The Haunted Movie 1991

[Jerica Shilt]

TheHaunted is a 1991 American made-for-television haunted house film directed by Robert Mandel and starring Sally Kirkland, who received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance.[1] The film depicts the events surrounding the Smurl haunting.

Janet Smurl and her family move into an old duplex in the town of Pittston, Pennsylvania, which is rumored to be haunted. Indeed, soon family members begin to pursue a variety of threatening phenomena. Strange human shadows wandering around the house, ominous sounds coming through the night, a stench spreading through the house, stains appearing on their own on the walls. But Janet cannot come to terms with the fact that something is persistently forcing the family to leave the house. Eventually, Janet turns to paranormal investigators, the Warren's for help, who know a lot more about the supernatural.

Our pal Mickster's "Post-childhood" traumafession regarding THE STRANGERS got me thinking about all the movies that rattled my own bearings as an adult. There are more than a few to choose from but my mind keeps flipping back to the 1991 T.V. movie THE HAUNTED (thanks largely to THE CONJURING dredging it up no doubt!) I realize I have already confessed to this particular trauma in our comments section but I thought it might be interesting for me to examine, in closer detail, just how and why a modest TV production got under my skin in a way that many seemingly more likely films failed.

My preferred scare is when you realize too late that you've popped a hole in the movie (and or book) and it's currently leaking all over you. Holy crap, something has changed in the space you're in and the genie is way too fat to fit back in the bottle! I'm talking about movies (and or books) acting up like Ouija boards and those dreaded intangible guests who won't take a hint and vamoose. How could I go to sleep after watching THE HAUNTED when the swirly black mass that inhabited the movie could, at any second, materialize before me? I'm an adult and I'm rational. That means I've got plenty of legitimate sounding excuses for being freaked out by THE HAUNTED.

Nonexistent scientists estimate that it takes countless dozens of conscious brains to keep the walls of reality standing firm. The more sleeping brains you have in your neighborhood the more likely it is that a wily, interdimensional entity might take advantage of the weakened barriers and slide through. Moreover, watching scary movies, reading about Bigfoot on the Internet and/or dabbling in ghost hunting shows, no matter their level of ridiculousness, acts like a magnet to these creatures. You are basically making yourself a lighthouse in the fog. Through years of research I have learned that the closest you can get to supernatural entertainment after 2 am while still remaining safe is SABRINA THE TEENAGE WITCH.

Adorable as it may seem now, prior to the release of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE remake, the term "based on a true story" still held some small bit of weight with me. The family depicted in THE HAUNTED was a real family. They went on talk shows and tainted their existences delivering their tale of ghostly woe. If they were crazy, I found small comfort in that. If you are a ghost (or a demon)I don't care if your return address is heaven, hell or my sick head, the point is you need to leave. I guess I could hope the family was lying but that would mean the grandma was lying too! Lying grandmothers are scarier than ghosts. I can't win.

I'm no aficionado of thespian pursuits and I pity the horror fan that is, that's asking for a whole lot of pain. On the other hand, if you look at truly successful works in the genre they are almost always strongly connected with at least one sterling, performance. Although they are rarely properly acknowledged, they are often the galvanizing glue that holds the entire shebang together (I started a list of examples but boy, did it go on.) I have to hand it to SALLY KIRKLAND in THE HAUNTING if for no other reason than that she made me believe her. (This cannot be said about her performance in FATAL GAMES). I'm not saying I'm going to run out and start a fan club or anything, I'm just saying that against some serious odds she convinces you of her genuine turmoil. No matter the authenticity of the actual story, within the confines of the teleplay , KIRKLAND is telling the truth.

Who would guess that an amorphous, black splotch of roving something or other could upstage THE HAUNTED's signature raped by a face-morphing hag demon under a disco strobe light scene? (Yes, I really just wrote that sentence.) But upstage the hag rape the undefined darkness does indeed do! (And that one too!) Fabrication or not, a nebulous cloud perpetually on the brink of transforming into something your mind doesn't realize it's horrified by yet is scary stuff. Besides forcing you to stare like a slack jawed idiot trying to attach some known shape or meaning to it, the inky entity additionally reeks of something too familiar- that blank slate of apprehension we've all stumbled upon in the dark, the instant before we're able to recognize what it is before us. (Huh?)

I don't know what it is but I know I don't like it. It drives me crazy because it's a traveling stain! It looks like a cross between a Rorschach test and the faceless being that rummages through my recycling bin every Tuesday night! According to the story, this merciless tear in sanity's pants will even follow you when you go camping! Light-hearted marshmallow roasting will not dissuade it! It can walk through walls! It can appear anyplace at any time! I didn't even mention the noise it makes! It sounds like a pig in a garbage disposal!

I am a co-conspirator! I was happy to find something of interest on TV and I was completely open to it. I wasn't thinking, "This better be good!" I didn't scrutinize its every move and I didn't look down on it. I wasn't trying to use the movie to validate myself as an astute critic or a super fan. Forming an opinion was not my #1 priority and I was engrossed in the movie rather than myself. It's like in THE BREAKFAST CLUB when ALLY SHEEDY is all, "Why are you being so nice to me?" and MOLLY RINGWALD is all, "Because you're letting me." The biggest reason this movie freaked me out is that I let it.

"The Haunted" scared me senseless as a youngster. I saw it on it's original run (was it the Fox Network originally?) and although I've had a life-long affection and love for scary movies, I also have a life-long curse of being a complete scaredy-cat.

This was around the same time that 20/20 (or some other news-y 10 p.m. program) did a nerve-shredding documentary about a real-life exorcism (which caused me at least 1 full week of sleepless nights) and USA Network was airing one of my favorite made-for-t.v. horrors, "I'm Dangerous Tonight".

Thank you very much! You are my favorite type of person. I can never understand horror fans who brag about not being scared by anything. To me that's like saying "I'm a big fan of comedy movies but I don't think anything is funny."

I have always dug on the urban legend of the psycho killer slicing up victims at a haunted house with nobody realizing it because of the macabre nature of their surroundings. In 1991 a Canadian production which was filmed in rural Texas, decided to use a very limited budget to play to this in the ridiculously fun film Scary Movie.

When Universal Studios Florida was getting ready to open, one of their biggest, most hyped-up rides was JAWS. When Universal eventually opened, the shark on the ride kept breaking down, so they ended up delaying the opening of the ride. In the meantime, the large extended queue built for the ride was not being used at all due to the attraction's closure, so they decided to use the line to hold a haunted house that would featured during their new Halloween event called Fright Nights. They decided to call the haunted house "The Dungeon of Terror", and it would be the only haunted house for the event. The house reportedly took ten weeks to design and six weeks to build.

This house was a huge hit that year, so they decided to bring it back the following year for Halloween Horror Nights II. Because the JAWS ride was still closed, they put the Dungeon of Terror back in the JAWS Queue. The house was reportedly largely the same, through most accounts say that it was more tame compared to the original. In 1994, the haunted house would once again return to the event, this time in the Earthquake Queue.

In both 1991 and 1992, guests would enter the queue from somewhere outside the JAWS Ride in the Amity area. The line would reportedly be up to three hours long, and would wrap around the outside area of the facade. The facade looked like the wall of a castle with a caged woman hanging above. On top of the castle were scareactors that would yell at the people that were below them. It is unknown if the line continued after going through the facade or if guests entered the house right after passing through the arch.

The house was designed to take seven to twelve minutes to get through, but in practice the number was closer to five-eight minutes. The walls were bloodied, and the beginning contained a dark maze where guests had to feel their way through walls of squishy slime. Guests were then hit by slime from a scareactor when leaving the maze. In another dark room, guests encountered a coffin with a rotting corpse that tried to grab at them. While they distracted guests, a ghoul wearing a bowler hat would jump out behind the bars.

Guests also ran into Chucky and The Invisible Man, a hanging cowboy behind a chain-link fence, and an asylum scene featuring many different well-known monsters and maniacs like The Phantom of the Opera and Hannibal Lecter. Escaping into another dark hallway, guests were then met with three doors, each one having a monster. One had The Predator behind it. The right door led guests into a swampy area with a bridge with a water below guests. Gill-Man would reach towards guests from under the water.

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