The one problem is that the house is actually haunted. The three patients and their doctor graduate from experimenting to surviving, as the house comes alive. The previous owner, it turns out, enslaved children and then burnt them in a walk-in fireplace. It is the ghosts of these children, their master and his wives that rise out of the curtains and walls, making the house drive fear into its inhabitants and the audience. With the magic of computer effects, cleverly timed musical crescendos become an afterthought.
Skeletons spring to action just as real as the human victims.
Though Hollywood has managed to make horror movies as real as the nightmares they have always tried to be, the conventions still stick. The only film genre to traditionally employ a female antagonist, horror lends no breaks to The Haunting. Eleanor runs around the house in a hysteria nobody else understands for most of the film. Eleanor's character is bolder than the Jamie Lee Curtises and Jennifer Love Hewitts of horror past. She calls herself a volunteer, not a victim, and uses her brain rather than her feet to stay alive until the end.