The House of Horrors

“I’ve always been very intrigued by inanimate objects,” Jan De Bont says. “I’ve always liked trying to make things come alive.”

So it comes as no surprise that the director of movies about a bus (“Speed”) and tornadoes (“Twister”) chose as his next film “The Haunting,” in which a house is not just a backdrop, it’s the central character. The DreamWorks release, based on the Shirley Jackson classic novel “The Haunting of Hill House,” opens Friday.

Even before he had set his cast (which includes Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Lili Taylor), De Bont hired production designer Eugenio Zanetti. Zanetti, who won a 1995 Oscar for his opulent 17th century sets in “Restoration” and a nomination for his colorful imaginings of heaven and hell in last year’s “What Dreams May Come,” envisioned “The Haunting” in cinematic terms: “The Shining” done on the sets of “Citizen Kane.”

What Zanetti did not do was search for inspiration in the classic haunted-house movies--pictures like “The Uninvited,” “House of Usher,” “The Amityville Horror” or even the original 1963 version of “The Haunting.”

“Cliches about creaking doors and things,” he says, wouldn’t have helped.

Over eight weeks last fall, Zanetti conceptualized and sketched designs for a cavernous, very creepy interior--so big, in fact, that no Hollywood sound stages could accommodate the sets. Instead, De Bont and Zanetti built much of their Hill House in the mammoth Long Beach Dome (which formerly housed Howard Hughes’ famous Spruce Goose).

Zanetti, De Bont says, “has an incredible taste for grand theater. He loves the spectacle, the big picture. He’s very operatic in his vision.”

The two originally met when De Bont was cinematographer on “Flatliners,” and they worked briefly together on an aborted screen version of “The Phantom of the Opera.” “He designed sets for that that were so incredibly beautiful and at the same time so scary, very Victorian, very Gothic,” De Bont says.

In “The Haunting,” Hill House is the setting for a study in fear by psychology researcher Neeson. A 130-year-old Massachusetts mansion built by a mysterious textile magnate named Hugh Crain, it soon starts to terrorize its temporary occupants, who gradually discover the truth about Crain and the reasons why nearby townsfolk shun the decaying structure.

Exterior shots are of a real 19th century English castle: Harlaxton Manor near Grantham, Lincolnshire, a massive, multiple-towered edifice that took nearly 30 years to build (and which now serves as the British campus of Indiana’s University of Evansville).

For the interiors, however, Zanetti recalled the majesty of Charles Foster Kane’s never-finished estate. “It was a house built by a monster,” Zanetti says. “That’s why I felt Xanadu and this house had something in common. Both characters were robber barons. The great thing about Xanadu, and what we tried to do here was--using the pretext of the Victorian era, in which people mixed up every style--to convey this Frankenstein monstrosity in which every piece is made of something different.”

Sharp-eyed viewers will spot Moroccan, Gothic, Neoclassical, Baroque, Romanesque and other influences throughout the house. What they may not realize, at first, is the overall conception: domicile as living, breathing entity. From the red parlor (the “heart” at the center) to the long, winding corridors (the arms) branching off the main room and the sculptured lions atop the gigantic fireplace (eyes and mouth), the house has a diabolical design, far more elaborate but not unlike the house in Jackson’s novel.

The Movie’s Sets Cost About $8 Million

De Bont felt that all of this needed to be interconnected and seen as a single magnificent setting. That’s why they chose the dome and spent an estimated $8 million on sets alone.

“If you don’t feel the choreography of a house, if you don’t know where everything is, you get lost quickly,” the director says. “We needed a place where you could actually see all the way from the front up to the mezzanine, and all the hallways that went away from the entrance. If you don’t sense that in one shot, you never will get a feeling of these kind of octopus-like tentacles that will take you away somewhere.”

Hill House’s Great Hall covered an estimated 15,000 square feet and was 45 feet high. Its elaborately carved doors (inspired by Rodin’s “Gates of Hell”) were 19 feet tall. The fireplace was so big that “you could park a truck in there,” De Bont says. At 1,440 cubic feet, it’s bigger than the fireplace in “Citizen Kane.”

“The human scale being dwarfed by the architecture was an important part,” Zanetti says. “To me, what is more frightening is the void.” Adds De Bont: “The space becomes so oppressive.”

The evil Crain cast a menacing gaze from a portrait at the top of the great staircase. Statuary was everywhere: Giant griffins lined the stairway, dozens of carved children’s faces appeared eerily throughout the house, and tormented figures adorned the hallways, the gardens and the enormous doors. Many of these sculpted faces and mythical creatures come alive as the film progresses.

The mansion’s greenhouse was also built inside the dome, and its 50-foot-high hanging staircase (in the form of a double helix, its DNA-inspired strands another telling form) became the focus of a key suspense sequence involving Neeson and Taylor. Neeson, De Bont says, is afraid of heights, so “the sweat drops on his forehead are real.”

Building the house was one thing; bringing it alive was something else again, requiring an above-average degree of coordination on the part of designer Zanetti, special effects coordinator John Frazier and visual effects supervisor Phil Tippett. “Anything you can do on camera is always better than what you can do in a computer,” De Bont says, “because actors can react to it. You get 10 times a better performance out of an actor when they see what’s going on.”

A Bed That Attacks Occupant

So a number of sets, with more complex technical requirements, were built at Raleigh Studios in Manhattan Beach. Taylor’s Gothic bedroom, for example--prominent in the film’s trailer--featured not only moving walls but also an ornately appointed bed that actually attacks its occupant. “A very high percentage of that happened physically on the set,” Zanetti points out.

Zanetti’s belief that one of the film’s subtexts was “Alice in Wonderland,” about going through a looking glass and finding another reality, led to a pair of mirrored-room sequences. “The one who did it best in movies was Busby Berkeley,” the designer says. “So I studied Berkeley and I discovered the only way you can shoot a complete mirrored room is if the room moves on a turntable.” De Bont says he was able to create on-camera effects utilizing double and triple mirrors.

De Bont’s background as a cinematographer (“Die Hard,” “Basic Instinct”) made the house an interesting challenge from a lighting perspective. He cites Fritz Lang as an influence for this film. “Lighting sets the mood. I wanted those colossal beams of light coming in through high windows, hitting certain sections of the big hall,” he says.

“One of the greatest things about doing a haunted-house movie,” says producer Susan Arnold, “is that any house can feel haunted late at night in the dark. When you have a house as grand and as unbelievable as Eugenio created, and you’re alone and in the dark, it’s really scary.”

Her partner, Donna Roth, even refused to walk down some of Zanetti’s corridors alone. “It’s not creaky stairways and cobwebs,” Roth says. “It’s a much more insidious horror. People’s first impression of it is of its beauty and grandeur. What’s frightening about it is that it is not what it appears to be.”

Or as Zeta-Jones puts it upon first seeing the inside of Hill House: “This is so twisted. Seriously twisted.”