Hide-N-Seek in a Haunted House - 'The Haunting in Connecticut'
One of the signs of a good horror movie is that it leaves you with disturbing images that stay with you long after the movie is over. In fact, it's strange that the longer you remain a little disturbed by things you see in a scary movie, the more likely it is that the thing will end up a horror classic. This calls to mind one of life's great questions - Why do we watch this stuff?Well, there are a million answers, and while I certainly wouldn't call The Haunting in Connecticut a horror classic, it has some moments of genuine creepiness and, gasp, even a few good scares. Yes, there are at least as many cheap and ineffective scares, but you may notice that the scares in modern horror movies have been getting cheaper and cheaper and less and less effective, so it's nice to see one come along that's at least a step in the right direction. But if you manage to get that eyelid thing out of your head anytime soon I congratulate you!
Sadly, the movie is less successful at escaping the Hollywood tradition of ruining true stories, a broadly disrespected genre for which horror films generally have little to no mercy whatsoever. Of course, the "true story" of the Snedeker family who moved into a "possessed" house in Southington, Connecticut was badly corrupted long before Hollywood got their hands on it, in which case I'm going to go ahead and argue that it would be best to leave the whole "true story" thing out altogether. With all of the blenders it's gone through, ultimately it's going to prove to be nothing more than a distraction. But hey, it sells tickets, so there you go.
But if you are just looking for a good ghost story on a lazy night, you could certainly do worse than this movie. It's competently directed and acted and, although it is dark and dreary from beginning to end, it never has that feel of a lesser horror movie, that simply turns the lights out in every location in order to create a scary atmosphere. I hate that.
So Virginia Madsen and Martin Donovan play Sara and Matt Campbell, a married couple struggling both financially and emotionally to make it through their son Matt's cancer treatment. He has to be driven several hours in each direction to receive his chemo, so they decide to relocate to the town of Goatswood, Connecticut to be closer to the cancer center. It soon turns out that the house they move into has "a history," and that strange events inside and even stranger occurrences involving Matt can only be blamed on his cancer medication for so long.The story involves some old experiments from the 1920s involving, ah, the control of souls of the dead, let's say, and a seance involving a young boy where everyone was later found dead and the boy was never even found (and thus was suspected of killing everyone else), and the fact that Matt is now sure that he has seen the boy hanging around the house every day since they moved in. Oh, and 100 missing bodies from the local cemetery. So yeah, you get the idea.
Like I said, the movie is good at creating an eerie atmosphere and has some good scares, although a brief lesson in the advantages and disadvantages of quality vs. quantity could have helped the effects department during production. Kyle Gallner does a passable job as the son Matt, only stumbilng in his performance by looking so pissed off all the time, but my favorite was Elias Koteas in a bleak performace as a priest with a special connection to the goings on in the lives of the Campbells. You remember Elias Koteas, right? Right? He's an unsung actor who, despite having appeared in nearly 50 movies since then, I still remember most as the great Casey Jones from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Classic!
By the way, by pure chance, I re-watched the original Poltergeist movie the day before I watched this, which had the unfortunate effect of making a lot of the scares in the movie seem not so original. And there's also the fact that the movie takes place in the 1980s and not a scrap of effort is made to recapture the time period in even the slighest way. This isn't a huge problem, just yet another reason that the whole "true story" thing might have been better left for a movie that had any interest in remaining, ah, true ot it.
There is, after all, the issue of ectoplasm. You see, the "history" of the house involves a man named Aikman who discovered a way to "amplify the sounds of the dead," which resulted in the appearance of ectoplasm, and don't consider yourself alone if you immediately picture Slimer screaming down the aisle in the library in Ghostbusters. Neither strike me as connected so much to reality.
But don't let that deter you. As a ghost story, The Haunting in Connecticut works better than most that have come out over the last several years. And with the recent announcement of official plans for Ghostbusters 3, I'm hoping that the horror genre is moving in some better directions than it has been in the last fifteen years or so!
[caption id="attachment_27962" align="aligncenter" width="261" caption="3.5 Beans out of 5."]
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