Haunting Of Hill House Film Analysis

The story of The Haunting of Hill House is a horror classic. The book and movie depict this terrifying story in vastly different ways. The movie uses cinematic techniques that a book can not portray: music, acting, and props. The book uses imagery, internal monologue, and suspense to peak fear in the readers. Movies are a different way of portraying a story, but movies aren’t always able to depict everything in the book. The movie depiction is able to elicit fear through cinematic techniques, and the novel uses fear in a different way than the movie which is more effective in frightening the reader.
Haunting of Hill House is considered a cinematic classic. Using mise-en-scene the director can elicit fear. Hill House is full of statues and mirrors,

Reading a horror novel allows the reader to become a part of the story. A major part of the fear caused by Hill House is the uncertainty of what the house wants. The novel used suspense to engage the reader, and make them wonder when the next haunting would be and wonder how much worse the hauntings would become. The ending of Haunting of Hill House leaves the reader to decide what actually happened to Eleanor. The reader hears most the thoughts Eleanor has, and the reader becomes invested in her sanity. Eleanor’s thoughts are very prominent in the novel, which allows the reader to try to decide what the house was doing to Eleanor, or just how crazy Eleanor was. The novel was able to illustrate Eleanor’s thoughts more clearly than the movie could. There was a disconnect between Eleanor’s thoughts and her downward spiral in the movie. The constant questioning of what was happening in the house is why the novel was frightening. Much of the fear was from the descriptions of the house such as: sick, disgusting, and cold. These descriptions made the house all more frightening because the reader shaped the house from their own fears. The novel does not sway the reader into believing what the reason for the hauntings like the film does. The movie has a time limit, that the novel does not which makes the novel go more in depth on the characters and