"Actor: Fay Maxwell"

• The Haunting | Blu Ray | (04/05/2020) from £7.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  It was an evil house form the beginning , a house that was born bad. The place is the 90-year-old mansion called Hill House. No one lives in there. Or so it seems. But come in. Because even if you don't believe in ghosts, there's no denying the terror of The Haunting. Robert Wise, returned to psychological horror for this much admired, first screen adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Four people (Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson and Russ Tamblyn) come to the house to study its supernatural phenomena. Or has the house drawn at least one of them to it? The answer will unnerve you in this elegantly sinister scare movie. It's good fun (Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies).

• The Haunting | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £4.79   |  Saving you £9.20 (192.07%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Certain to remain one of the greatest haunted-house movies ever made, Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) is antithetical to all the gory horror films of subsequent decades, because its considerable frights remain implicitly rooted in the viewer's sensitivity to abject fear. A classic spook-fest based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House (which also inspired the 1999 remake directed by Jan de Bont), the film begins with a prologue that concisely establishes the dark history of Hill House, a massive New England mansion (actually filmed in England) that will play host to four daring guests determined to investigate--and hopefully debunk--the legacy of death and ghostly possession that has given the mansion its terrifying reputation. Consumed by guilt and grief over her mother's recent death and driven to adventure by her belief in the supernatural, Eleanor Vance (Julie Harris) is the most unstable--and therefore the most vulnerable--visitor to Hill House. She's invited there by anthropologist Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), along with the bohemian lesbian Theodora (Claire Bloom), who has acute extra-sensory abilities, and glib playboy Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn, from Wise's West Side Story), who will gladly inherit Hill House if it proves to be hospitable. Of course, the shadowy mansion is anything but welcoming to its unwanted intruders. Strange noises, from muffled wails to deafening pounding, set the stage for even scarier occurrences, including a door that appears to breathe (with a slowly turning doorknob that's almost unbearably suspenseful), unexplained writing on walls, and a delicate spiral staircase that seems to have a life of its own. The genius of The Haunting lies in the restraint of Wise and screenwriter Nelson Gidding, who elicit almost all of the film's mounting terror from the psychology of its characters--particularly Eleanor, whose grip on sanity grows increasingly tenuous. The presence of lurking spirits relies heavily on the power of suggestion (likewise the cautious handling of Theodora's attraction to Eleanor) and the film's use of sound is more terrifying than anything Wise could have shown with his camera. Like Jack Clayton's 1961 chiller, The Innocents, The Haunting knows the value of planting the seeds of terror in the mind, as opposed to letting them blossom graphically on the screen. What you don't see is infinitely more frightening than what you do, and with nary a severed head or bloody corpse in sight, The Haunting is guaranteed to chill you to the bone. --Jeff Shannon

• Talking Threads Series 1 | DVD | (05/07/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Talking Threads is an exciting programme about the colourful and imaginative world of contemporary textile art. This DVD features ten leading British textile artists with easy to follow demonstrations including: Silk Painting Creative Embroidery Heat & Melting Techniques Contemporary Quilting Techniques Machine Embroidery Hand Dyeing Fabric Water Solubles Mixed Media Fabric Slashing- An Age Old Technique Reinvented

• Island Of Lost Souls / Mystery Of The Wax Museum | DVD | (26/02/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99