"The Haunting" (Robert Wise, 1963)

Little was left of the square. The plat­form had long since col­lapsed in a cloud of red­dish dust. The last to rush past was a woman in a black shawl, car­ry­ing the tiny exe­cu­tion­er like a larva in her arms. The fallen trees lay flat and reliefless, while those that were still stand­ing, also two-dimensional, with a lat­er­al shad­ing of the trunk to sug­gest roun­ded­ness, barely held on with their branches to the rip­ping mesh of the sky. Everything was com­ing apart. Everything was fall­ing. A spin­ning wind was pick­ing up and whirl­ing; dust, rags, chips of painted wood, bits of gil­ded plaster, paste­board bricks, posters; an arid gloom fleeted; and amidst the dust, and the fall­ing things, and the flap­ping scenery, Cincinnatus made his way in that dir­ec­tion where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him. 

—Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation To A Beheading, trans­lated from the Russian by Dimitri Nabokov in col­lab­or­a­tion with the author, 1959

When I was a kid my dad, whose full-time day job was as a route man for National Foods in Clifton, N.J., had to take on some part-time work for our fam­ily to make ends meet. We had just moved from a duplex apart­ment in Cliffside Park to a whole house in Dumont, and I guess things were a little tight. So on week­end even­ings my dad would park cars at Hing’s, a very pop­u­lar Chinese res­taur­ant in Englewood. This had been one of my dad’s jobs in high school and hence Mr. Hing, who I recall as look­ing pretty much exactly like Ho Chi Minh, was kind of an old friend of the fam­ily and showed my dad a good amount of kind­ness. The res­taur­ant was good, too, and attrac­ted a pretty swank clientele—Paul Anka was a lousy tip­per, accord­ing to father. 

So I guess I was some­where between the first and second grades, that is, some­where around sev­en years old, on the Saturday night when my mom, with whom I was not par­tic­u­larly pally at that time, sus­pen­ded my bed time on account of an odd request. She wanted me to stay up with her while she watched a movie, because she did­n’t want to watch the movie alone, because it was a movie that was apt to fright­en her. 

I should point out that my mom was not yet thirty at the time; more in the mid-twenties range. My folks had mar­ried very young, and I was their first child, which is the only reas­on her request to me made any kind of sense, although it did­n’t really make any kind of sense to me at the time really. When I say my moth­er and I wer­en’t pally at the time, I’m merely being matter-of-fact about our rela­tion­ship, whose cir­cum­stances were cir­cum­scribed by the con­di­tion of her being in her mid-twenties, my dad being the con­sciously “easy­going” fig­ure where par­ent­ing was con­cerned, and my mother­’s kinda hard­core Italian-American per­spect­ive about run­ning a house­hold. This per­spect­ive was dif­fi­cult to nego­ti­ate around the fact that I was a bit of a prob­lem child, which I don’t mean in a cute way; I was very poorly social­ized and it was sus­pec­ted for some time that I had some devel­op­ment­al issues, to the extent that my gram­mar school gym teach­er had got­ten the notion that I was “spas­tic,” which notion, once artic­u­lated to my par­ents, res­ul­ted in, among oth­er things, me get­ting a bunch of EEG tests, and under­go­ing ther­apy, and stuff. 

To make a long story short­er, I was of the opin­ion at the time that my moth­er did­n’t like me very much, and so I was kind of staggered that she was ask­ing me to watch a movie with her. I did not in any way relate to her as a young woman who was anxious about watch­ing a hor­ror movie. On the oth­er hand, I was being offered a free stay-up-late card. And I kind of liked movies. My par­ents, young Americans that they still were,  enjoyed jaunts to the drive-in, and made them pretty fre­quently, and while my sis­ter, one year my juni­or, and my broth­er, four years so, actu­ally slept, I would lie on my stom­ach cran­ing my neck, gaz­ing up sur­repti­tiously from the turned-down back seat of our Ford Country Squire sta­tion wag­on, and I would see cer­tain images that stuck with me, such as that of a pie-eyed man in a gray suit try­ing not to drive a fancy car off of the edge of a cliff. 

So. My mom and I stayed up and watched The Haunting, which, it seems worth men­tion­ing in this cli­mate, at the time was hardly an “old” movie. And, panned-and-scanned and inter­rup­ted by com­mer­cials as it was, it scared the bejee­sus out of both of us. I remem­ber the weird talk­ing wood­work did not look like any “ghost” that I was used to from the Washington Irving and Poe stor­ies I had tent­at­ively looked into in the school lib­rary. I was par­tic­u­larly gal­van­ized by a shot that seemed to have been taken from a prone pos­i­tion on the floor of the haunted house, look­ing up to a secret attic door that sud­denly opened to reveal the scream­ing face of a trau­mat­ized woman. I remem­ber ask­ing my mom why she was screaming—I did not have the plot-following facil­it­ies that I even­tu­ally developed—and I remem­ber her try­ing to explain it, and that try­ing to explain it took her out of being pretty frightened herself. 

I did not imme­di­ately try to make my way toward beings akin to me. But I found a couple, in time. This kid Alan who lived across the oth­er side of town, and who had a book with some neat pic­tures in it, called An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films, which I bor­rowed from him and nev­er gave back. I read up on The Haunting in there; its author, Carlos Clarens, actu­ally dis­ap­proved of it, and deplored the “use of ana­morph­ic lenses and film stock instead of allow­ing the hor­ror to devel­op from the every­day, the hor­ror of exist­ence which helped make the mys­ter­i­ous beauty and attrac­tion of the Lewton films.” I did not know from these “Lewton films,” but what Clarens wrote about them made me want to find out. Similarly, it was in Clarens’ book that I first came to know the names of Losey and Godard; Clarens was kind of sneaky that way.

I met anoth­er kid, Joseph, who liked to draw pic­tures of the mon­sters from old Universal hor­ror pic­tures. He was a very shy kid, and under­neath the quiet lurked a truly delight­ful sense of humor. I remem­ber he had this Marvel com­ics col­or­ing book, fea­tur­ing Captain America and Nick Fury, one of those nar­rat­ive col­or­ing books in which each of the to-be-colored pages advanced the story. The final page was a draw­ing of Captain America and Nick Fury shak­ing hands, and the cap­tion below read “We did it again, Nick!” And in mark­er on that page Joseph drew a hori­zon line behind the two fig­ures, and on that line, between the men, a mush­room cloud. We spent almost every week­end at the Palace theat­er in Bergenfield watch­ing whatever movie played there, and most of our non-homework-doing wak­ing hours (which, for me at least, were boun­ti­ful, because I was an abysmal stu­dent) watch­ing movies on tele­vi­sion. In sev­enth or eighth grade, in gym class, sit­ting out yet anoth­er soft­ball game, I was telling Joseph about my week­end plans, such as they were; through some unusu­al cir­cum­stance, I had actu­ally been invited to a party; but, I glibly said to my friend, “I’m not gonna stay too late because Psycho is on Channel 9 at elev­en.” Our gym teach­er, Coach M, who liked to regale his favored stu­dents with tales of his antics on the ’63 Mets farm team, over­heard me and ripos­ted, “What kinda party, Kenny? All boys?” Oh, the humanity.

And the time not spent doing all that we spent on the phone. “Why don’t you and Joseph ever talk about any­thing real?” my moth­er asked me once, after I got off the line with him one day. I did­n’t have the where­with­al to for­mu­late an answer, and I was slightly hurt that she did­n’t know it herself. 

The second time I saw The Haunting was in the very early ’70s, in my first or second year of high school. There was this guy who was not a whole lot older than the rest of us, this char­ac­ter named Nelson, who ran the A/V depart­ment at the high school, and was very up on cur­rent equip­ment and had a couple of Sony Portapaks in his office, as well as a video­tape record­er with which he could record stuff off of the tele­vi­sion. And one after­noon after classes he invited a couple of the more cinema-sensitive stu­dents of his acquaint­ance to join him and an aspring film­maker friend of his to watch The Haunting. And it was kind of great because with the tape we could stop, and go back, and look at par­tic­u­lar scenes again and again, and zip for­ward through com­mer­cials and such. And Nelson, a big, vol­uble guy, was a lot of fun to watch a movie with, his appre­ci­ation was so palp­able. “What a shot!” he bel­lowed when Russ Tamblyn, frightened at the shift­ing wood­work, dropped his whis­key bottle (as seen in the screen cap above.)

And so it went. In 1978, at the funer­al of a mutu­al friend who had been killed by a drunk driver, I met the per­son I refer to on this blog as My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™, and the first thing that I said to him was, “I hear you can recite all the dia­logue from King Kong by heart.” And he looked at me as if I had just taken a dump on the floor and said, “I don’t think this is the appro­pri­ate occa­sion for that.” But he got over it and soon he was intro­du­cing me to the joys of Dario Argento, going to the blighted Plaza Theater in Paterson to see Suspiria, out of which the pro­jec­tion­ist that night dropped an entire reel, to little dis­cern­able effect on the film’s coherence. 

I intro­duced Ron to Joseph, and I remem­ber in the fall of 1980, after we had all seen The Shining some­thing like nine times already (it had become our default social activ­ity: “Whaddya wanna do tonight?” “I dunno, whaddya YOU wanna do?” “How about The Shining?” “Why not?”), Cinema Village had paired it with Kubrick’s much earli­er The Killing, and we all went to check that out. There were a couple of likely lads in line behind us dis­cuss­ing the ins and outs of Clint Eastwood’s dir­ect­ori­al career. “It was only with Play Misty For Me that he began to find his water level,” one of them said, a bit too loudly, and Joseph smirked at me and said, “It’d be kind of great if Eastwood just kind of popped up now like McLuhan in Annie Hall, only in Dirty Harry mode, and asked ‘What do you know about my films, punk?’ ” After the films we heard one of the same guys call the pair­ing “an instruct­ive double bill.” He was right, but still. 

I turned 53 this year. Although you might not be able to dis­cern this from my Twitter feed, but I’ve become a reas­on­ably well-socialized adult. While a foot injury kind of screwed up my routine earli­er this year, I try to stay phys­ic­ally fit. I even take box­ing les­sons, intemit­tently, and my train­er some­times gives me a com­pli­ment that I can actu­ally believe. My rela­tion­ship with my mom is, among oth­er things, pally. I write about movies, and about music some­times, for a liv­ing, and I like doing that and I’d like to con­tin­ue doing that, though I’d also like to do oth­er things. This Saturday I’m gonna get up early (which is one reas­on My Lovely Wife, who likes her Saturday snooze [not that I don’t], may not accom­pany me) and go to Penn Station and take a train to Suffern, New York, right across the Jersey bor­der, and I’m gonna go to the Lafayette Theatre and see an 11 a.m. screen­ing of a new 35mm print of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s great film The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp. The Lafayette is man­aged by Nelson Page, the one-time A/V coördin­at­or of Dumont High School. Overseeing a theat­er such as the Lafayette, a 1920s beauty kit­ted out with a full Wurlitzer organ, was a dream of his from before I ever met him. Running the pro­ject­or will be Nelson’s asso­ci­ate and rep cur­at­or Pete, who is also a long­time friend of Joseph’s. Pete is both an ace cinephile and a tech geni­us, and I was happy, earli­er this year, to be able to intro­duce him to anoth­er tech geni­us, Larry Blake, the sound engin­eer who’s worked with Stephen Soderbergh since BEFORE sex, lies, and video­tape, and who Bertrand Tavernier heaped much praise on when I inter­viewed Tavernier some time ago. (Blake helped Tavernier a lot on his ulti­mately ill-fated, in the U.S. at least, English-language film In The Electric Mist.) Larry and I had a great time at the Lafayette in May for Lang’s The Woman In The Window, and I hope to get him up to the theat­er again while he’s in town for some­thing this rep sea­son, which is look­ing very good. As for this Saturday, Joseph will be in attend­ance too, and as it hap­pens, My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™, who incid­ent­ally has since renounced all things Argento (he men­tions “the por­no­graphy of viol­ence,” I tell him that he’s lost it, and then we move on), has just moved to a house pretty close to Suffern, so he might join the gang. The movie is sure to look great on the Lafayette screen, and after­wards, if there’s time, the bunch of us may grab a bite down the street at the frankly mediocre pizza place that has the assets of being roomy and con­veni­ent and quick. I’m not sure what we’ll all talk about, but I’m reas­on­ably sure it won’t be “the death of movie culture.”