It just screams out, "tame!"
The Haunting in Connecticut
Directed by Peter Cornwell
Lionsgate, 2009
By Sean Kelly
I have to confess I’ve always been intrigued by stories of ghosts and hauntings. It’s fascinating that there are things in this world that science cannot explain. Whether you’re a believer or not, you’ll agree that Hollywood frequently exploits these stories in film, often for no other reason than to include the “Based on a True Story” label on posters.
Probably the most notable example would be The Amityville Horror. While it’s one of the most famous of the true ghost stories, it is also widely considered the least likely to be true. A few years ago, we also saw the release of An American Haunting, which dealt with the “Bell Witch,” one of the oldest and most famous of American ghost stories.
Now we have The Haunting in Connecticut. The story is based on the case of the Snedeker family, previously documented in the book A Dark Place and on the Discovery Channel haunted house series A Haunting. At the very least, the film has a reasonable claim to the “Based on a True Story” label, as opposed to, say, last year’s The Strangers, which was an original story based quite loosely on the Manson killings.
So, how did this film affect me? True story or not, I was sitting quite passively for two thirds of this “horror” film. That said, the haunted house subgenre of horror films is probably the most difficult to pull off. You have to find a way to portray hauntings on film that is genuinely scary and doesn’t come off as cheesy.
For the most part, ghosts are portrayed in this film as shadowy figures in the background. While the musical cues suggested that I should be scared at these shots, I ended up just shrugging them off. There was only one single jump-scare in the film that got me, and that involved a moderately scarier ghost than what had been shown during the previous hour.
Another thing I wasn’t too crazy about was how one of characters kept having these quickly-cut flashback visions. While they do become clearer as the film goes on and eventually provide an explanation to the hauntings, they came off as clumsy — stylization for its own sake.
The film did pick up a bit for me during the third act when the hauntings got more intense. It still wasn’t perfect, but I can say that it was for those twenty or so minutes alone that I left the theatre with the feeling that at least the film wasn’t a total waste of money.
As for the performances, Virginia Madsen is the only main character in the film who would be instantly recognizable. I really enjoyed Elias Koteas (one of my favourite character actors), who plays the obligatory religious figure trying to exorcise the house. His character gives a unique explanation as to why some people can see ghosts and others can’t.
In the end, while I considered the film to be fair, there are definitely better haunted house movies out there. Maybe this will cause studios to consider that not every true ghost story will necessarily translate well on to film. Sometimes you have to play with the facts — just ask The Amityville Horror.
