I still remember one of the scariest moments in my life pretty vividly. I was 12 or 13 years old, and my family was visiting some people who owned a lake house. Being the only boy in a family of women, I was more interested in investigating the lake behind the house than going shopping at the local mall on one particular day, and so I was left to my own devices. I found myself digging in a trunk that contained all sorts of submersible toys and finally hit the jackpot when I found a plexiglass underwater face mask; the kind that covers not only one’s eyes, but one’s nose as well in an airtight configuration. I jumped off the dock and swam far out into the lake, affixed the mask to my head, dove under, and opened my eyes. I saw the most terrifying thing in the world: nothing. It was too murky under there to even see my own hand in front of my face. My imagination began to light up and fire on all cylinders.

Anything could’ve been floating, swimming, or moving right in front of my eyes and I wouldn’t be able to see it. It could’ve been a half-rotted corpse, or a giant, dark eyeball belonging to a huge sea-creature thought to be extinct for millions of years, or simply a huge mouth fit with thousands of rows of razor-sharp teeth coming at me at at a speed previously unknown to man. It could’ve been all those things and more. I swam back to the dock as fast as I could and have since never been too crazy about lakes. There’s a lesson to be learned here, I think, and it pertains directly to horror movies. Too many horror movies fail to scare because they try to show the audience something scary instead of simply letting the audience fill in the blanks. Well, that hardly works, and that’s one of the reasons I don’t get scared by movies much anymore. And that’s just a darn shame, because I love to get scared. Especially by movies. The fear of the unknown is a lost art in the cinema. Hitchcock always seemed to know that what was right around the corner, but out of sight to the viewing audience, was much scarier than a full-on shot of a thug with a gun or a psycho with a knife. But in this day in age where movies like ‘Saw’ and ‘Hostel’ attempt to scare audiences with a shot of a drill going into someone’s forehead, I just feel they got it all wrong. While a bloody and gory moment may be gross and impressive, it is by no means scary. It’s simply not working up the audience’s imaginations – and those imaginations can conjure up images and ideas eight million times scarier than any filmmaker can put up on the screen, I promise you that. But a few filmmakers have succeeded where many others have failed.

In between winning Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for ‘West Side Story’ (1961) and ‘The Sound of Music’ (1965), director Robert Wise (1914-2005) made the scariest haunted house movie of all time in ‘The Haunting’ (1963) - a strange thing, indeed, to be wedged between two beloved blockbuster musicals. Wise wasn’t new to challenging the norms and conventions of genre films. He was the editor of ‘Citizen Kane’, then followed up Jacques Tourneur’s excellent horror flick ‘The Cat People’ (1942) with his own directorial debut ‘Curse of the Cat People’ (1944), and eventually directed one of the best damned science fiction movies of all time, to boot, in 1951’s ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’ (“Klaatu barada nikto” anyone?). But his 1963 ‘The Haunting’ is arguably his best work. One can easily see how amazing the movie is when compared to the God-awful 1999 version starring Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones (what were they thinking?) and directed by cinematic ass-clown Jan de Bont (I guess after ‘Speed’ and ‘Twister’ some studio genius felt this former-d.p. was qualified to direct a haunted house movie. That studio genius was dead wrong). The 1999 atrocity was everything a good horror movie should not be, especially a good horror movie based on such excellent source material – Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel ‘The Haunting of Hill House’. The new movie threw away the whole thesis of the novel and original 1963 film – that the supernatural phenomena could very well all be in one of the protagonist’s mind (something that makes Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ much better than its own source material).

The 1999 ‘Haunting’ substituted this interesting device with a huge budget featuring computer generated ghosties that, while they may look kind of cool, just plain aren’t scary. The 1963 version is scary. Robert Wise, while knowing how to create amazing song and dance numbers, edit Orson Welles movies, and make great sci-fi, also seems to know what scares people. People are scared of the unknown, plain and simple. And 1963’s ‘The Haunting’ exploits that to maximum effect. The story has become total cliche by now. It revolves around a scientist and his assistants investigating a house that everyone claims to be haunted. That’s pretty much the story laid bare, and isn’t really any different than an episode of Sci-Fi’s excellent series ‘Ghost Hunters’. Anyone can take that story (as many have) and screw it up and magically transform it into a piece of crap (Jan de Bont, I’m talking to you). However, Wise uses atmosphere, mood, shadows, sound design, editing, and amazing black and white photography to create something akin to a great symphony for horror movie fanatics. One scene in particular will have you on the edge of your seat and the entire ‘special effect’ utilized for the scares is probably some stagehand banging on a wall. It’s old school, to be sure, but it’s scarier than the computer-enhanced new school that people of today willingly embrace.

Wise doesn’t show the audience a damn thing and rightfully so, as he knows that not seeing whatever it is that is making those sounds is 90 percent of the scare. The other 10 percent is the sound. It’s what is hiding behind the door that is so damn scary. Most modern horror movies make the huge mistake of revealing the monster (or ghost or killer or what-have-you) way too early or at all and, thus, taking the scare out of it. It’s as if most modern filmmakers assume the audience has no imagination. I first saw the movie when I was younger on Showtime late at night in a terrible pan and scan version. It had a tremendous effect on me, and would ruin all the so-called scary haunted house movies that I would see down the road.

Since then, AMC ended up airing it in its original cinemascope aspect ratio of 2.35:1, and it looks glorious. All the shots finally looked properly composed and, now that I could see what the director and cinematographer originally intended for me to see, the movie was scarier than ever. A couple of years ago Warner Bros. finally released the DVD of the film in its original aspect ratio and with an interesting commentary to boot. If you want to get scared silly, then find the DVD, turn off all the lights, and watch the movie without interruption. It’s the best of its kind, and it shouldn’t be missed. It’s almost scarier than jumping into the middle of a murky lake with goggles on. Almost.