This movie should really be somewhere in the top ten. It’s a film about not only what you don’t see, but what you legitimately don’t know. It’s a movie in which the mentally ill protagonist is probably more reliable than any other character in the film. I personally assume that there’s a supernatural element in the movie, but where it begins and where it ends is debatable, because I don’t think there’s a single event in this film for which a rational explanation couldn’t be provided.
The story is told primarily through the
eyes of a girl named Eleanor, or Nell for short (Julie Harris).
While never stated overtly, it’s strongly implied that Nell suffers
from some form of mental illness that causes her family to view her
as entirely dependent. However, before her mother died, Nell had
spent the last ten years caring for her. And now she blames herself
for her mother's death.
Nell is invited by Dr. John Markway
(Richard Johnson) to stay overnight at a “haunted” mansion called
Hill House, and she jumps at the chance to escape her controlling
sister and brother-in-law; determined to never return. How she
intends to accomplish this with whatever she can earn from staying
overnight in this house is not elaborated upon, and I think it’s
likely a sign of her mental state that she believes such an escape
can be so easily achieved.
Markway invited several people with
paranormal experiences to the house as an experiment to demonstrate
the existence of the supernatural by stirring it up with their
presence. Unfortunately for the experiment, only two of them show
up. Nell (who may have encountered a poltergeist as a child), and a
supposedly psychic woman named Theo (Claire Bloom). The cast is then
rounded off by Luke (Russ Tamblyn), a young man who stands to inherit
the house, and has been charged by his family’s Matriarch to
oversee the experiment.
The fact that the house may be haunted
and that Nell is clearly unwell already provide a great deal of
ambiguity as to what’s going on. Anything that we learn
exclusively from her perspective may be distorted. However, the rest
of the cast are all so dubious in their motives that there’s a
layer to it beyond this. Each and every member of the experiment has
a motivation to deceive the others, and Nell is clearly an easy
target for such trickery.
Dr. Markway naturally wants to make
sure his “experiment” is a success. However, he never comes
across as particularly scientific or rigorous, and you could
interpret him either as a deluded fanatic or an outright conman
looking to become famous. In fact, even if we give him the benefit
of the doubt, he seems like nothing more than a superstitious idiot
who got in over his head when he stumbled into a real haunting.
Theo comes across as quite shady
herself. She could be a psychic, or a card shark who’s very
skilled at cold reading. There are also many hints that she’s
sexually attracted to Nell, but she’s manipulative enough that you
could just as easily reverse the interpretation and say that Nell is
a Lesbian with whom she’s playing mind games. She makes a point of
“Reading” Nell’s mind on a number of occasions, but Nell always
tends to wear her thoughts on her sleeves anyway
Luke is a rich, spoiled jerk who
doesn’t take anything about the experiment seriously. You could
certainly see him setting up some of the manifestations of the
supernatural as pranks, simply to amuse himself. And just as with
Theo, Luke would likely see Nell as the obvious target.
With these factors coming together,
we’re left with a troubled woman, surrounded by a pack of wolves,
desperate to get away from her family and possibly under siege by
spirits. But in spite of this, she begins to fall in love with the
house because of the escape it represents.
The house itself is just as ambiguous.
On the one hand, we’re told that it was built with bizarre angles
to be intentionally disorienting. On the other, there have been a
number of strange deaths in the house... or perhaps it’s just
natural that a house standing for 90 years would have seen some of
its residents meet their end. We’re given the deaths in an eerie
flashback. But when you say “two deaths by accident, an old woman
died because her nurse was negligent, and a suicide,” it doesn’t
sound all that impressive to merit such fear; especially since the
first two and the last two were at least half a century apart. Then
again, it’s possible that the movie is creating an irrational fear
within us, just as the house creates an irrational fear in the
characters.
This isn’t a movie that gives you
easy answers. All you know is that when people are scared, or when
they believe in something, real or not, it can pose a very real
threat. Nell’s desperation to stay in the house eventually drives
her to her death... or the house just kills her. But in the end, the
result is still the same. She prefers death over returning to her
life, and so she joins the house.
If you haven’t seen this movie, watch
it. Turn off the lights, grab a hand to hold, and it’s perfect for
any movie night.
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