Robert Wise, the Academy Award-winning director of West Side Story, took a shot at the horror genre two years after that success.

The project he chose was an adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. It was a winner. With great photography by David Boulton, and excellent camera work and sound effects, it was one of the last examples of a film in which the suggestion of horror is just as scary as seeing it.

In New England some 90 years before, Hugh Crain built a house for his new wife and daughter. He called it Hill House. His wife was killed on her way to their home when the horses pulling her carriage bolted. Crain remarried but that second wife also died mysteriously, falling down a flight of stairs.

Crain went to England where he died in a drowning accident. His daughter, Abigail, stayed at Hill House, where she grew old and bedridden in the nursery room. She died when a young companion living with her neglected her calls for help. This companion inherited the house, but something drove her to suicide.

Currently, the house belongs to a distant relative of hers in Boston, Mrs. Sannerson (Fay Compton). Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), wants to investigate the house with a group of carefully picked people. He is an anthropologist specializing in psychic phenomena and he's convinced the house is haunted. Mrs. Sannerson is initially skeptical, but agrees to this if the doctor brings along her nephew Luke, who stands to inherit Hill House.

One of the chosen is Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris). She's a sheltered and lonely spinster who sees the stay at Hill House as an escape from her drab existence. Most of her adult life was spent taking care of her invalid mother until her death. Eleanor lives with her sister and her sister's husband, who both treat her with disdain. It is implied that she has some sort of psychological problem.

Her sister refuses to let her take the family car, but she secretly borrows it and drives up to Hill House. When she gets to there, she looks up at the imposing structure and becomes frightened.

The first to arrive, Eleanor is soon joined by Theodora (Claire Bloom), a lesbian clairvoyant. They wander around the house feeling uneasy about the experiment. Dr. Markway and Luke Sannerson (Russ Tamblyn) show up.

The group is smaller than originally planned, because a few people have decided against coming. At dinner that night, the doctor explains the purpose of their stay: to prove the existence of ghosts. With the exception of Luke, the guests were chosen because of prior experiences with the supernatural.

That night, Eleanor hears a loud pounding on the walls. She runs to Theodora's room. The pounding gets louder. There is a continous banging on the bedroom door and the sound of a woman laughing. Eleanor and Theodora are afraid. Suddenly it all stops. Luke and Dr. Markway rush to the room, but say they didn't hear the noise.

The next day, they find Eleanor's name scawled with chalk on a wall. Eleanor feels as if she's being singled out. She also thinks that the others in the group are mocking her. The doctors starts to wonder if perhaps some of what Eleanor is experiencing is in her mind.

One night, the group find a cold spot in the house. It's right outside of the nursery where Abigail died. They decide not to go in. At bedtime, Eleanor becomes testy with Theo. Theo reads her mind and tells Eleanor that nobody thinks that she was responsible for her mother's death. They try to go to sleep but Eleanor can't.

She hears voices coming from behind the wall and believes that a child is being hurt. She feels a tight grip on her hand and thinks that Theo is also afraid and that she's grabbing her. Eleanor screams, but when Theo wakes up, they're at opposite ends of the room. Eleanor has marks on her wrist, but they didn't come from her roommate. Dr. Markway's wife Grace (Lois Maxwell) appears at the house. She tries at first to get her husband to go home, but then pleads to stay. Skeptical of the experiment, Grace decides to stay in the nursery. Later, when Eleanor starts hearing things and thinking that the house is closing in on her, she runs into the nursery. Grace is nowhere to be found.

Eleanor finds herself drawn to a rickety winding staircase which leads to the attic. She gets to the top, but Dr. Markway makes his way to her. He grabs her to bring her back down, but suddenly she sees a woman quickly open and shut the attic door.Eleanor faints.

When she wakes up, she tells the others that the woman she saw was Grace. Nobody believes her. Feeling that it was a mistake to invite her, the doctor tells Eleanor that she has to leave. She is reluctant, telling him that she belongs in the house and that she has no place to go. They pack her bags, and Luke is set to drive her home.

But she gets into the driver's seat and tries to leave by herself. Eleanor loses control of the steering wheel, and she thinks that the house is trying to prevent her from leaving. At that moment, a woman runs in front of the car. It's Grace Markway. Eleanor swerves to avoid hitting her and crashes into a tree. She dies instantly. Hill House has claimed another victim.

Hunter: As in The Innocents, which was made two years earlier, The Haunting also features a female protagonist who may or may not be imagining the proceedings. Like Mrs. Giddens in the first film, Eleanor is both repelled by and attracted to the house she is staying in. I like to think that there are two things going on in both these movies...the houses are haunted, since it is never disproven, AND the women are a bit looney. In the case of Eleanor, you really feel for her character. The only connection she makes in her life is to Hill House, but it eventually kills her.

Jason: The Haunting relies heavily on the acting of Julie Harris. And it works. Her fragile sanity and fits of anger, persecution and guilt seem to mirror the house's bouts of door-slamming, moaning, children crying and general craziness. This film is also amazingly photographed.

With this camerawork, every corridor, doorway and staircase take on special creepy meanings as Eleanor runs past them. The plot is driven well, the acting is all great, and the ending is a winner. Was she or wasn't she? This is a classic not-to-be-missed.