James Herbert is a genius. For me, he is, apart from Clive Barker, the very best British writer today. He is like how Stephen King should be. He does not make compromises; he tells a story, and it's not oh-so-bad-forces from oh-so-far-away, but his heroes are anti-heroes, his world is black and rotten. His books have inspired many a writer and director so far. Also, he takes a theme and varies it in different books; the denying sceptic from Haunted can also be found in Moon. What I want to say, read his books; they are no mainstream, but books like "The Fog", "The Spear" and "'48" will be different and stimulating reading.
That said, let's review "Haunted". Haunted, the first in the series of anti-hero David Ash (second being "The Ghosts of Sleath"), one of his best (and best-selling) novels, is set in modern-day Britain. The title has more than one meaning; apart from Edbrook Manor being haunted, David Ash himself is by the ghost of his evil older sister, Juliette, who drowned when she fled from the sudden anger of David after torturing him again; since then, she tortures him in his dreams - and found ideal companions in the Muriell family.
David, himself, has a drinking problem, and is one of the best investigators of the "Psychic Institute" with a reputation to expose frauds. He denies the existence of ghosts, but not of para-psychic phenomena. As he enters stage, his driving license is lost. Again.
Enter the Mariell family - prankster Simon, upright Robert, and schizophrenic Christine, stewarded after the deadly car accident of their parents by crazed Tess Webb. Having made an arrangement with evil Juliet, they order an investigation of the Psychic Institute in order to torture David. Dead all of them, Christine and her dog incinerated after Simon locked them in the cellar, Robert died trying to save them, Simon hanged himself within the week of their deaths.
That is the reason for Davids experience in the book, revealed at the very end of a suspenseful Fantasy/Horror tale. The torture starts subtle, and becomes more and more blatant, at the end leaving David questioning his sanity and being saved by nanny Tess alone.
If you watch the movie to view a mediocre ghost story, the lacking of all of the above may not disturb you. If you watch it to view what you read in the book - given all the deficiencies dramatisations have -, you think wine and get stale water.
Lewis took the story to 1928, and Prof. Dr. David Ash is not the borderline-alcoholic borderline-failure haunted man we know and love from the books, but a stable, successful teacher. Instead, we get incest in the Mariell family - if Herbert wanted incest, he would have put it into the book. Apart from that, we get cardboard characters where Herberts book stressed on the discovery of the characters and character development, and shallowness where Herbert delved into the deep. The delicate effects of Herbert that left Ash wondering whether he hallucinated, or whether all was simply a normal circumstance, are totally left out (and where they are, they are totally unmotivated - Ash being not the subject of their torture, and we ask ourselves why nanny Tess keeps her secrecy - plot holes where Herbert put delicacy). The fire in the wine cellar where Christina, Robert and the dog died, for example - in the book, David extinguishes it, and stops seeing it - but still /hears/ it and /feels/ its heat, one of the finest effects in the book - is totally low-budget SFX in the movie. Kate Beckinsales nude and sex scenes are enjoyable and lead to the (male) viewer's strong identification with David - the character development of Christina is totally left out (which I am sure Beckinsale as an actor would have been capable of). When David discovers that Edbrook is a totally different world than the outside, and is not what it seems, this is done step by step adding suspense the movie lacks.
All in all, this movie adds to the B-grades Kate Beckinsale made between "Much ado about nothing" and "Underworld" - why? She's intelligent, educated, a much better actor than Catherine Zeta-Jones and many others, why is she selling herself so cheaply and does movies like "Van Helsing"? You would think she could chose between much better scripts.
The movie itself has good actors, and the story of Herbert is excellent, but the script is catastrophic. You could only guess whether it aimed at a mainstream marked that would find Herbert too complicated, or it wanted to soften the hardest things about Herberts black-in-black world here - the movie did neither become a popular mainstream success, nor did the script use the potential even "Haunted, light version" did offer.
A little more money on the effects - and a few well-placed additional effects - would not have harmed. So, I hate to say that, this is a great disappointment.
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