We first see Nelson Orion (Martin Landau), architect and amateur investigator of paranormal activities, wandering moodily at twilight down the beach below his very modern house up on a cliff. Meanwhile, in another house somewhere nearby, Henry Mandor, rich but blind, stands by a window waiting for his wife Vivia who is returning from a weeks-long business trip. When she returns, she finds Henry nervous and fearful. His late mother is buried in the family vault with a phone near the coffin, a private line attached to the Mandor mansion, which she had put in because of a morbid fear of premature burial. Since Vivia left, Henry has been plagued by calls on that phone in the middle of the night from a crying woman. The servants abandoned him and the house is run by Paulina (Judith Anderson, at right), a new and somewhat menacing-looking housekeeper (picture an older Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca). Nelson is called to get to the bottom of the apparent haunting. The narrative points in a couple of different directions. We strongly suspect Paulina is behind this because we see her lurking in the family crypt. But at one point, Vivia sees what seems like an actual ghost, blood-spattered and moaning (effectively creepy, pictured below). There is also some momentarily confusing backstory about a ghostly occurrence in Mexico (featuring the title ghost) involving a poisoning death that Nelson investigated some time ago and that may not have been wrapped up satisfactorily. More backstory: Henry's father went mad on the night of his birth and Henry fears the same fate. I kept yelling at the screen, "For God’s sake, just unplug the phone!" But that would have made for an awfully short movie. In fact, we discover by the halfway point that Paulina has a branch-off phone line from the crypt in her room, but there is more than that to the ultimate solution of this haunting. It turns out there actually is a ghost, but Nelson must discover who it is and who it is haunting. The ending is satisfying even if I'm not sure I could explain it in detail to anyone.
The internet has a fair amount of information (and misinformation) about this movie: it was originally shot as an hour-long pilot for a CBS show focusing on the Nelson Orion character, but it was not picked up for a series. There are newspaper accounts from 1965 that indicate it was seen as a possible mid-season replacement, but despite some rumors, the pilot doesn’t seem to have been broadcast nationally. A couple of years later, it was padded out with twenty more minutes of footage that had been trimmed from the pilot. But though IMDb says it was released in Japan, there's no information about an American release. It was thought lost for some time, but now we have it on DVD along with its TV version, titled The Haunted. It plays out like a TV movie but it's beautifully shot in eerie black & white by Conrad Hall who later won Oscars for shooting Butch Cassidy and American Beauty. Landau is nicely low-key, coming off like a modest playboy-wannabe beachcomber type, balancing out the slight over-the-topness of Diane Baker as Vivia and Judith Anderson as Paulina—much as I respect Anderson, she's a bit much here, mostly due to some unfortunately overdone makeup. Tom Simcox is believable as the beleaguered Henry, and Nellie Burt, as Nelson's housekeeper, has a couple of nice bantering scenes with Landau. There is one very odd scene in which Landau chats with a sexy young woman on the beach and asks her to meet up with him later, but we never see her again. Maybe that was pilot footage that was setting her up as a recurring character, but it's weird. Directed and written by Joseph Stefano of Outer Limits fame. The TV version is shorter and has a very different, less downbeat ending. No masterpiece perhaps, but interesting and atmospheric. [The audio commentaries on both versions start out well but, as with most Kino Lorber commentaries, become repetitive, off-topic, and tedious.] [DVD]
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