Haunting in Connecticut – Review

I find the tagline “based on a true story” to be distracting when a film opens with it. I find myself wandering, analyzing or questioning what I’m seeing as fact. Haunting in Connecticut not only opens with that but goes one further, “based on the true story”. Okay, odd.

I’m a natural egghead, so after leaving the theater I started researching this true story. Sometimes writers have to spruce the story up, especially one like this, a ghost story, to make it more interesting or scary. After reading up on the true story, I must admit that for once, it seems, the true story is way more interesting than the film, which is pedestrian at best. Perhaps there was no need to spruce this up?

Ray Garton in 1992 wrote a book called In a Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting based on the Snedeker family and their encounter with the paranormal during the 1980s. Sadly, any story about ghosts or something of the like is always alleged, but the story of Garton’s book should’ve been the movie. The Snedeker family was facing a lot of issues at the time, mostly drug addiction and alcoholism, couldn’t get their story straight making it very hard for Garton to write the book. He’s even stated he’s glad the book is out-of-print, being displeased with his time working on it. The family was seeing ghosts and other odd things and after a séance it was deemed clear of any activity. Some sources claim it was all fabricated (naturally).

To me, that right there was more entertaining than what I witnessed for 90 minutes. They changed it by making the family move upstate to be closer to this hospital since their son has cancer. The house seemed ideal but “it has some history”. Now, what transpires isn’t bad, in fact the film is directed and acted well; it just feels like ground well covered before. It’s not Peter Cornwell’s fault, the director, or Virginia Madsen’s fault, she is the film’s anchor, so all I can call-out is the script, which offers nothing new or interesting. The history behind the house isn’t that riveting and how many stories do we need or ghosts trying to tell a character what happened to them? There’s too many, and yes, I am knocking the film for its lack of originality, which is a shame because of the true story of the family, seemed more interesting.

I know I’ve brought up the word interesting a lot here, but I highly doubt if anyone will be scared by this, a shame since, you know, it supposed to scare us, and even with a few bits of creepy imagery and loud music cues, it just doesn’t. Maybe if the script was worked on again to highlight some of the very few interesting things in the film, build the characters better (we really just care about the mom and the son, everyone else is just filler), the film could’ve worked. But I still feel as if they focused more on the real true story, with the family in turmoil, drugs and alcohol, ramp that angle up, with the supernatural, I think Haunting in Connecticut could have been a standout. But with it being just another haunted house movie, years after the most famous story was film, sequelized and remade, this one just gets lost. Or maybe, as I believe, haunted house movies just aren’t that scary?

Rating: