The Haunting in Connecticut Review

Published by Jeff Leins on: March 27th, 2009

To coincide with the theatrical release of the movie, I’m reposting News in Film’s South by Southwest review of The Haunting in Connecticut.

The Haunting in Connecticut is a paint-by-number horror flick based on a “true” story about another supposedly haunted house. If you have seen any other movie where things go bump in the night you’ve already seen this PG-13 version, but if you’re thirteen years old and this is your first horror movie it may be scary enough for a Twitter update.

An opening title card touts its “true story,” which retells the Snedeker family’s alleged encounter with the paranormal in the late 80s. The family is renamed the Campbells and given a few Hollywood tweaks until the recreation takes enough liberties with an already tall tale that it becomes so unbelievable and ultimately loses its scary hook.

Teenager Matt Campbell (Kyle Gallner) is diagnosed with cancer, putting his family in a tough financial and geographical situation. His doting mother (played by a talented Virginia Madsen) makes the decision to move temporarily into a low rent house near the treatment facility unaware of the building’s funeral home and seance performance history. After a few nights of settling in their new home, Matt’s side effects strangely include horrific nightmares and hallucinations of disturbing images.

[Perhaps more disturbing is that the real mother, Carmen Snedeker, still believes her son's cancer was somehow cured by the house's cleansing rather than the medical treatments he was receiving throughout. Creeky floorboards trump chemotherapy in this case and thankfully her son has children of his own now. Fortunately Carmen was able to cash in herself, writing her own companion novel to coincide with the film's theatrical release. Look for it in the fiction section.]

The scares in the movie are entirely made up of “gotcha” moments punctuated by sudden shrill violins and sound effect tricks, as if the random appearance of a wandering ghost wasn’t enough to frighten the audience. Each and every “Boo!” moment invokes the same shrieking technique until they lose their effect. If someone hopped out of a closet each time you came into a room and shouted, you might be terrified at first. But diminishing returns quickly set in and soon you’re saying, “Alright, I get it” to the foolish game as with this movie’s redundant attempts to scare.

By the way, were two hide and go seek games necessary?

When it isn’t winding up the horror jack-in-the-box, the visuals are comprised of creepy looks at demonic body carvings, ectoplasm writhing from a child’s mouth, or snipped eyelid removals. Yet again, Cornwell overuses his spooky methods by revisiting them too often and eventually a corpse covered in red letters is as familiar as the plot.

The Haunting in Connecticut is as scary as watching, rewinding, and re-watching a scene from any other horror flick and as true as saying cancer is cured by the paranormal.

1.5 out of 5.