Almost twenty years ago, I opened the new issue of TV Guide and saw a short article about the TV show I was working on. It doesn’t seem like much now, but I was very excited.
The show was called A Haunting and it premiered on the Discovery Channel on Friday, October 28, 2005. New Discovery shows didn’t usually get highlighted in TV Guide, but the Halloween premiere—and the relative novelty of paranormal shows in 2005—helped our cause. We couldn’t compete with bigger network premieres like CBS’s Ghost Whisperer and The WB’s Supernatural, which also debuted in the fall of 2005, but I thought our little show had a decent shot at making a mark on audiences.
A Haunting was produced at the Virginia-based production company New Dominion Pictures, and spun off of two TV movies that aired in the fall of 2002. I was working on a different NDP series when A Haunting in Connecticut and A Haunting in Georgia were shot, and I desperately wanted to work on them. But I was a 22-year-old newbie researcher, so that didn’t happen.
I had better credentials in the spring of 2005. I had recently published my first book, a cultural history of American horror films, which gave me some credibility as a “horror movie expert.” For that reason, I got a call to work on A Haunting and I jumped at the opportunity to prove myself.
When I conducted phone interviews for the pilot episode “Hell House,” I remember feeling nervous to ask people about their experiences with the paranormal. I worried that they would be guarded, fearful of being doubted and/or ridiculed. Also, I figured that if they’d gone through what they said they’d gone through, they might be legitimately traumatized and reluctant to re-visit those experiences.
As it turned out, the interviewees on “Hell House” were very down-to-earth, very relatable and very believable. For years when I was working on the series, people asked me if I believed that the things depicted in our show really happened. I always responded the same way: I believed that the people I talked to believed what they were saying. I wasn’t sure if I believed in “ghosts,” but I believed that they believed. And I was fascinated by my conversations with various paranormal “experts,” beginning with the late Lorraine Warren.
My fascination with the subject matter made my job easy and fun. I was also lucky to get to work closely with a good showrunner. Larry Silverman’s goal for the first season of A Haunting was to make six “mini-movies” that blurred the line between documentary and drama. Larry was not particularly a horror fan—nor was he a believer in the paranormal—but he understood how to tell a story. Instinctively, he guided the series toward the tried-and-true formula of Rod Serling and Stephen King: “ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.” I remember having many conversations about character arcs and dramatic escalation in our stories, because we knew we had to establish the normal before we could make an audience suspend their disbelief in the paranormal. We also had to know how to build suspense in a visual medium.
For me, one particular scene in “Hell House” encapsulated the show. An interviewee had told me about an experience where she felt like she was being punched through the mattress of her bed. She stated clearly that she did not feel the mattress move beneath her; rather, she felt an immaterial—but still forceful—fist pass through the mattress and strike her body. Larry and I, along with the episode writer, had a long conversation about how to shoot that scene. Initially, there was some discussion about hiding a production assistant under the bed so they could punch the mattress from below. I knew that wouldn’t work.
I remembered something I’d read while researching my first book. In an interview with Francois Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock famously explained the difference between shock and suspense, using a scene from his film Sabotage as an illustration. In the scene, a boy is traveling on a London metro bus and there is a time bomb under his seat. The boy is blissfully unaware, but Hitchcock made sure the audience knows—not just that the bomb is there, but exactly how much time is left before it goes off. The essence of cinematic suspense is that we know more than the character.
I thought: What if we showed the audience that there’s something underneath the bed before our character senses anything? The image that popped into my head was an overhead POV shot, looking down on the room as a ghostly shadow slides beneath the bed. I didn't want to see a ghost, just a shadow. Less is more.
I’m not suggesting that this was a particularly innovative shot—I’d seen it in plenty of horror films horror films—but it was different from the traditional coverage (wide, medium, tight) used in most of NDP’s documentary shows. It was more cinematic, and it fit Larry’s goal of making “mini-movies.” After that, we were always thinking consciously about how we could build suspense using careful shot sequencing. We wrote the individual shots into our scripts. Again, this was hardly innovative—but, for me, it was a hands-on film school.
In my mind, our series was a direct descendant of docu-drama programming like Unsolved Mysteries, Haunted Lives (the 1991 Tobe Hooper pilot), and The Haunted (the 1995 TV movie based on the same case that was recently profiled in The Conjuring: Last Rites), but I also wanted the show to emulate effective horror movies. One of the jump scenes in “Hell House” owes a debt to The Sixth Sense, and another to Stir of Echoes. There’s also a transition between two scenes that was directly inspired by Cujo… although I didn’t realize it until years later.
By the time the episode was in post-production, Larry and I were the only producers left on the show and it fell on us to articulate the “philosophy” of the show and brand the series. Remembering the voice of the original Twilight Zone series, I cobbled together the opening narration from three sources. The first line—“In this world, there is real evil…”—came from A Haunting in Connecticut. The next two lines—“… in the darkest shadows and in the most ordinary places. These are the two stories of the innocent and the unimaginable”—summed up Larry’s vision for the series.
The last two lines were mine. “Between the world we see and the things we fear, there are doors. When they are opened, nightmares become reality.” As I said already, I wasn’t sure whether or not I believed in “ghosts.” Even today, my thoughts on the topic are scattered. In a more ponderous moment, I might start rambling about subject-object coalescence or the power of belief to transform consensus reality. But that would make for some lousy opening narration. At the time, I remembered the quote behind Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is…” I also might have been slyly nodding toward my book Nightmares in Red, White and Blue.
My friend Andrew Monument did a bang-up job editing the series open, as well as the entire “Hell House” episode. In particular, he made the climactic possession sequence work better than anyone imagined it could. It was at that point we realized we really had something. I was hoping the show would work for die-hard horror fans like myself, so at one point I made a suggestion that I thought might tip the scales. I approached Angus Scrimm, The Tall Man from the Phantasm series, about being our narrator. He seemed game, so I pitched my idea to the powers that be—but, in the end, the decision was made way above my pay grade, and my idea was rejected by someone who had never seen Phantasm.
That first episode still did pretty well. Over Halloween
weekend, “Hell House” got a household rating of 0.94, which means that a little
less than 1% of American households saw the episode in real time. That may not
sound like much, but for a cable TV network at that time, it was pretty damn
good. As a result, there was never any serious doubt that we’d get picked up
for a second season, and so I wound up working on all six first-season episodes as
well as five second-season episodes. I received my first onscreen writing
credit for the episode “Cursed,” which set the stage for my TV writing
career. Even more significantly, I ended up marrying one of my fellow producers
on A Haunting. A few years after that, when the show was resurrected on a new network, A Haunting kept me busy during a year
when my wife and I were at home with our infant daughter. In 2022, I got a chance to write one last episode for the final season. So, yeah, A Haunting has been a big part of my
life.
As a result, it’s hard for me to objectively assess the show or its significance. I was blown away when an October 2015 article in Rolling Stone named it one of the “25 Best Horror TV Shows of All Time”—and again when the article was updated as a Top 30 in 2021. In 2015, A Haunting made the Top 10. In 2021, it landed at #17—just above Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Showtime’s Masters of Horror! The article’s writer declared it “a 21st century portrait of How We Fear Now,” suggesting that A Haunting has a kind of sociological relevance that similar shows lack.
As the author of a cultural study of American horror films, I’d love to take some credit for that—but the fact is that the formula of the series was established way before we came along. In his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, Stephen King described The Amityville Horror (the 1979 film) as “The Horror of the Shrinking Bank Account,” noting that the film’s ghosts could be interpreted as symbols of the everyday burdens on the American middle-class. The same can be said for Poltergeist (1982), which provided a template for many of the haunted house movies of the past four decades.
In her 2023 book Ghost Channels: Paranormal Reality Television and the Haunting of Twenty-First Century America, Dartmouth professor Amy Lawrence writes that “what our current obsession with ghosts and haunting ultimately reveals is… the inability of existing social institutions to address the conditions that have made daily life unendurable.” She describes A Haunting as one of the progenitors of the current wave, but strangely focuses on Season Five episodes as metaphors for the 2008 housing crisis. I wish she had watched some of the earlier episodes because I think they help illustrate her observations about how paranormal reality TV has responded to social change in America.
Lawrence writes that the show’s characters routinely embrace “alternate systems of knowledge,” amounting to “a political act.” In hindsight, I recognize that A Haunting carries a vague anti-authority sentiment and places a very high value on subjective truth. For me, each episode was the story of one person’s—or one family’s—journey from skepticism to belief. In the early seasons, the endpoint of the journey was not necessarily reassuring. I think that’s what kept things interesting, and what ultimately kept the series alive (or undead?) for 17 years and 115 episodes.
