The Haunting in Connecticut

Connecticut? An evil house possessed by evil spirits? You've got my attention. If you ask me, perhaps no other state of the union has spawned so much Luciferian madness as the Nutmeg State, at least on a per capital basis. So as I pulled up to the multiplex in Leominster this afternoon, I was at least looking forward to that part of the story.

So let's get the story paradigms for The Haunting in Connecticut out of the way:

1. As I said, an evil house is possessed by evil spirits, causing harm and mayem to mortal occupants inside.

2. A evil necromancer type who dabbles in the occult abuses a high-powered medium to channel evil spirits, and bad things happen, because of the evil spirits that are released.

3. A godly clergyman arrives in the darkness of night to help drive out demonic spirits through an exorcism.

4. An alcoholic and violently abusive father wreaks havoc on his family.

5. A teenage boy is dying of cancer, and during his treatment he is plagued by auditory and visual hallucinations of evil spirits.

Wait, what was that in number 5? It wasn't in the trailer, but the cancer-patient is the part of the movie that made this fresh. Almost everything else in the movie was assembled from parts of other horror movies, sort of Frankenstein style (found photographs of dead people---oh yeah, just like in The Others).

But it sorta worked, especially because of the aforementioned fresh part. If this had been an extraordinary movie then numbers 4 and 5 (especially 5) would have served as the springboard text on which the other three parts played off. If this had been a masterpiece, then the supernatural would have been sublimated to the level of "naturalistic cover," meaning that one could watch the movie while interpreting all the events as part of the natural world, if one chose.

But this wasn't a masterpiece, or even an extraordinary movie. The linkage between t 4 and 5 to the supernatural parts to create true subtext wasn't really established firmly. This was a ghost story, not a story about a cancer patient, and the movie veered off into the necromancer backstory. Too bad. With a better screenplay, the concept could have really soared.

But like I said, it still sort of worked. But something about it did bother me deeply (get ready for a rant): in the Postmodern era, one of the ironclad rules of movies is that all psychic mediums are real. It's the "Whoopi Goldberg Rule" from Ghost (1990). Even though she's a phony scammer, she really can communicate with spirits. In the classical era, mediums were phonies, because they are, well, phonies. In the Postmodern era, all fucking mediums are real. All of them.

Just a couple hours ago on the tube (ABC), I watched yet another example of this in Just Like Heaven (2005). I get really, really tired of this mediums-are-all-real rule. Can't we get a phony one from time to time? Why in movieland must every damn person who claims to be able to see ghosts actually turn out to be valid?

Another thing about the movie I didn't like: photographs of ectoplasm. Anytime I hear the word "ectoplasm" in a movie, I roll my eyes. If I were a Hollywood producer and someone gave me a script with the word "ectoplasm" in it, I'd throw it right out my window.

I'm not at all averse to a good scary ghost story on screen, but somehow this one just asked me to swallow a little too much crap along the way. A better route would have been to jettison the whole medium back story, and somehow tie in the cancer patient subtext more.

Some things I did like about the movie: the cinematography was appropriately eerie for a ghost movie. There were plenty of good creepy camera angles. The first half hour of the movie was probably the best, when they were building up the tension.

The performances were good too. Kyle Gallner in the lead was somewhat lackluster and shuffling, in a non-demanding sort of way, but Martin Donovan in a supporting role is always a good sign for any movie. Virginia Madsen was decently matronly, and I was delighted to see the gorgeous Amanda Crew again, having become a fan of hers from last year's Sex Drive. She gets one of my favorite scenes in the movie, a somewhat innovative use of a shower curtain for a horror movie (you thought you'd seen them all).

Like I said, had it not been for the top-heavy back story involving the seances, I might have really liked this movie. As such, I can only recommend it to horror movie completionists, and of course, to anyone interested in evil things in Connecticut.