After finishing her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I finally did my homework regarding its author, Shirley Jackson. At first her name didn't ring a bell, but later on I noticed she was also the author of The Haunting of Hill House, the book the movie The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963) was adapted from.

So, I told myself, in a way Shirley Jackson turned out to be the grandmother of 'found footage', this sub-genre that has been so popular in terror movies during a few decades now. If i recall correctly, in The Haunting, a parapsychologist sends invitations to a set of individuals in order to join him in an allegedly haunted house. Each of these people have been carefully selected based on some particular feature, and the reason of inviting them is to have some serious research done about the activity of spirits at the said house. The film has no real 'found footage' effects, that's right, but the necessary elements are all on stage, just waiting for the hand-held camera and digital recording to come about.

I found the movie OK when I saw it a few years ago, mainly because it aroused old childhood memories—there was this TV space called Sábados de Súper Acción, where every Saturday afternoon they used to show a string of B flicks and telefilms displaying the names of Vincent Price, Roger Corman, and so on. By the way, later on I noticed people raving about this particular film on social media, one guy even saying he had it as the best terror film ever. That's what cult movies are all about.