10 Brilliantly Crazy Movie Fan Theories
7. The Haunting Is A Christian Allegory
Leave it to
a Christian film critic to point out the “obvious Christian symbolic meaning”
of The Haunting (1999), Jan De Bont’s trashing of Shirley Jackson’s The
Haunting Of Hill House.
According to the critic, Hill House represents “the once beautiful but perverted and evil world”, ghostly villain Hugh Crain is Satan and the Velma Dinkley-ish Eleanor, played by Lili Taylor, is none other than Jesus Christ. The remaining characters – The Doctor With An Ulterior Motive, The Bisexual Character, The Beatnik – are lost souls in search of redemption. When Eleanor sacrifices herself to save them and bond Crain in hell, she, like Christ, sacrifices herself for everyone, regardless of their sins.
An agnostic viewer who missed that particular reading of the material would have to object to it, not on moral or religious grounds but because it obscures what De Bont’s movie really is – a load of tosh hiding behind some very expensive special effects.