Director Robert Wise's classic 1963 film The Haunting is the gold standard for haunted house movies. Based on Shirley Jackson's landmark 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House, the film keeps its scares both unseen and ambiguous (are the ghosts real, or is the doomed Eleanor having a complete mental collapse?), and confirms that the most terrifying things are often the ones we can't see.
But don't take our word for it: Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg both rate The Haunting as one of the scariest horror films of all time. Its basic premise — that some houses are just “born bad” — its deliberate obfuscation of both the nature and origin of the events that besiege the party of paranormal researchers, and its use of a very unreliable narrator are all aspects still influencing the horror genre today. It’s fitting, then, that the film just received a new 4K UHD Blu-ray from Scream Factory so that modern audiences can properly appreciate it.
