A suburban California family is terrorized by ghosts in the machine — the machine in question being the TV. Producer Steven Spielberg was apparently much influenced by The Haunting as a child… When it came to making his own haunted house movie two decades later, he jettisoned monochrome restraint for (then) cutting edge fx and saturated colour. But the movie, directed by Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw fame, does take pains to make its characters seem real, so we care about them when things take a dark turn.
“I adore this film… the Jerry Goldsmith score, the approach, the tone… Everything about it is great,” gushes VIFF+ Premium member Sean Wicks.
Content Considerations: Graphic violence
Tobe Hooper
Craig T Nelson, JoBeth Williams, Beatrice Straight, Heather O’Rourke
USA
1982
English
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Credits
Screenwriter
Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, Mark Victor
Cinematography
Matthew F. Leonetti
Editor
Michael Kahn
Original Music
Jerry Goldsmith
Premium Horror
To celebrate Halloween, VIFF+ Premium members nominated the scariest movies they have ever seen — and now we’re playing them.
Get Out
Guess who's coming to dinner? Daniel Kaluuya is the Black boyfriend justifiably anxious about meeting his white girlfriend's folks for the first time in Jordan Peele's satiric modern horror classic, one of a series curated by our VIFF+ Premium members.
The Haunting
Directed by Robert Wise in 1963, The Haunting is a classic exercise in the suggestive power of cinema, adapted from Shirley Jackson's 1959 best-seller, The Haunting of Hill House, a provocative blend of supernatural and psychological horror.
