THE HAUNTING
(1963; d. Rbt Wise, w. Nelson Gidding)

Bookending narration à la Wise’s earlier I Want to Live, beginning w/ anthropologist Dr Markway (scientific mind/consciousness)’s + ending w/ spiritual Eleanor (soul/unconscious)’s, suggesting containment w/i mandalic whole (mind/soul, living/dead, masculine/feminine, consc’ss/unconsc) reinforced by similar mandalas in spiral staircase + spinning wheels on 1st Mrs Crain’s death (à la film reels, this one echoing Wise mentors Welles + Lewton) + climactic Eleanor’s, latter’s desire for house atavistic desire to return to womb rather’n possess it like mature woman.

Dr Markway conducting research into supposedly haunted Hill House (investigation into own "spirit"/soul, grown hostile due to neglect), recruits Eleanor + psychic Theo ("medium" possessed of ambiguous name + sexuality: she the mediating not-the-mind + unity of counterpart Dr + Mrs M), plus, by agreement w/ House’s owner (the proprietary Self), young, playful, libidinous heir (inheritor of previous generation’s "ghosts," or unexamined/unresolved spiritual issues, dealing mainly w/ gender + sexuality) Luke Sanderson; acknowledgment of house as great unexplored unconscious suggesting all characters as part of same unintegrated personality (Eleanor’s "Maybe The Haunting is all in my mind") à la ’62 Cabinet of Caligari, caretakers the Dudleys the rigid, formulaic consciousness keeping house locked + always leaving at night, Mrs D’s breakfast-intrusions cuckoo-clocklike, predictable + regular, telling everyone it’s time to return to routine.

Built by repressive Hugh Crain, whose bunch of architectural "crazy angles," or little misperceptions, add up to "one giant distortion": the mind + patriarchal society, Eleanor’s jones for DrM + house longing for father invisible in own childhood tales dominated by mother, he + they ordering consciousness (HC’s strict laws) absent in her world + film; tho longed for, w/o this model, Eleanor only drawn twd inwdness + destruction (dancing w/ statues + uniting w/ house in end: can’t have real, so courts effigies in own mind), she both H-daughter Abigail Crain (nursery where latter spent life locked up + avoided [à la Live’s gas chamber, here dubbed "pressure cooker" à la Wise Andromeda Strain’s "verve center" underground lab, West Side Story’s NYC + Hindenburg + Sand Pebbles’ ships]: repressed info which can only return destructively, and Eleanor as womanchild [Abby’s aging scene, her nursery-subconscious holding both presexual child + unrealized post-sex’l senior, Eleanor having missed own adolescence]) + Abby’s companion (own mother’s caregiver); reenacting former’s staircase suicide laying to rest caregiver status to regress to child-i.d.

Turns on "unnatural" "monster" Theo not for lesbianism (probably oblivious to Eleanor) but because she’s free + uninhibited – dsn’t need validation, as does El, she jealous child wanting Daddy all to self (all of life replaying – even other people’s – childhood): wants to be mother (Mrs Markway; naïve attraction to Dr desire to assume womanhood + be the womb/house) but she keeps dying on her (own mom + 2 Mrs Crains); only way she can i.d. w/ either is to die, too (spinning wheels of 1st + final death scenes; cf The Shining, where similar character who i.d.s w/ past becomes past).

Voyeur Markway up early one morning to study sighing thru harpstrings (cf Sunset Blvd’s moaning "organ"), triangular feminine icon opposite phallic staff dropped by Abigail at death: Eleanor’s lamented sexuality + moan of all repressed wmnhood under patriarchy, traditional El (everpresent bows on dresses) victim-feminine survived by visionary, self-reliant modern-wmn Theo, who wd change world in coupla yrs, Luke’s pronouncement that structure shd be leveled + "earth sown w/ salt" epitaph for patriarchy.

Hauntings also transference of DrM’s repressed anima-irrational onto Eleanor (in men’s adaptation of wmn writer’s novel), she complaining of being everybody’s psychic wastebasket; larger implications (raised in Live) of wmn as scapegoat (consequent leveling of headstrong Mrs M Dr’s desire to suppress her, nursery doors opening flytrap-like for her his, as well as Eleanor’s, punishment for her uncontrollability), sublimated again in end as in Live, only this time un-realized.

Mrs Markway’s climactic drop from attic/womb above Eleanor’s head during spiral-staircase pursuit (vertiginous ascension along DNA: hereditary "ladder") culmination of Eleanor’s reflection-in-house imagery (staring into face as into mirror), Mrs M the assertive wmn + wife Eleanor cd never be.