"Everybody who has ever brooded over the way life speeds - and who hasn't? - will get goose-pimples from the sequence here in a wonderfully scary movie called The Haunting, as convincing and chilling as The Turn of the Screw...The women, brilliantly acted by Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, find they can't sleep nights, in that house. Audiences will find they can't sleep afterward either."--Life magazine

"90-year-old New England haunted house is setting for chosen group being introduced to the supernatural, with hair-raising results. Don't see this one alone!" -- Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide

"...believe me, before this antique chiller drags to an extoplasmic end, you'll agree that it does have just about everything in the old-fashioned blood-chilling line except a line of reasoning that makes a degree of sense. It is great as long as Julie Harris and Claire Bloom are huddling in a room in that luridly off-kilter mansion, hugging each other in the dark and listening to horrible noises...this film simply makes more goose pimples than sense, which is rather surprising and disappointing for a picture with two such actresses, who are very good all the way through it, and produced and directed by the able Robert Wise." -- The New York Times

"In Shirley Jackson's bestselling ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House, the specter is a sneaky spook that evidently intends to get between the sheets. In this movie version, directed by Robert Wise, the specter is slightly censored -what's left is just the usual commercial spirit. Whenever it appears, the violins on the sound track start to didder, doors open and shut by themselves, people stare about in terror and squeak: 'The house, it's alive!' The picture, it's dead." -- Time magazine

"The artful cinematic strokes of director Robert Wise and staff are not quite enough to override the major shortcomings of Nelson Gidding's screenplay from the Shirley Jackson novel [The Haunting of Hill House]...The acting is effective all around. The picture excels in the purely cinematic departments. Davis Boulton has employed his camera with extraordinary dexterity in fashioning a visual excitement that keeps the picture alive with images of impending shock. As photographed by Boulton, the house itself is a monstrous personality, most decidedly the star of the film. The pity is that all this production savvy has been squandered on a screen yarn that cannot support such artistic bulk." -- Variety

AWARDS AND HONORS

Robert Wise was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Director for his work on The Haunting.

In 2009 filmmaker Martin Scorsese made a list of his top 11 favorite horror films of all time exclusively for The Daily Best, and The Haunting was number 1. He called it "absolutely terrifying."

In 2010 The Guardian ranked The Haunting number 13 on its list of the best horror films of all time. "From a potentially creaky, cliché-filled premise...director Robert Wise leads us on a brilliantly unsettling journey," wrote Stuart Heritage. "A perfect example of the power of implied threat, The Haunting is essentially the story of Julie Harris's lonely middle-aged woman being slowly devoured by her groaning, undulating surroundings."

Compiled by Andrea Passafiume