded, usually with flames or an explosion or whatever — not things you’d expect in a ghost story, but you’d also expect a ghost story to be relatively entertaining, yeah?
There’s a lot of period ghost movies out there. Some are better than others. This isn’t one of them, with its slow pace, awkward script, workmanlike direction, boring cishet romance, bad effects, and an ending that’s more interesting for its visuals than anything else. You’re better off watching The Awakening.
