Fresh Blood: The Haunting in Connecticut

Spending a Little Quality Time with the Dead. Courtesy of Lionsgate Films

Released this week onto DVD is The Haunting in Connecticut, a tale of love, compassion and the triumph of the human spirit. Just kidding, it’s a ghost story. Yet another supernatural horror flick, oh boy, how terrible could this possibly be? Surprisingly this isn’t all that bad and is in fact a pretty decent film. The first time I heard of the story was back in 2002, when the Discovery Channel hosted a 2 hour special, amazingly called A Haunting in Connecticut. The show was a lot like “Unsolved Mysteries”, in the sense that the format was reenactments over interviews with the real people involved. The special was apparently a success and was spin-off into an hour long show, simply called “A Haunting”, which featured a different story each week.

The film begins with Virginia Madsen’s character Sara Campbell sitting in front of a very blatant camera. I immediately thought that I was watching some sort of behind the scenes special feature but then it dawned on me that the scene was implying that the character was being interviewed for the Discovery Channel show. I thought that this was a very interesting and unique way to begin the film, as it almost gave the viewer the feeling that they were watching a theatrical reenactment sans the voiceover.
Afterward, the actually story begins and we are introduced to Sara and her son, Matt, on a long trip home from a Connecticut hospital, where Matt receives cancer treatments. After watching her son experience yet another sickness from the travel, Sara tells her husband that they really should temporarily move closer to the hospital. This notion is, of course, a bad idea because as the title implies there is going to some ghostly tomfoolery.

So the movie and the actual story, as I heard it to be true, are quite different yet very much the same, if that makes any sense. Meaning that certain things that appear in the movie may not have happened and things that may have happened aren’t in the film. The same thing can be said to describe the characters versus the real people involved. For instance, in both versions the house was once a funeral home, however the movie adds to that and makes the former undertaker into some sort of “mad scientist” type character. Beyond that, the “real” story involves a psychic team, who investigate the house, while the film makes no mention of them at all. I guess the whole “based on a true story” line really emphasizes the “based on” part.

While the film may be more fiction than fact, The Haunting in Connecticut is an epic success in modern “Hollywood Horror”. This is a prime example of how a horror film with a budget doesn’t automatically mean that it is awful. The scares are pretty genuine and effective, plus there are some very disturbing sequences that will keep you sleeping with the lights on for weeks. It should also be noted that there is now “The Haunting in Georgia” in the works, which was ironically the second episode of that Discovery Channel series. Perhaps they’ll make a movie based on every episode or just finish out the rest of the map. That being said, when should we expect “The Haunting in Indiana”? I saw a ghost once, doesn’t that justify an entire movie be made?

Bottom Line: While I don’t think the film is very deserving of a spot in my personal library, it is defiantly worth an immediate rental.

Rating:

2.5 / 5 "Kills"