Ten Days of Terror!: Haunted

Film: Haunted
Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!

I sometimes wonder why there aren’t more period horror movies. There are certainly some, of course, but the idea of the Gothic horror sadly went away decades ago. I think in general modern horror fans are much more about seeing what they can see—the gore and the brutality. Modern horror is about transgression in a lot of cases, but people not aware of the history of the genre don’t realize that a lot of those Gothic stories were just as transgressive. This feels like the reason that a film like Haunted slid under the radar of horror fans.

Haunted has a solid cast and is beautifully filmed and has fewer than 2,500 ratings on Letterboxd. To put that into perspective, the passable Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight from the same year has almost 8,500 4-star ratings on Letterboxd. Admittedly, it’s not a terrible movie, but it doesn’t have to scope, cinematography, or cast that Haunted does.

The film starts in pre-World War I Britain where young David Ash (Peter England as a child, then Aidan Quinn as an adult) and his twin sister Juliet (Victoria Shalet) live with their mother. Juliet is killed in a freak accident. David and his mother head to the U.S., and some time later, David returns to England as a professor of parapsychology, working to disprove the existence of ghosts and the spiritual. This is reinforced to us when he debunks a séance.

Because he has written a book on the paranormal and is a prominent professor, he is contacted by people for assistance. One particular letter writer is especially insistent. Miss Webb (Anna Massey!) believes she is being haunted. David is ready to ignore her pleas until he realizes that she lives in the house where he grew up and where his sister died, so off he heads to Edbrook, both to see what he can do for Miss Webb and to perhaps exorcise his old memories of his ill-fated twin.

At Edbrook, David encounters Christina Mariell (Kate Beckinsale), to whom he is immediately attracted. Back at the house, he also meets her brothers, Robert (Anthony Andrews) and Simon (Alex Lowe). The relationship between the siblings is immediately suspicious. Robert’s hobby is painting nudes of his sister, and Christina and Simon apparently enjoy swimming in the nude together. While David learns to deal with the three siblings and confronts his clear attraction to Christina despite her odd relationship with her brothers, he also meets with Miss Webb, who the three call Nanny Tess.

It’s soon clear, though that there is something happening at the house that might not be explainable by natural means. David starts to have experiences that can’t be explained—scratching and knocking at his door and his inability to leave the room. He also sees what looks like his dead sister out of the corner of his eye at times. Add on to this the odd behavior of Nanny Tess and the brusque treatment of her by her relatives and by family friend Dr. Doyle (John Goddam Gielgud).

So are there actual ghosts here? Is Nanny Tess senile or loopy? And what’s with the creepy relationship between Christina and her brothers? Everything eventually comes to a head at the end, and while some of this is expected, not all of it is.

This is a hard film not to like at least a little bit. It unfortunately shows its age at the end—in the final act of the film when things really become apparent, the effects look like what they are—30 years old, and they have not aged well at all. Up to this point, though, this is a slow-burn drama with romance elements that has some supernatural overtones. Shift this a little in one way or another, and it wouldn’t feel completely out of place in the Merchant Ivory catalog.

The truth is that Haunted is not scary, but I don’t know that it’s really trying to be. It wants to be essentially what it is—a ghost story that feels like it’s touching on something supernatural without really trying to scare the audience too much. It’s the romance here that is stressed more than the scares. The ghosts, if there are any (I won’t spoil it), feel more like a part of the scenery than anything else. The ghost story is there to drive the romance rather than the other way around.

Haunted isn’t going to be my favorite movie, but it’s pretty harmless and pretty to look at, and sometimes, that’s enough.

Why to watch Haunted: A crazy cast for an odd period horror piece.
Why not to watch: Once we get toward the end, the effects really don’t hold up.