This is already the second movie with "Haunting" in the title that I have seen this year. This movie is unusually plugged to be "Based on THE true story," not just A true story. I believe I may have actually seen the original Discovery Channel documentary about this particular haunted house in Connecticut, but I cannot be too sure now. Given the array of dramatic issues tackled in this movie, I would think it was based loosely only on the actual events. But then again, truth can be stranger than fiction.
This story revolves around a typical American family who had a son with cancer. They needed to get a cheap house near the hospital where the son is getting treatment. The regimen he is undergoing may tend to give him visual and auditory hallucinations. This was how some of his initial experiences in the house rationalized away. But as the movie progressed, they find out more about the house's history, and why supernatural events persist to make their stay a living hell. The story further touched on several other macabre topics such as funeral parlors, séances, ectoplasmic photography and even grave robbery.
This is not a bad horror movie. The first two-thirds of this movie are genuinely creepy. The opening credits with all those photographs of dead people and the funereal music set the mood just right for the rest of the 100 minutes you will invest in the theater. All the scenes with the small kids playing hide and seek were a study in effective tension. There was that memorable scene when they come home finding son Matt hiding behind a wall of furniture trying to claw his way out of the wall. And for me, the creepiest was the box of EYELIDS (you have to see it to believe it)!
Of course, there were also horror clichés here and there, like brave people walking in the dark alone to investigate strange noises, the erratic power outages, and the obligatory shower scene by the pretty teenage girl (Amanda Crew). The ending sequences were a bit excessively over-dramatic, but admittedly the sight of all those hidden dead bodies was really scary.
The mom is played by Virginia Madsen and she is really a solid presence here. Her acting is very natural and realistic, nothing of the typical over-the-top horror theatrics with her. The son with cancer Matt is performed by a new actor Kyle Gallner pretty well, and he succeeds to be as gaunt and creepy-looking as the ghosts that he sees. On the down side is the character and the actor of the dad (Martin Donovan). The character was carelessly written and woodenly portrayed.
A final word, according to a conversation between Matt and co-patient Reverend (Elias Koteas), cancer patients are more sensitive to spirits around them because they are spending their life on the borderline of the living and the dead. I have never heard that before, but I guess it is just some interesting pop psychology from the scriptwriters to keep the story going.
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