This time around, the group that gathers to investigate the lethal paranormal phenomenon which seems to be inhabiting an 80-year-old Boston mansion includes a supernaturalist pro­fessor (Richard Johnson), a materialist-minded heir-apparent (Russ Tamblyn), and a suavely-psy­chic Greenwich Village lesbian (Claire Bloom). Finally, at the narrative's impressionable, hysteri­cal nerve-centre there frets a mother-dominated virginal spinster played with unsettling sensitivity by Julie Harris.

However, in a way that predicts the home-as-monster pics of the 70s and 80s (The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist), it's Hill House itself and the force inside its Gothic structure that's really the main character-or entity—of Wise's nail-biting chiller. Ever-present but always unseen, the mur­derously malevolent spirit is made all the more unimaginably manifest through the use of rever­berant sound effects, distorting lens work and shadowy cinematography. In The Haunting, what you don't quite know can really hurt you...or at least scare you into conceding the case that in his wide-screen hair-raiser with its disorienting camera angles, spare story-telling style, edgy performances and vertiginously spiralling stair-rase, director Wise just might've achieved what some regard as his overlooked masterpiece.