Allen: The Uninvited (1944)

The Uninvited is generally considered to be the first serious haunted house film, or at least the first high concept haunted house film, as well as the first to ascribe the haunting to a supernatural cause. Set on the Cornish coast, it’s about a brother and sister, Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey), who impulsively buy a remote, desolate clifftop house when holidaying from London. They quickly move in, and just as quickly realise that there’s something wrong about the house – a series of “disturbances” that take them back to the original owner, Commander Beech (Donald Crisp) and his granddaughter Stella Meredith (Gail Russell) for questions. For the most part Lewis Allen draws on the lush atmospherics of the Lewton horror cycle to heighten our sensitivity to the precise modulations of moving from one room to another - insofar as the “disturbances” tend to manifest themselves, it’s as fleeting, elusive changes in how a room feels, or sounds, or smells, as horror tends to hang around doors, porches, windows and other thresholds between one micro-atmosphere and the next. Among other things, that tends to collapse the difference between scenes shot on sound sages and scenes shot on location – if anything, the more furnished a room, the more distinctive an atmosphere it accrues, as Roderick and Pamela learn after attempting to make over the house in their own image, a ploy that just provides the “disturbances” with a greater canvas of materials and textures to make their presence felt. And, at its strongest, it feels as if Allen is offering the haunted house genre as just this collapse of real and staged scenes in the name of an affinity between the camera and the spaces it describes that doesn’t much care whether those spaces are regarded as being natural or artificial by human standards – a realism of space that bypasses human use and so ends up feeling too real for human perception, as if supernaturalism were simply the moment at which realism exceeds our sensory limitations. Not unlike the relationship between the camera and its spaces in the Paranormal Activity franchise – the film includes one of the earliest and eeriest séance sessions – it must have struck audiences with a similar terror and uncanniness, making for one of the most melancholy, memorable horror films of the 40s, and a morbid, moody precursor to The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.