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Fridge / The Haunting (1999)

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As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.


Fridge Brilliance:

  • Initially the fact the doors were the only way to defeat Crain comes off as a perfect example of Fridge Logic and poor writing—why would Crain include in his own house the very thing that would defeat him, and before he ever became a malevolent ghost, no less? But if you take into account Crain's Holier Than Thou attitude from the novel (and his book of morality for his daughters), the doors make sense as yet another example of his fixation upon being one of the Moral Guardians with a stern belief in a Fire and Brimstone Hell. What he didn't count on, then, was that God would work through those very doors to end his reign of terror and mete out proper punishment.
    • Alternately, he didn't count on one of his descendants being as attuned to ghostly phenomena as he must've been in life, to have trapped so many children's souls there in the first place. Nor for that descendant to be able to tap into the same effect he'd used to animate the household's statues - something even the child-ghosts could do, at least to their own images - and redirect the vast power he'd been pouring into her body to attempt to subdue her into the Hell-mural on the doorway behind her.
  • The sequence of events in this film makes more sense if you consider that Nell's recently-deceased mother was a Crain descendant, too. Upon her death, she too was unable to rest in peace, as she became aware of how her ancestor's ghost was tormenting so many innocent child-ghosts, as well as how misplaced her trust had been in naming Nell's brother-in-law as executor. Anticipating that her emotionally-fragile daughter would sooner die a hero and save those trapped innocents than be exploited and demeaned by ungrateful relatives, she gave Nell the opportunity to make that choice if she wished, by planting the notion of using the Crain mansion for his research site in Dr. Marrow's mind, simulating the telephone call to invite Nell to participate, and cooperating with the child-ghosts to re-create her own bedroom as a message to Nell.

Fridge Horror:

  • Read a little deeper into the supernatural side of the movie. Crain didn't play with the kids when they were alive - he killed them in the house when they were young, and kept building rooms for them, and having statues and carvings made of them. All so they would be there even after his death. The house is a giant Soul Jar.
  • The triumphant ending may very likely end up being not so happy with the survivors having to eventually face the authorities and prove to them that ghosts caused Luke and Nell's deaths...
    • Forensic evidence will reveal that Luke was killed by a giant unsafe chimney flue. Every bone in Nell's body was crushed under mysterious circumstances with no evidence damage caused by a blunt force instrument so it might be a little harder to handwave, but there would also be nothing to link Theo and Marrow to it. The authorities' attention would instead be primarily diverted towards identifying all the dozens of murdered children and their bones in the fireplace which had gone uninvestigated for decades. I imagine the Dudleys would back-up whatever cover story Marrow decides to go with.
  • Why exactly was Hugh Crain so obsessed with children? There's even a deleted scene in the shooting script, derived from a similar scene in the original novel/film, where Nell is in bed hearing a child crying in pain, heavily implied to be Crain's doing.

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