The Haunting
Cinema is a screen onto which we can project our fears, torments and the monstrosities of the world. The screen protects us from what we see, but cinema has also permanently anchored our nightmares around a few powerful images (empty houses, hostile attics and basements, demonic masks, bloodcurdling grimaces, disturbing postures). Throughout the summer, the Cinémathèque québécoise will be presenting a series of films encompassing more than one hundred and twenty years of horror, reminding us that what scares us most is to make the deepest of our fears tangible and credible.
To continue his experiments in parapsychology, Professor Markway brings together a group of people in an old mansion reputed to be haunted. From the very first night, the professor's guests are terrorized by unusual noises. Eleanor is on the verge of depression and the professor advises her to leave, but she refuses, claiming that the house is holding her back.
Robert Wise
Robert Wise was an American filmmaker. He won the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture for his musical films West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965). He was also nominated for Best Film Editing for Citizen Kane (1941) and directed and produced The Sand Pebbles (1966), which was nominated for Best Picture. Among his other films are The Body Snatcher (1945), Born to Kill (1947), The Set-Up (1949), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), I Want to Live! (1958), The Haunting (1963), The Andromeda Strain (1971), and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). He was the president of the Directors Guild of America from 1971 to 1975 and the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1985 through 1988. Wise achieved critical success as a director in a striking variety of film genres: horror-noir, western, war, science fiction, musical and drama, with many repeat successes within each genre. His meticulous preparation may have been largely motivated by studio budget constraints, but advanced the moviemaking art. He received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1998.
