text: Somewhere in his non-fiction book DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King suggests that one secret of writing scary stories is to avoid showing your readers exactly what horrible thing is waiting behind the door to get them. If at last the door bursts open and a bug ten feet tall lurches through, the reader may be a little scared, but he'll also think, "Well, I can deal with that. At least it wasn't a HUNDRED feet tall." There's nothing more frightening than what lurks, unseen and unknown, just on the other side of that tightly closed door, waiting to get you.<br /><br />THE HAUNTING is so completely misconceived that director Jan De Bont more or less starts off his movie by metaphorically throwing open that door himself and yelling: "Look, everybody, look! It's a ten-foot-tall bug! Isn't that SCARY?!" The law of diminishing returns immediately kicks in. By the end of the movie, the director is, so to speak, jumping up and down, banging his CGI pots and pans madly, and hoarsely screaming: "Look, everyone, look! Here come ten HUNDRED-foot-tall bugs! ... And now, here come a hundred THOUSAND-foot-tall bugs!" <br /><br />The filmmakers apparently believed that special effects alone could compensate for all the other shortcomings in this endeavor (and there are many). They can't and don't. In fact, impressive as they are, the special effects are so insistent and obtrusive that the distracted viewer winds up staring at them -- whether in admiration or annoyance -- instead of being immersed in a story.<br /><br />For me, the nadir of this film's sheer stupidity comes when a statue, with "blood" gushing from its mouth, tries to drown Liam Neeson (as Dr. Marrow) in a fountain. The filmmakers clearly didn't know what to do with this alleged idea once they had it, so they just have Neeson thrash around in the water a bit, flailing his arms and going glug-glug. By the next scene, the good doctor has apparently dried himself off and, ho hum, forgotten all about the annoying incident.<br /><br />Shirley Jackson's novel seems to have been dumbed-down into this ridiculous screenplay by a committee of low-IQ teenage stoners who thought the way to frighten people was to make every effect bigger and louder: "Okay, next, let's, uh, make the ceiling, you know, look like a creepy face, and, uh, come down on her ... and all these spiky things, like, trap her in the bed."<br /><br />The sole saving grace of THE HAUNTING is that it at last becomes so awful that it's actually funny. By the time Owen Wilson (as Luke Sanderson) fell on the floor and then went on his Magic-Carpet Ride O' Death, I just about fell on the floor myself, laughing.<br /><br />Badly constructed, witless, grotesquely heavy-handed, utterly unbelievable, and filled with clunky dialogue and pointless scenes, this vacuous HAUNTING is a textbook example of how NOT to make a horror movie.