The Terror Cellar - Real Paranormal Stories
Oct 9, 2026 · 54 min · 13 segments
Is Hill House really haunted, or is something far more sinister at work? 👻 In this classic supernatural horror film, director Robert Wise takes us inside one of cinema’s most terrifying haunted…
Andy CroftsHost
You know, it always... cheers me up makes me happy to see people engaging and listening to the show so yeah but anyway there's something about a haunted house that I find far more frightening than a monster chasing somebody through a forest or a masked killer hiding behind a door.
A house is supposed to be somewhere you feel safe, right? It's where you sleep, where you eat, where you spend time with the people you love.
It's somewhere you should be able to close the door on the outside world and relax.
Not because somebody has locked the doors or because there's a strange man standing at the end of the corridor, but because the house itself seems to be aware of you.
And when you try to convince yourself that there's a perfectly ordinary explanation, something else happens that makes you question everything.
And then, perhaps worst of all, you begin to feel that the house knows something about you, something personal, something you've spent your entire life trying to hide.
That's the feeling I get from this film, The Haunting, the extraordinary 1963 horror film directed by Robert Wise.
It's a film that doesn't need buckets of blood, enormous monsters or a succession of cheap jump scares to get under your skin.
Is Hill House simply an enormous, unpleasant old building with a terrible history? Is it haunted by the spirits of people who died there? Is there some kind of malevolent intelligence inside its walls? Or is the house doing something even more disturbing, finding the weakness in the minds of the people who enter it and use those weaknesses against them? And what if all those explanations are true in different ways? Well, in this episode, for day 9 of the 31 Nights of Fright I'm going back to one of the greatest haunted house films ever made It's a film that has influenced generations of horror filmmakers and continues to frighten people more than 60 years after it first appeared.
So, settle in, make yourself feel comfortable and perhaps leave a light on somewhere because today's classic film review is The Haunting.
The Haunting was released in 1963 and directed by Robert Wise, a filmmaker whose career covered an astonishing range of cinema.
He had worked in film editing, directed film noir and crime dramas and would go on to direct enormous musical successes including West Side Story and The Sound of Music.
He was an experienced filmmaker who understood how to tell a story visually, how to build tension through editing and how to make an audience feel something without having to explain every little detail.
The screenplay was written by Nelson Gidding, based on Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House.
You know, it always... cheers me up makes me happy to see people engaging and listening to the show so yeah but anyway there's something about a haunted house that I find far more frightening than a monster chasing somebody through a forest or a masked killer hiding behind a door.
A house is supposed to be somewhere you feel safe, right? It's where you sleep, where you eat, where you spend time with the people you love.
It's somewhere you should be able to close the door on the outside world and relax.
Not because somebody has locked the doors or because there's a strange man standing at the end of the corridor, but because the house itself seems to be aware of you.
And when you try to convince yourself that there's a perfectly ordinary explanation, something else happens that makes you question everything.
And then, perhaps worst of all, you begin to feel that the house knows something about you, something personal, something you've spent your entire life trying to hide.
That's the feeling I get from this film, The Haunting, the extraordinary 1963 horror film directed by Robert Wise.
It's a film that doesn't need buckets of blood, enormous monsters or a succession of cheap jump scares to get under your skin.
Is Hill House simply an enormous, unpleasant old building with a terrible history? Is it haunted by the spirits of people who died there? Is there some kind of malevolent intelligence inside its walls? Or is the house doing something even more disturbing, finding the weakness in the minds of the people who enter it and use those weaknesses against them? And what if all those explanations are true in different ways? Well, in this episode, for day 9 of the 31 Nights of Fright I'm going back to one of the greatest haunted house films ever made It's a film that has influenced generations of horror filmmakers and continues to frighten people more than 60 years after it first appeared.
So, settle in, make yourself feel comfortable and perhaps leave a light on somewhere because today's classic film review is The Haunting.
The Haunting was released in 1963 and directed by Robert Wise, a filmmaker whose career covered an astonishing range of cinema.
He had worked in film editing, directed film noir and crime dramas and would go on to direct enormous musical successes including West Side Story and The Sound of Music.
He was an experienced filmmaker who understood how to tell a story visually, how to build tension through editing and how to make an audience feel something without having to explain every little detail.
The screenplay was written by Nelson Gidding, based on Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House.
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