The Haunting in Connecticut

What the audience first sees in "The Haunting in Connecticut," an ambitious but not-quite-successful horror offering, are vintage black-and-white photographs of families grieving over their dead -- images of an old man, a young wife, an infant, each laid out in a coffin, on a bed, in a woven basket. The pictures are both repulsive and fascinating.

The brute fact of an uneuphemized corpse, its face frozen in that opaque, no-longer-quite-human expression, always evokes a kind of atavistic horror. We want to put distance between us and that cold flesh. We want it in the ground ... now, without a moment's delay.

And when the dead won't stay down in the ground? Well, then you've got yourself a ghost story. And, in the right hands, a good haunting can not only scare the bejesus out of you, but also resonate with something more than the heebie-jeebies. Think of Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" and the awful smearing of boundaries between the quick and the dead, the metaphysical horror of the undead acting out murder and decadence and banality over and over, for all eternity.

Alas, "The Haunting in Connecticut" turns out to be a very far cry from "The Shining." The film's loosely based on actual events (already chronicled in a 2002 TV documentary) that allegedly occurred in a Connecticut residence that was once a funeral home where corpses were mutilated to call up extremely black magic. Years later, when a hapless family rents the house, they discover it's infected by the vengeful dead.

Death moved in with the Campbell family long before they rent a house full of ghosts. Gaunted by cancer, young Matt (Kyle Gallner, a dead-ringer for Robert Pattinson, of "Twilight" fame) seems resigned to his fate. His mother (the ever-luminous Virginia Madsen) stands strong for him, her other kids, and an alcoholic, mostly absent husband (Martin Donovan).

When a white net mask is lowered over Matt's face, just before he slides into a radiation machine, it's a weirdly disturbing moment. The blanking of his human face, as well as the "stigmata" left by his painful cancer treatment, mark his growing kinship to the mutilated, spiritually "diseased" ghosts at home.

But "The Haunting" mostly runs on things going bump in the night with knee-jerk regularity -- punctuated by blasts of scary music, shock cutting and lighting so murky you can only guess what horror is abroad.

And the grotesque silhouette that pops up in mirrors and lurks around every corner gets old fast. Worse, after we learn this sinister spirit's motivation, its scare tactics don't really make much sense.

To truly terrify us, this haunted funeral home should literally stink of death. Its every surface should bear a sheen of putrescence, metaphorically speaking. We should feel moral and visceral revulsion at the atrocities once practiced in its basement mortuary. Instead, the scares often seem arbitrary, abstract, even silly -- distinctly un-Hitchcockian shadow-birds fluttering around a bedroom, a girl attacked by a shower curtain ...

Still, the film does have some spine-tingling, stomach-churning moments. Take that flashback to bygone times in the mortuary, where some specialty work is performed -- in queasy close-up -- on a corpse's eyelid. Or the little kid, playing hide-and-seek, curled up in a dark dumbwaiter: When he turns his head just a tad, a shapeless black "something" crouches claustrophobically close behind him.

Debuting feature director Peter Cornwell got his chance at the Bigs on the strength of his animated horror short "Ward 13," which racked up a raft of prestigious awards back in 2003 (it's briefly glimpsed here on a hospital TV). His only other credit is "Post Apocalyptic Pizza," a short in a series titled "Horror Meets Comedy," viewable later in 2009 on Xbox Live.

Rookie though Cornwell is, it's clear he's reaching for more than movie-as-scream-machine. He works hard to make the Campbell family real to us, in hopes that we'll care about them as more than fodder for frights. And he pumps up the plot with some boilerplate religious symbolism.

Madsen's powerful love for her fading son, her will to wrestle him back from death, is absolutely authentic, and too big for this movie. As she holds her boy in her arms, after Matt's costly bid to release the house's damned souls, mother and son look like a secular pietà. And indeed a resurrection of sorts is in the offing.

In the end, gross-out ectoplasm and nasty necromancy generate only half-baked horror in "The Haunting in Connecticut." What really scares us to death are cannibal cells that can turn any one of us into a walking skeleton.