Harried mother Virginia Madsen (Virginia Madsen) has moved her family to a temporary Connecticut residence so her cancer-riddled son Matt (Kyle Gallner) can be nearer his doctors. While her contractor husband Peter (Martin Donovan) worries they cannot afford the extra expense, she’s positive this is a good idea; her only thought the health and well-being of her eldest child. But this is no ordinary house, and the spirits haunting it won’t be happy until they’ve possessed every inch of the unwell teen’s body and soul.

Virginia Madsen and Kyle Gallner in Lionsgate Films' The Haunting in Connecticut

The line between a great haunted house thriller and a mediocre one is very, very slim. On paper, to get things right seems quite simple. In practice, few filmmakers have been able to pull it off with any lasting flair.

In the end, everyone who attempts to make a film within this genre is chasing a single sacred cow, Robert Wise’s immortal 1963 stunner The Haunting. What’s truly amazing about that still scary winner is how little the director shows you, the movie a jittery masterwork of sound, reaction shots and audience imagination. It is arguably the most frightening film I have ever seen, and even though I’ve watched it a dozen or so times certain scenes send chills so far up my spine I tend to think they’ve left a permanent impression.

While the storyline sounds more like the plot of The Amityville Horror or The Others (two - three if you consider the first one one has been told twice - other stories about families dealing with difficult circumstances facing paranormal situations), the supposedly based-on-fact The Haunting in Connecticut actually owes a lot to Wise’s classic. Director Peter Cornwell (making his feature debut) spends a lot of time setting up his scares by focusing on a series of locked doors, strange metronomic thumps and skittering wooden creaks giving the illusion of a house alive with its own inhuman intentions.

This tends to work beautifully, and if the filmmaker tends to revel in a few too many John Carpenter-like freak-outs I admit the first third had me seriously unsettled. Cornwell got me interested in discovering what was going to happen next, each door unlocking and every crack in a floorboard enough to send my pulse racing and my blood run cold.

But it doesn’t last. The deeper into the story we go the more the director lets the material get the better of him. He starts throwing in pointless camera tricks, image desaturations, jump cuts and other editing moves that annoy more than they unnerve. On top of that, he adds in pointless special effects that do not startle and do not shock, instead only diluting the power of the unhinged imaginational whirligig Cornwell had done such a fine job constructing early on.

It doesn’t help that writers Adam Simon (who, incidentally, co-wrote and directed the underappreciated 1990 cult gem Brain Dead) and Tim Metcalfe (Kalifornia) don’t do him any favors. While the first two-thirds are fairly solid, the climactic turn of events is pretty darn silly. The characters stop acting like human beings and begin to become stock figures in a routine Sci-Fi Channel programmer. It all becomes a series of forgettable shrieks and screams, the air of mystery surrounding it all evaporating like helium escaping from a pinpricked balloon. 

This is why the line is so thin. Even with some structural problems (and some over-familiarity), this film could still of worked extremely well had Cornwell stuck to his initial template and used restraint to fuel his story’s scares. Instead, not trusting audiences would be open to this he turns to tired visual tricks and effects that only point out just how silly and tired the majority really is. What could have been a solidly scary potboiler is instead just a forgettable genre retread, The Haunting in Connecticut another unfortunate disappointment in a 2009 already littered with them.