Claire Bloom, Russ Tamblyn, Julie Harris and Richard Johnson
Robert Wise (Editor on the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Citizen Kane; director of The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, The Sound of Music) delivers a faithful version of Shirley Jackson’s early second-wave feminist horror story, The Haunting of Hill House, published four years earlier. The genius of the story lies in its grim reading of domesticity. Influenced by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic, The Yellow Wallpaper, the central character is a woman ravaged by social expectation.
Julie Harris plays the lead character - Eleanor 'Nell' Lance, who has spent her life caring for her sick mother and now is reduced to living on the couch in a home she shares with her bullying sister’s family. When she receives an invitation to assist Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson – every inch the English academic) who is investigating a reportedly haunted house, she grabs the opportunity to escape from her horrible existence.
The film is dominated by two elements: Nell’s constant, anxious inner dialogue and the mysterious, threatening noise of Hill House. Also, a great bendy door effect.
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