Mr Smuts,
Your essay on _The Haunting_ is relevant to some thoughts I have been having
about this film for about a year. I am particularly interested when you talk
about how the qualities of space interact with belief. Apropos of Dewey, you
say that space is 'infinitely diversified in qualities', that is not a
container but experience, rather 'space and time are also occupancy,
filling.' As a child, I remember trying to explain the way in which space
seems to change its aspect depending upon when you're there, 'when' meaning
not 28/4, 7/10, 1968, but when in terms of 'before I learned to ride a bike,
before my parents moved' etc. Perhaps this is an example of the "unexamined
animistic" way we interact with space which you mention, triggering the
thought that maybe children, and Nell is in many ways still a child, are more
prone to this pre-rational interaction than adults, which in turn triggers
the recollection that _The Innocents_ (1962) also dealt with children as
harbingers of supernatural forces. What makes the space in Wise' film
haunting is that it embodies this 'becoming', it has a status inextricably
bound up with time. Elsewhere, you say that we experience the film through
Nell's perceptions. Isn't this because what is at stake here isn't space but
the mind's concision with the passing moment? As you say, belief is
engendered partly by creating the history of Hill House. So what we follow
when we follow _The Haunting_ is the history of Nell's stay there, a history
which mimics an earlier history, as if she triggers a kind of chronological
'loop' by returning. (This 'loop' could be the film itself). It has struck me
as very powerful that the film's space, when mediated by a protagonist in
this way, mutates. Mrs Markway leaves the nursery and becomes disoriented in
the corridors. You talk of the house's maze-like quality. Prominent among
those horror films which depend, as you say, upon suggesting rather than
showing, _The Haunting_ suggests the shifting narrative space in the woods in
_The Blair Witch Project_ These thoughts are quite random. Your essay is
powerful.
Richard Armstrong
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