And don’t tell the local townfolk you’re there to visit Hill House or you’ll get the cold shoulder.

The object of his study is Hill House, a haunted and brooding mansion in a small town, which is surrounded by forest. Montague is a professor of the occult who is seeking to prove that ghosts and hauntings are real. But fuck me if every classic I’ve ever read isn’t a boring snoozefest.

I have all the respect in the world for the work itself and the author the ideas and the inspiration classic novels have been to those that come after them. The fact is, me and classic literature do not get along. In fact, while I was reading this I suddenly had a desire to watch Scary Movie 2, so I did, and that was arguably a bad idea because for the rest of the book all I could picture was Chris Elliot with his gross tiny fucking hand. In 2001, Scary Movie 2 pulled heavily from The Haunting and it has been seared into my brain ever since. I later saw the original 1963 adaptation which just didn’t really work for me because I was a dumbass teenager with a myopic view of entertainment and a shitty attitude. So, there’s some nostalgia linked to this for me in terms of shitty 90s horror movies that I still have a fondness for. And that scene where Owen Wilson gets his head lobbed off? Scared the shit out of me twenty years… TWENTY YEARS AGO?! Omg. But, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Liam Neeson in a murderous, haunted house? That’s always going to be a yes from me.

The first time I ever came across this story was in 1999 when I was 14 years old and watched The Haunting for the first time.

Author of the haunting of hill house