Movie Monday: The Uninvited

Are you ready for...The Uninvited?
 

I love horror movies, always have. So when I hear that there's a genuinely scary movie out there that I haven't seen, I try and track it down. I especially love horror from the Golden Age of Hollywood, because filmmakers of the time were so much more limited: they couldn't rely on gore or extreme violence, so they had to be creative.

Case in point: The Uninvited, directed by Lewis Allen (Suddenly):

A brother and sister (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) buy a massive house sitting along an English sea coast. Despite resistance from the granddaughter of the owner (Gail Russell), it is sold to them by its owner, an old Navy man named Commander Beech (Donald Crisp). Rick and Pamela start to move in right away, along with their little dog:

Rick runs into Stella in town, and she reveals why she tried to talk them out of buying the house: it was lived in by her late mother, who died when Stella was very young. Stella worships her late mother, and doesn't want to give up the house, even though no one lives there. Rick is smitten by Stella (despite, or maybe because, their 20-year age difference) and tries to show her how she's living her life in the shadow of her mother:

It doesn't take long to see that something is wrong with the house: there's a glassed-in penthouse that is eerily cold, even when the sun is directly shining in. Soon after, Rick hears a woman sobbing downstairs, but neither he or Pamela can find the source (in a truly eerie sequence). 

Stella comes for dinner, and senses a presence in the house. Rather than being scared, she thinks it's the spirit of her late mother, who died under mysterious circumstances by falling off the nearby cliff into the ocean. 

One of the reasons The Uninvited is distinctive in terms of Hollywood history is that, early on, it's obvious that there really is a ghost in the house: it's not a crook pulling a Scooby-esque scam, not a hoax; it's an actual supernatural being. In fact, the studio (Paramount) thought the film a little too vague on that subject, and added in special effects that left no doubt about the ghostly presence:

I would love to report that The Uninvited is a lost classic of horror. Unavailable on DVD for decades, its reputation got burnished by its unavailability, as well as the enthusiastic accolades by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Guillermo Del Toro (the former putting it on his list of the Top 11 Scariest Movies of All Time).

But while there are scenes that are definitely frightening, full of menace and eerie tension, I found often as not the spell is broken by talky scenes involving a doctor (Alan Napier, who went on to play Alfred on Batman), a housekeeper (Barbara Everest), and the woman who runs the local sanitorium (Cornelia Otis Skinner), and old friend of the family. Add to the fact that Rick never seems all that scared of the ghost--during one sequence, he makes jokes at it, almost mocking it. I know that England was at war back then and maybe it was harder to phase those people, but still! (Also: the film ends on a joke that feels lifted from a Bob Hope movie, which elicited a groan when I realized that was it)

Despite all that, The Uninvited is still worth seeing: at a brisk 90 or so minutes, the film goes down easy, and the scenes of the ghost revealing its presence one way or the other are still quite effective (there's a great moment of a book having its pages turned by the ghost, and no one in the scene notices). It feels like the kind of movie Val Lewton might have made, had he access to big Hollywood stars and a bigger budget.

I'm happy to say The Uninvited is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray, from Criterion no less, which shows that the film's rep as a creepy lost classic is now firmly in place.