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When Sara Campbell (Virginia Madsen) spots a man erecting a "For Rent" sign outside a Victorian home in Connecticut, she stops the car. She has been hunting for a place to stay near the hospital where her son, Matt (Kyle Gallner), is receiving cancer treatment.
The stranger says of the house: "Just needs some love and care and a family to bring it back to life." She, wisely, asks, "Where's the catch?"
In a response that belongs in the Understatement Hall of Fame, he demurs, "Well, it does have a bit of history."
Does it ever. It starts with its onetime use as a funeral parlor and site of seances that were not comic callings of the spirits but ghoulish gatherings with a medium who looked and acted nothing like Patricia Arquette's psychic on the NBC series.
Mom, Matt and other family members settle into the house while Sara's husband (Martin Donovan) keeps working hours away and splitting his time between their two residences.
- Starring: Virginia Madsen, Kyle Gallner
- Rating: PG-13 for some intense sequences of terror and disturbing images
- Web site: hauntinginconnecticut.com
Matt, weirdly, chooses to move into the Victorian home's basement and immediately starts to have disturbing dreams or visions, but if he mentions them to his doctor, he could be disqualified from the medical study that could save his life.
As is the usual pattern in such movies, the freaky frights escalate until everyone in the family is endangered and there's a cataclysmic meeting of the living and dead.
If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it was the basis for a Discovery Channel show and a book called "In a Dark Place" by Ray Garton.
The onetime haunted homeÂowners, actually named the Snedekers, brought in the same paranormal researchers who documented the "Amityville Horror" case, according to a recent Associated Press story.
Their house still stands in Southington, Conn., and it has been owned for a decade by another family free from hauntings but worried about curiosity-seekers intrigued by the movie.
The home's petrifying pedigree gives "Haunting" an advantage over the recent "The Last House on the Left" or "Friday the 13th" remakes. But some dramatic license apparently has been taken, especially with the finale.
The movie is set in 1987, which means medical options for the ailing Matt (convincingly played by Gallner from "Veronica Mars") are more limited and there are no cell phones, texts or tweets for help. Research involves a trip to the library, rather than Wikipedia.
"Haunting" is directed by feature newcomer Peter Cornwell, but the presence of veterans such as Madsen, Donovan and Elias Koteas as a clergyman helps enormously.
The story is unsettling -- especially for a PG-13-rated film -- and I confess to being jolted once or twice (and turning my head), but "The Haunting" falls prey to the usual potholes.
Among them: allowing fragile cancer patient Matt to sleep or continue to sleep in the basement, after the creepy stuff starts; not fleeing from the house at the first sign of trouble; making the bloodcurdling background somewhat convoluted and graphic; and staging an operatic, over the top ending in which the bombastic music and dialogue are in a death match.
"Haunting" may not haunt you, but it might hold you for its 90-odd minutes.
