The Haunting In Conneck-ticut

It's a trope of horror stories that the (typically doomed) protagonists are not happy-go-lucky types with the world at their command. Unhappiness, disease or other disturbance is usually the lot of characters about to be visited by some supernatural evil.

Which, you know, kind of sucks for them, quite apart from all the horror they're about to go through.

There's a difficult line to tread here. At it's best, horror is often (but far from always) an analysis of real life problems, but for movie horror in particular, you don't necessarily want to create a grim story where beleaguered people suffer increasingly horrible fantastic events, while continuing to suffer realistically horrible events.

Which is the line that The Haunting of Connecticut treads very carefully, and maybe not always successfully. This is the "true" story of the Campbells, a financially stressed couple with three kids whose oldest has cancer. The father (played by stalwart character actor Martin Donovan) is a recovering alcoholic whose fledgling contracting business drains the family bank account, while the mother (by longtime Maelstrom favorite Virginia Madsen) shuttles the sick kid (Kyle Gallner) back and forth from Connecticut, where he receives treatment, to their home in...some place eight hours from Connecticut.

OK, this didn't bug The Boy (and wouldn't have bugged me at that age, either), but I confess to finding it uncomfortable enough seeing a child (Gallner is in his 20s but he's playing a teen) racked with cancer and suffering from chemo and radiation to where I tend to demand more out of a movie that uses those things as somewhat incidental story elements.

Anyway, the family makes the logical conclusion that they should relocate, at least temporarily to Conneck-ticut. (Pronunciation courtesy of recent birthday girl Katharine Hepburn in, I think, Philadelphia Story.) But the only suitable place they can afford has some history, so they pass--until the trip gets to be so long, Madsen can't bear to put her son through it any more and so settles on the house with the history.

The movie gets off to a slow start this way. Unlike many horrors where we have a hard time seeing why the characters don't extract themselves sooner, this one puts us pretty squarely in reasonable shoes. We see how they got there, and the initial signs of hauntings are experienced almost exclusively by the sick kid--who is undergoing treatment that apparently might cause hallucinations--we see why they stay.

In fact, it's not until relatively late that anything indisputably supernatural occurs. There was a point where it looked like it might all be in the kid's head, which would've been an interesting twist, though not the marketing boost that a supernatural "based on a true" story is presumed to be.

Rounding out the fine cast is Amanda Crew as the niece-who's-handy-for-the-shower-scene and another stalwart character actor, Elias Koteas, as the priest with all the answers.

So, good acting. Pacing that starts slow but picks up about half-way in and stays pretty solid.

The Boy liked it a lot, and more than I did, but we both appreciated the change in tempo and character, as the movie got more supernatural, and the ending, which wasn't the sort of knee-jerk nihlism that plagued the After Dark horror festival.

Maybe due to the Amityville connection--the couple that pimped the story when it "happened" back in the '90s, were the same couple that pimped the Amityville Horror--it felt a little bit like a throwback, but overall this is a decent movie.

True story? Not so much.