The Quiet Ones (2012)

The Quiet Ones: written by John Pogue, Oren Moverman, and Craig Rosenberg, based on the screenplay by Tom de Ville; directed by John Pogue; starring Jared Harris (Professor Coupland), Sam Claflin (Brian), Erin Richards (Krissi), Rory Fleck-Byrne (Harry), and Olivia Cooke (Jane) (2012): The 'true events' this movie claims to be based upon took place in Toronto, Ontario and not in and around England's Oxford University, where the movie is set. The events also bear virtually no relation to the movie other than the fact that human beings and seances figure in both. And oxygen, I guess. The planet Earth. The protagonists were directly beneath the Sun at some point.

The Quiet Ones even shows still photographs at the end which one assumes the viewer is supposed to believe are photos of the actual participants. They're not. I actually like this last bit -- it seems like a critique of all those ridiculously fictionalized 'true ghost story' movies. It's the smartest thing about the movie. Or the fakest. 

I can see why The Quiet Ones sat on the shelf for a couple of years before being released by the reconstituted Hammer Films. It's a movie woefully short on the sort of concise and capable characterization needed for the audience to give a crap about what's happening to whom. Alternately, characterization can be replaced by a complicated and interesting story behind a haunting, or by the deployment of some form of fascinating exposition, or by terror itself -- thrills, chills, and spills. The Quiet Ones is thin on all these fronts. It feels like a plot outline rather than an actual script was filmed.

So anyway. The real Toronto experiment involved an attempt to prove that ghosts were really psychic phenomena created by living people, primarily by having a group of people invent a fake ghost and then try to will it into existence. The mostly terrible recent movie The Apparition also spun out from this initial premise. 

The Quiet Ones inverts that premise: an obsessed psychic researcher/Oxford professor (Jared Harris, struggling mightily with his underwritten, unsympathetic, one-note character) and his trio of (grad?) students try to prove that the ghost haunting a poltergeist-plagued orphan is the creation of her psychic talents and not an actual ghost.

If you've seen or read Richard Matheson's terrific novel-into-film Hell House, this will all sound vaguely familiar. If you haven't, then read and watch Hell House (well, the movie's re-titled Legend of Hell House) instead of The Quiet Ones.  Or read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, with its formerly poltergeist-plagued protagonist and its massively haunted house and its team of ghost researchers. Or watch the early 1960's adaptation of Jackson's novel, The Haunting. The Quiet Ones simply isn't very good or very smart. Not recommended.

Hello, Walls!

The Legend of Hell House: adapted by Richard Matheson from his own novel; starring Roddy McDowall (Ben Fischer), Pamela Franklin (Florence Tanner), Clive Revill (Dr. Barrett), Gayle Hunnicutt (Ann Barrett) and Michael Gough (Belasco) (1973): The late, great Richard Matheson adapts his own haunted-house novel here in effective fashion, especially given what couldn't be shown in a movie of the time. The whole thing even manages to make an impossible-not-to-laugh cat-attack scene work without the benefit of CGI.

Where Matheson's I Am Legend gave vampires a scientific rationale for existing, The Legend of Hell House offers a quasi-scientific exploration of an extraordinarily dangerous haunted house. There's certainly a tip of the cap to Shirley Jackson's monumental haunted-house novel The Haunting of Hill House starting with the title and the four-person psychic investigation team.

But whereas Jackson's novel offered no real antagonist other than the house itself, Matheson's work gives us a malign human -- Emeric Belasco, builder of the house and a Satanic presence who would have made Aleister Crowley look like the Church Lady.

Back in the 1920's, Belasco built the house and then sealed it away from the outside world with its two-dozen or so inhabitants inside. When the house was opened, everyone was dead and Belasco had vanished. One of the subtle drolleries of Hell House is that the most haunted house in the world is less than 50 years old: it was built to be haunted.

Teams investigating the house have been devastated by Something, to the extent that the only one of a dozen previous investigators to survive both physically and mentally is Roddy McDowall's Ben Fischer. Fischer was a teen-aged medium when he entered Hell House with the last group to investigate it before the events of the novel. Now, he's the middle-aged Voice of Doom with a new team which ultimately aims to use technology to dissipate Hell House's restless spirits. Good luck with that.

The performances here are all fine, and suspense builds to a satisfying conclusion. McDowall is especially fine as the withdrawn and wounded Fischer. The book fleshed out Fischer's personality by describing his thoughts and experiences. Here, McDowall has to build his wounded psychic without the benefit of voice-overs. I think he succeeds admirably, as does the movie itself. Highly recommended.

Proof

Rose Red: written by Stephen King; directed by Craig R. Baxley; starring Nancy Travis (Professor Joyce Reardon), Matt Keeslar (Steve Rimbauer), Kimberly J. Brown (Annie Wheaton), David Dukes (Professor Carl Miller), Judith Ivey (Cathy Kramer), Melanie Lynskey (Rachel Wheaton), Matt Ross (Emery Waterman), Julian Sands (Nick Hardaway), Kevin Tighe (Victor Kandinsky) and Emily Deschanel (Pam Asbury) (2002): King's penchant for synthesizing different horror tropes fails him here in this wearying miniseries from 2002 that focuses on a rag-tag assortment of psychic investigators/actual psychics and their investigation of Rose Red, a sprawling Seattle haunted house roughly the size of the New Orleans Superdome. Or possibly the moon.

Rose Red's fundamental problem may lie with King's stentorian approach to the haunted house sub-genre. Subtlety and gradually escalating weirdness are the hallmarks of the two great American haunted house novels (Richard Matheson's Hell House and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House). Rose Red leads with an extraordinarily overt manifestation of psychic powers, one that echoes and amplifies a similar incident from Shirley Jackson's novel to such an extent that the miniseries clearly establishes itself as taking place in an alternate universe where psychic powers must have been confirmed long ago by science.

With too much (yet not enough) already established about psychic powers, the miniseries starts throwing everything and the kitchen sink into other areas. Hill House and Hell House both initially sent 4-person teams of paranormal investigators into their haunted houses. Rose Red sends eight. Or possibly nine. Or a dozen, if you count the people who show up throughout the main part of the movie. Hell House and Hill House gave us large but explicable mansions.

Rose Red gives us something that's larger than the Winchester House and which builds new rooms itself, a trick the Winchester House never mastered. This remarkable self-building has apparently been confirmed on many occasions by flyover photographs of the sprawling complex. Wouldn't a house that verifiably builds itself without people pretty much confirm supernatural activity? Why is this movie about an academic whose reputation rests on whether or not she can confirm supernatural activity? Such activity is everywhere!!! Buy a camera!

So the psychics and the scientists and the hangers-on all show up, and they all have readily verifiable psychic powers, and we also learn that about 50 people have gone missing at Rose Red over the century of its existence. You'd think the authorities might want such a place torn down or blown up. But they don't. It's still there. Still growing. Still eating people.

The acting is pretty scattershot and the direction by Craig R. Baxley obvious and only rarely subtle. Rotting, animated corpses dominate the proceedings, somewhat counterintuitively at certain points when the house is ostensibly trying to get people to join it of their own free will. Because look, you get to be a rotting corpse for all eternity! Who handles the marketing for this haunted house? Not recommended.