What's Really Scary About
The Haunting

by D. K. Holm

here is a new character type in the world and no film can be released without featuring him. Normally played by Steve Zahn or Phillip Seymour Hoffman, he has roots in the drugged out valley kids of movies such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, followed by the slacker kids seen in a thousand teen films since Bottle Rocket . This creature has a croaky voice, a slow manner of talking, a drug induced sense of being slightly behind everyone else coupled with a blinding insight into the hypocrisy of others. He is also an reconstructed hedonist. He is the latest in a series of minor character types who define a time and serve as a model, even if not followed. for young men coming of age.

I remember once going to see Old Boyfriends at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon. It was a Sunday afternoon, and there weren't many people there. I went to the film because I was a Paul Schrader fan and wanted to see how his script was treated. But the others were there because… what? It was hard to tell—except for one of them. He was a fratboyish but slightly heavy guy in glasses. He sat in the middle of the auditorium, in my sight line. He was utterly bored by the story, changed from the original script, of a girl looking up her former boyfriends, its revised concentration on the concerns of women tedious to him. He was listless, his head resting bored on his arm. But then the main character visited boyfriend John Belushi. For that sequence, he perked up, sat straight, and howled with laughter, even though what was happening was neither funny nor appropriate to the tone the director had established from the beginning. When the Belushi portion was over, this spectator realized that he wasn't going to see the comedian in the film again, and so he got up, bored, and left.

Belushi was the key personality type of his era, thanks to his self-destructive and rarely funny antics on Saturday Night Live, followed by a series of iconic if poor films. His influence on the culture ceased with his death. And then American itself changed, and there were new kinds of types in the world. Now, of course, they are infesting our films.

hus we have a relatively innocuous film such as The Haunting and it must include a representative of this new slacker skateboarder type. Here he is played by Owen Wilson, who was in Bottle Rocket. He wears the clothing of a preteen from the sixties; he has that hissy, shushy speech impediment essential to the identification of the type; and he has the open lust coupled with the passivity of his progenitors. Plus, when he first appears, the audience howls, feeling assured that here is a character they can identify with. The person sitting directly behind me at a recent screening, though obviously holding the film in contempt—he kept tisking all through the screening at the dialogue he deemed poor, the horror effects he judged unspectacular, and the plot shifts he appraised as obvious—nevertheless vocally relished Wilson's appearances, rocking back and forth in his seat with laughter.

It's unfortunate that The Haunting is so innocuous, as it is suppose to be scary, really, really scary. Well, it is startling at times, but never creepy. Filmmakers these days, or maybe they always have, confuse startling people with scaring them. This new version, directed by Jan De Bont from a script credited to David Self, apparently his first film if he is a real person and not a Martin Amis character, bears a general resemblance to the Shirley Jackson novel and subsequent Robert Wise movie based on it. But with the advent of high tech computer graphics, the film is much more explicit about its "horrors." It is to state the obvious wearily and wearingly yet again to say that explicit doesn't necessarily mean better. The chills of the film go out the window once faces begin to appear in curtains and the heads of babies carved into bed posts suddenly begin to swivel and talk. Also, the film comes from DreamWorks, which is to say that it contains on the most simple level some of the themes that obsess Spielberg, if only because the film's creators dedicated themselves to anticipating his taste. Thus the film focuses on lost or tortured kids, and the kindly soul whose quest it is to save them. In fact, for the most part, the tale is rather old fashioned, ludicrously so in some of its portentous dialogue. It embraces modernity only with its special effects—and its slacker character, who, I am happy to say, suffers decapitation all too late in the film.

Who he is and where this character type came from and why audiences identify with him confounds sociological analysis. That it is a made up character, a style that young men embrace seems certain. That it is a male response to the helping sciences—kindergarten generated over-concern with "hearing" you that leads to those sentences that rise up at the end like questions adopted by girls who have been immersed in "caring" since birth seems obvious. That we are going to be haunted by this type for many more years is saddening.

Full cast and credits can be had via the Internet Movie Data Base. There is also an official web site.

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