One day in 2009, I was channel surfing and I saw a showing was coming on called A Haunting in Connecticut. I had recently seen ads for a movie called The Haunting in Connecticut that I didn’t think had been released yet. The similarity of the names confused me, and I watched just to see the show on TV was the same thing. It turns out that the The Haunting was based on the same story as A Haunting. I enjoyed the TV show enough that I decided to go see the film when it was released. My son and my youngest daughter went with me to see the film.
The background story is a “true” case of demonic possession. A teenage boy has cancer. His family needs to move closer to the hospital where he is getting treatment. The house they end up getting is a former funeral home. The morgue is still in the basement. Some of the evil spirits from the morgue end up possessing the boy with cancer. Ultimately the demon is driven out, the boy is saved.
My kids and I were watching the film at a sparsely attended matinee at a local theater. There were about 8 people counting us. My family was sitting on the left side of the main aisle that when down the middle of the theater. Everyone else was sitting on the back row on the right side of the aisle. The movie had been playing for about 10-15 minutes when an older couple came in and found seats slightly ahead of us on the opposite side of the aisle. Before they sat down, the man asked me if they had missed too much of the film. It was an odd question to ask someone that was seeing the film for the first time. It seemed to be following the TV show closely that I could tell they hadn’t missed that much. I told him they would be ok. They sat down. A few minutes later there was a scene where the boy was at a doctor’s appointment. About a minute into the scene, the old man turns around and asks, “Is there something wrong with that boy?” I tell him the boy has cancer. I thought I was going to have to tell them about everything that happened. The old man settled down and we enjoyed the rest of the movie. Our favorite scene featured the son’s father. The father lives back in their original community because he has a business there. He mainly comes to the new house on the weekends. Our favorite scene is when he is upset about his son’s condition, being separated and his business. He is at their other home alone. In a montage, they show him getting drunk, playing guitar and crying. Bottles and glasses break and he cuts himself. Often our family will fake cry and pretend to play guitar in homage to this scene in the film.