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Atmospheric adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House finds a parapsychologist and his team of psychics investigating the happenings at Hill House. Julie Harris is Eleanor, the heroine of the book and the weak link of our protagonists. The house wants her and it gets her. This is more a movie about haunted people than about haunted houses, but that doesn't make much difference to the events on screen--whether they are supernatural occurrences or the result of skewed and distorted perceptions, they weave a powerful spell on the viewer and the experience of watching the movie is a lot like having a particularly unpleasant hallucination.

Director Robert Wise is smart enough to use the Val Lewton approach of letting the audience fill in the horror for themselves and, for the most part, his execution is cunning enough to suggest worse things than anyone could possibly film. The main technique in his arsenal is an array of distorting lenses that really work the audience over when viewed on an actual movie screen (the effect is diminished on television, and absent entirely from pan and scan editions of the film).This is among the creepiest movies ever made, though it refrains from delivering any really potent shocks--but it doesn't need them. The Haunting sets up resonances in the mind of the viewer which reverberate all the way to the base of the spine, with more genuine incidences of frisson, that buzz at the back of the head bad creepiness generates, than in any five other horror movies you could care to mention.