"I was reading one of the very scary passages—hackles were going up and down my neck—when Nelson Gidding...burst through

Claire Bloom and Julie Harris

the door to ask me a question. I literally jumped about three feet out of my chair. I said, 'if it can do that to me sitting and reading, it ought to be something I want to make a picture out of.'"*

This film, Wise's last in black-and-white, showcased his brilliant mastery of black-and-white techniques. "The exterior was a several-hundred-years-old manor house out in the country....It was a pretty horrifying-looking thing under certain kinds of lights, and I accentuated that by shooting some of the exteriors with infra-red film."*

As always, he used all the tools available to him as a craftsman in order to convey and intensify the important elements of whatever story he was telling. He was shooting this picture in Panavision and could not find a wide-angle lens that would give him the spooky feeling he wanted to elicit from the house's hallways. So he called the president of Panavision, Bob Gottschalk, and asked if there were wider-angle lenses available. Gottschalk told him "'We have developed a 30mm, but it's not ready for use yet. It's got a lot of distortion in it.' I said, 'That's exactly what I need for certain places—I want the house to look almost alive.'"*

Wise cleverly used suggestion and simple effects to create an atmosphere of icy terror that would serve as a model for haunted house movies for years to come.

From the AFI Catalog of Feature Films