Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Haunting
1963 · Robert Wise · The Haunting on Sightlines
Two women sit together on a bed in the dark. Something is coming down the corridor, striking the walls as it comes. The booming is too heavy and too regular to be the pipes. Then it reaches their door. Robert Wise does not cut to the corridor. He holds on Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, then on the door, and the carved wood seems to swell inward toward them. We never see what is on the other side. More than sixty years later, that door is still one of the most frightening things in the movies, and nothing is ever shown behind it.
It is often said that The Haunting proves suggestion is scarier than showing. That's true, but it doesn't explain much. Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, gives us a sharper tool. Every frame, he argues, implies a space outside it, which he calls the out-of-field. Usually that space is ordinary. It is the rest of the room, or the hallway an actor walks into: space we could reach if the camera turned. Deleuze calls this the relative out-of-field. There is a second kind, which can't be located anywhere. It isn't the next room. It is a sense that the frame belongs to some larger whole we cannot place or reach. He calls it the absolute out-of-field.
The Haunting works by blurring the two. The pounding ought to have a source we could walk to, because the corridor is right there. Yet the film persuades us that if we opened the door the corridor would be empty and the sound would still be in the room. Space we could reach keeps threatening to become space we can't. So Wise isn't hiding a monster. He is making the edge of the frame unreliable.
He learned this in a particular school. Wise started as a director under Val Lewton at RKO. Lewton's unit, in Cat People, invented the scare that comes from offscreen sound: the unseen presence circling the swimming pool. Wise's first directing credit, The Curse of the Cat People, made a lonely girl's inner life the source of its supernatural, so that you could never tell whether the ghost was real. The Haunting takes both lessons and spreads them across an entire house. In Lewton's films the unseen was a sequence. Here it is the architecture.
The second invention is in the lens. Wise asked Panavision for a very wide anamorphic lens, around 30mm, which the company said wasn't ready because it bent the edges of the image. By his own account, he accepted the distortion in writing and used it on purpose. Doorframes bow. Rooms stretch near the borders of the frame. The sets had ceilings, so low angles take in whole rooms that lean over the people in them. The camera prowls and tilts as if it were someone in the house. Deleuze names a kind of image in which the camera watches a character who is perceiving, and we feel the camera's own presence while it does so: the dicisign. Usually that presence belongs to the filmmaker. In Hill House it seems to belong to the house, and the house isn't friendly.
Then there are the faces. Elliot Scott filled the rooms with statues, mirrors, heavy drapes, carving and patterned wallpaper, and the camera moves over them slowly enough for us to start finding eyes and mouths. Deleuze, writing about German Expressionism, described its shadowy gradients as giving things a "non-organic life": objects alive in a way that is neither human nor animal. The Haunting has none of Caligari's crooked painted sets. Its expressionism lies in a habit of seeing, and the film teaches it to us. By the second night we are scanning the wallpaper ourselves. The fear has moved into our own eyes.
This matters for what the film does to the horror story. Classic genre storytelling follows what Deleuze calls the action-image: someone sees a threat and acts to change the situation. Dr. Markway is built for that kind of story. He is rational and well-meaning, and he has come to investigate. But his authority turns out to be useless. Luke's jokes give way to fear. Nobody can do anything, because there is nothing to act on. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image, and the situation it leaves is a pure sound situation (a sonsign): people who can only listen. Mrs. Dudley spells out the terms in her flat recital of the house rules, about what happens "in the night, in the dark." Being a guest at Hill House means hearing things and not being able to answer them.
Eleanor is the film's real listener. Deleuze calls such figures seers: people who watch and endure rather than act. Harris plays her with a nervous hunger that never settles, and Deleuze would point to her face as a potisign, a face where small tremors build into intensity without ever turning into action. Over that face runs her whispered voiceover, eager and wounded and sometimes grand. Much of the film is heard from inside her head. Here the earlier question takes a sharper form. If the absolute out-of-field is the larger whole the frame belongs to, which whole is it? The house, or Eleanor's mind? The screenwriter, Nelson Gidding, first read her story as a breakdown. Shirley Jackson told him she meant a ghost story. The film doesn't decide between them. Because it never shows an apparition, every knock can belong to either.
The film stands among clear relatives. Rebecca gave it a timid heroine's inner voice and a house that dominates her. The Uninvited gave it cold spots, sobbing heard offscreen, and a coded-lesbian figure that anticipates Theodora's charged watchfulness. Its siblings, The Innocents and Carnival of Souls, also build hauntings out of a woman's estrangement and unsettling sound. Humphrey Searle, a composer of twelve-tone concert music, wrote a sparse score that mostly steps aside so that silence and pounding can do the work. Reviews were mixed in 1963. Today The Haunting is treated as the central haunted-house film, and the reason is that it took the frame itself, the line between seen and unseen, and made that line the thing to fear.
So when you watch it, look at the edges. Watch where the verticals bend, and which faces in the carving you start to see first. When the knocking begins, notice that Wise keeps you in the room. Ask yourself where you think the sound is, and whether that place is a corridor at all.
Concepts in play
- out-of-field (absolute) — The pounding that moves along the corridor and the door that seems to bulge inward. The source is never shown, and offscreen space seems to stop being a place you could reach.
- out-of-field (relative) — The editing cuts only to the door and the women's faces. The corridor is implied as adjacent space where the noise should have a source.
- dicisign — Shot with a distorting 30mm anamorphic lens, using low angles and a prowling, tilting camera that moves as if it were a presence in the house while it watches the characters.
- expressionism (non-organic life of things) — Deep-shadow black-and-white, possibly infrared exteriors that make windows look like eyes, and a camera that tilts across carved wood and patterned wallpaper until faces seem to appear in them.
- crisis of the action-image — Markway, the rational investigator, finds his authority useless. Luke's cynicism gives way to fear. There is no visible threat for anyone to act against.
- pure sound situation (sonsign) — The haunting is mostly heard: booming knocks, muffled voices and laughter, something that might be a child crying. The characters can only listen.
- the seer (voyant) — Eleanor endures and interprets the house's signs rather than acting on them. Much of the film is heard from inside her head through her whispered voiceover.
- potisign (intensive face) — Julie Harris's nervous, hungry intensity, with the editing holding on her face as the pounding builds instead of cutting away to an action.