Sightlines · reception

How The Haunting was received

1963 · Robert Wise · The Haunting on Sightlines

The arc

Met with respectable but muted notices in 1963 — some critics found it hokum — it's since been canonised as perhaps THE haunted house movie, the gold standard every ghost film gets measured against.

What’s debated

The eternal fight it starts: is suggestion scarier than showing, with its 'you never see anything' restraint held up as either horror's peak or a slow sit — a debate the loathed 1999 remake settled for most fans in the original's favor.

Its footprint

'Whose hand was I holding?' remains one of horror's most quoted lines, and the film's DNA runs straight through Mike Flanagan's 2018 Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House; its breathing, bulging door is an endlessly referenced image.

Where it stands

Firmly canonical — Martin Scorsese put it at #1 on his list of the scariest films of all time, and it's a perennial 'this is how you do horror' rite of passage.

Did you know? Robert Wise shot the house's queasy interiors with a 30mm wide-angle Panavision lens the company considered too distorted to release — he convinced them the flaw was exactly what Hill House needed.

Named by the director

• Val Lewton — Wise, who directed The Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher for Lewton, said he made The Haunting as a tribute to Lewton's suggestion-over-showing school of horror.