THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT: Atmosphere, acting help sell ghost story

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This article was published 27/03/2009 (6384 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The best haunted-house movies never just arbitrarily plunk characters in a dwelling where things go bump in the night.

In movies such as The Amityville Horror and The Haunting, supernatural tensions cause violent cracks in relationships that already have stress fractures before anyone ever crosses a spooky threshold.

So it is with this film by first-time feature director Peter Cornwell. The Campbell clan, effectively headed by mom Sara (Virginia Madsen) is already reeling from eldest son Matt’s ongoing battle with cancer.

Matt (well played by the intense young Kyle Gallner of the low-key vigilante movie Red) is undergoing treatments that take him and his mother far from home. Sara prevails on her reformed-alcoholic husband Peter (Martin Donovan) to rent a house near the hospital to shorten the hours-long commute.

The only affordable rental they can find is kind of a creepy-decrepit old house with mortuary equipment in the basement and walls filled with secrets.

Because of the experimental nature of Matt’s cancer treatments, he is predisposed to hallucinations. But a fellow cancer patient, Rev. Popescu (Elias Koteas) suggests that Matt’s visions of another young man in the basement may not be a figment of his imagination, but the spirit of a long-dead psychic medium, only visible to those who "live in the shadow of the valley of death."

Given that the haunted-house movie has been, pardon the expression, done to death, director Cornwell and screenwriters Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe discover novelty in the century-old backstory, including spirit photography (incorporating ectoplasm that would emanate from the orifices of mediums), and the bizarre old tradition of photographing the dead posed alongside their still-living family.

Along more conventional horror-movie lines, the film also features walking corpses with no eyelids.

Movies like this live or die depending on the quality of the acting, and in this case, the cast is sufficiently skilled and committed that they sell the film’s more outlandish elements (never mind that the story is supposedly based on a true story). Madsen’s glamour has given way to a kind of mid-life gravitas, and Gallner proves to be an actor to watch.

Much of the film was shot on location in a big old house in Teulon that may constitute the most inspired casting of all. It’s big, rambling and tinged with menace.

Its interiors are reminiscent of the bowels of the Burton Cummings Theatre, which was effectively used to elicit old-dark-house thrills in the otherwise forgettable 1998 horror movie The Clown at Midnight.

Apparently, Manitoba is filled with places that can elicit more chills and tension than an end-of-March snowstorm.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

 

 

Movie Review

The Haunting in Connecticut

Starring Virginia Madsen and Kyle Gallner

Grant Park, Kildonan Place, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne.

14A

3 out of 5 stars