Ostensible remake of Robert Wise's ghostly classic of 1963. Certainly there looks to be a lot of similarity in the basic configuration of four people — two men, two women, one of the former a research scientist, one of the latter a lonely shut-away who has only recently been liberated as nursemaid to her dying mother — spending some days and nights together in a haunted house. But there was nearly as much similarity between the old Haunting and, say, The Legend of Hell House, ten years later, without anyone making out that the second one was a literal re-do, or was anything more than another try at the same genre. The experimental subjects in this later Haunting, deviating immediately and rapidly from those in the earlier, have been brought together by a common bond of ordinary insomnia, not by any special occult faculties; and the scoffing rationalist of the earlier version — the scheduled inheritor of the house — has here been supplanted by just another redundant insomniac. The purpose of the project is not to study any supernatural phenomena, but rather the very natural phenomenon of human fear; and the research scientist, who has out-and-out lied about the experiment's purpose to its participants, seems as surprised as everyone else that this reputedly haunted house is in fact haunted. (Why, in the first place, would insomniacs have been thought to be particularly good subjects for the study of fear? Where's the correlation?) In short, this later version has been thoroughly de-psychologized — and, an important distinction, de-psychicized — and it substitutes a heart-tugging rescue of the perfectly harmless ghosts of 19th-century child laborers from the malevolent ghost of a sweatshop Scrooge. It stands entirely on its own. Or rather, it falls. Lili Taylor, Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Owen Wilson; directed by Jan De Bont. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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