The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)

The Haunting in Connecticut arrives from 2009, a year when horror still understood that its primary obligation was to make audiences jump and then send them home. Peter Cornwell's feature debut concerns the Campbell family, who relocate to a Victorian former funeral parlor so that their cancer-stricken son Matt might live closer to his experimental treatments. The film proceeds through a familiar procession of apparitions, carved symbols, and crematory dread. It is competent, atmospheric, and entirely uninterested in the cultural conversations that would dominate the following decade. It wants only to scare us, and occasionally it does.

On the matter of representation, the cast is uniformly white and the film makes no gesture toward inclusive or non-traditional casting. There are no LGBTQ+ characters or subtext, no racial commentary, no environmental concern, and no economic critique. The antagonist is a demonic entity, not a system, and the film has no interest in framing its horrors as metaphors for capital. Matt's illness functions as a device for dread, not as a statement about bodies or their worth. A medium named Jonah wields supernatural abilities, which the film treats as occult phenomena, not as a neurological condition to be celebrated. The based on a true story label is a marketing convention, borrowed from a 1992 book whose own author later distanced himself from its accuracy. This is not historical revisionism in service of an ideology. It is simply a haunted house.

Virginia Madsen anchors the proceedings as Sara, a determined matriarch holding a fracturing family together. Her performance carries warmth and authority, and the film benefits from it. Whether this constitutes any articulated feminist program is doubtful. A mother protecting her children is ancient territory, older than cinema, and the film offers no argument beyond maternal instinct. There is no lecture here, no sermon, no moment where the audience is instructed on how to think. The film is content to deliver its scares and retreat. In an era that would soon demand meaning from every frame, this one asks for nothing but a darkened room. It is, in its modest way, a relief.