Directors love to hear a theater roiling with laughter. Unless of course, they’ve just directed a horror movie called The Haunting in Connecticut. Believe it or not, Haunting just may be a funnier movie than Monsters vs. Aliens, opening on the screen next door. Which, obviously, is hardly a ringing endorsement of either film. While Haunting does possess (pun intended) some genuinely creepy moments, most of them were stolen outright from better films. Quick, somebody grab a dictionary and show director Peter Cornwell the difference between homage and grand larceny.

The Campbell family’s move to upstate Connecticut doesn’t take place under the best of circumstances. Eldest son Matt (Kyle Gallner) has been diagnosed with cancer, and his parents Sarah (Virginia Madsen) and Peter (Martin Donovan) decide to move closer to the hospital where he is undergoing an aggressive treatment program. But no sooner do they move in than Matt begins witnessing terrifying manifestations. The family soon learns that their Victorian fixer-upper comes with a disturbing history: not only was the house used as a funeral parlor, but the owner’s clairvoyant apprentice led séances, a living gateway through which the dead crossed over. Sarah and Matt turn to Father Popescu (Elias Koteas), a priest with keen insights into the dark underbelly of the supernatural. But even Popescu may be too late to stop a gathering malevolence bent on revenge for nearly a century.

The Haunting in Connecticut, supposedly based on a true story, is not so much an original film, as it is a big budget mash-up. YouTubers love to take scenes from different, often divergent films, and splice them together to make something new and generally ironical. If it weren’t for the fact that the actors stay the same throughout the film, you might be forgiven for believing that’s what happened here. Now that I think of it, Haunting would make a great drinking game — you have to toss down a shot every time you see a cut-and-paste from another film. Amityville Horror? Big time. The Exorcist? Oh yeah. The Shining? Of course. Poltergeist? Check. Sixth Sense? You bet. Several such moments, lifted unmolested from the aforementioned films, caused peels of derisive laughter to sweep the audience.

While Haunting is at least smart enough to steal from the very best, it still relies far too much on moments designed to do little more than make you jump in your seat, music that telegraphs every shred of action and a climax involving light bulbs that turns on a premise so preposterous it must have been scribbled into the script by a practical joke-playing production assistant while the director had his back turned.

But the worst offense by far is characters whose actions we cannot relate to. Why is it that for most sub par horror films to work, characters have to behave in ways utterly antithetical to reality? Ask yourself this simple question: if monstrous apparitions appeared repeatedly by your bedside, would you keep sleeping in that house, much less the bed? Obviously any sane person would run, shrieking like a little girl, and never look back. But not the Campbell family. No matter the horrors that harass them, by the next scene they appear to have gone on with their normal lives, practically oblivious to what just occurred.

I will give Haunting this bit of oblique praise. Even if it never rises above the level of routine things-going-bump-in-the-night, it does understand that a gory body count is not necessary to produce terror. The filmmakers may try scaring us long after we realize that the danger is overstated, but at least they never confuse horror with an excuse to dismember half their cast.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.