The Haunting, 1999
Director
Cast
visit the film locations
Visit: Belvoir Castle, about six miles from Grantham (rail: Grantham, from London King’s Cross)
Trivia
Forget this overanimated nonsense. Go back to the 1963 original The Haunting with Julie Harris and Claire Bloom. Black and white, low key and ten times as scary.
Also featuring Belvoir Castle in Lincolnshire, Young Sherlock Holmes (aka Young Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear) is a splurgy period adventure, produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Nicholas Rowe (the stoner dealer of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) as the teenage sleuth.
The Haunting location: ‘Hill House’ for the Nineties: Harlaxton Manor, Grantham, Lincolnshire
Photograph: flickr/Scuddr
Audiences justifiably hooted at this ludicrous, FX-heavy remake of the beautifully understated, and scary, 1963 classic, directed by Robert Wise.
A great location, though. ‘Hill House’ for the Nineties is the gorgeously over-the-top Harlaxton Manor, an astonishing neo-Elizabethan folly which was home to mad Earl of Gurney (Peter O’Toole) in Peter Medak’s film of Peter Barnes’s pitch black satire The Ruling Class.
Three miles from Grantham on the A607 in Lincolnshire, and now home to Harlaxton College, it’s not generally open to the public, though it’s possible to book group tours..
The car-port entrance was added for the movie and the bizarre interiors – nothing like the real Harlaxton – were created on soundstages in the US.
The ‘Billiard Room’, however, is Harlaxton’s Great Hall. The kitchen scenes used Belvoir Castle, home of the Duke of Rutland, about six miles from Grantham in Leicestershire, previously featured in Barry Levinson’s Young Sherlock Holmes and, more recently, as ‘Castle Gandolfo’ in The Da Vinci Code. It’s pronounced ‘Beaver Castle’. Stop sniggering at the back.
