By Peter Straub
I had assumed the 1975 film, The Haunting of Julia, would be hard to find, but to my surprise it appeared on Tubi last autumn. I really liked it.
The credits revealed that is was adapted from a novel by Peter Straub, which I promptly ordered (to arrive at my MILs as it’s much easier to find vintage books in the US). Even Olman remarked on the cool cover. Turned out this was Peter Straub’s first novel. I had read Ghost Story a long time ago, so long ago that it didn’t even have its own entry.
I can see how Straub had perfected his craft after he had published Julia because I found Ghost Story to be a very effective supernatural horror novel.
Julia is modern gothic with a major slathering of maternal horror (right up my alley). There’s even a séance as Julia’s sister-in-law Lily belongs to an informal spiritualist group. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The titular character is an American heiress in London who has been struggling with the aftermath of her daughter’s death. The novel begins with Julia shortly after being released from hospital (we later learn her husband Magnus had committed her). Julia has just purchased an expensive house near Holland Park in Kensington and is about to move in.. without Magnus. There's a lot of unresolved issues in their marriage, to say the least. For one, Julia blames Magnus for the death of their nine year old daughter, Kate. She views her leaving him as a separation while Magnus has never given his blessing on the matter and tries to convince her to come back.
We learn later how Kate died – from choking on a piece of meat and from Julia’s desperate attempt at a botched tracheostomy. It's interesting to note that the Heimlich maneuver may not have been common knowledge at that time (the novel was published in 1975).
Right away, there's something off about the house on 25 Ilchester Place. Even though London was experiencing an unusually hot summer, the heat is always cranked way up, even though Julia was sure she had turned it off. Later in the narrative, as the crazy shit ramps up, the wallpaper starts peeling and the furniture begin to warp under the stifling heat, which I thought was a nice touch.
But at the start, the strange occurrences are very minimal, ie. Julia keeps seeing a girl who looks so much like her dead daughter, hearing strange sounds in the night, etc. That is, until the fateful night of the séance, when the medium Mrs Fludd detects a malevolent entity in Julia’s house. Mrs Fludd tells Julia she must leave the house, move back to the States even, though she won’t say why -- a convenient plot device as this prompts Julia to investigate the history of the house, and she discovers some terrible things. Of course, no one else believes an evil entity is haunting Julia and whoever does simply ends up getting killed!
The book makes a connection between Julia and the previous homeowner, Heather Rudge, which was omitted in the film adaptation. Both women are American, and both had daughters who died by their mother’s hand. Julia and Kate had a loving relationship while Heather’s relationship with Olivia was somewhat fraught, shall we way, due to the kid being a sadistic psychopath! This explains Julia’s inexplicable desire to purchase the house (the malevolent spirit of Olivia was exerting its influence on her). In the film, Julia's impulsive purchase of the house was a way to liberate herself from her controlling husband.
There’s also another connection in the novel that's not covered in the film. When Magnus was a young bachelor, he was Heather’s lover, and the book strongly implies that Magnus had fathered Olivia. This makes sense in terms of a motive to explain why the vengeful spirit of Olivia has set her sights on Julia (and why Kate and Olivia look so much alike). In the movie, the spirit was simply evil because Olivia was a psychopathic bitch who enjoyed torturing little kids when she was alive and now it wants to drive Julia insane.
Some other creative differences between movie vs book:
The movie is called The Haunting of Julia (or Full Circle in the UK) – both of which are better titles than the one given to the novel.
In the movie, Mark is a working-class hipster who’s been friend-zoned by Julia (not the adopted black-sheep brother of Magnus and Lily). In the movie, Mark is an ally of Julia and ends up being electrocuted by an antique lamp while he’s taking a bath. In the book, Julia harbors an attraction to Mark, her brother-in-law, and turns to him for refuge when she finds out that the middle-aged members of Olivia’s old gang have been murdered. Mark ends up leaving Julia in an even more fragile mental state after he rapes her and leaves her alone in his shabby apartment. The Lofting siblings are a rather despicable lot.
The movie also sets the narrative during autumn/winter, which I found much more fitting in terms of a modern gothic atmosphere (and I loved how Mia Farrow wore lots of woolens). I can see why Straub wanted an unusually hot summer with the heat, like the entity, exerting an oppressive force on Julia, but I prefer a more chilly autumnal setting.
The movie had an ambiguous ending (spoiler alert!). Was Julia really haunted, or was it all due to mental deterioration? I really thought that when Julia opened her arms, Olivia was going to possess her, as the film seemed to be setting it up for that. Seeing Julia dead with her throat slit and the credits rolling with her slumped in the armchair, I didn't know what to think. Who ended her life? Was it the ghost or Julia herself?
According to Kier-La Janisse, "the ghost's murderous hands are in actuality the protagonist's own". So was it Julia who had killed her husband then, because she blamed him for their daughter's death? Did Julia really kill herself out of guilt and grief? The lack of historical context between Julia and Olivia in the film made it seem that Julia’s demise was mainly due to her mental disintegration.
In the book, we see how Olivia’s power over Julia grows and as Julia comes to the dawning realization that she was the one who killed Kate, she climbs to the roof of the house on 25 Ilchester Place and plummets to her death. The ending of the novel was rather sudden and disappointing (see next paragraph), so I much prefer the film’s ambigious ending over the book.
In the movie, Magnus dies when he sneaks into Julia’s house (something causes him to fall down the stairs to the basement and his throat gets cut by a broken bottle). In the book, Magnus lives. In fact, Mark takes off for California, while Magnus and Lily end up with Julia’s money after her death and they (and the ghost) get everything they want. Evil triumphs!
Here’s an apt summary of Peter Straub’s Julia which also encapsulates my own feelings about the ending:
Julia is a weak, easily-led heiress (always a good combo) who falls under Magnus’s spell, marries him, and endures a semi-abusive marriage for about 10 years. They both love their daughter, who dies tragically, leaving Julia to run away from the shambles of her life. She buys a house that’s haunted by the spirit of a little girl, and bad things start happening. Magnus’s family is terrible – his brother and sister try to stay on Julia’s good side to stay close to her money. The brother tries to sleep with her, the sister tries to talk her into going back to Magnus. The build-up is great. Things start swirling around, getting more eerie and more dangerous, Julia finally convinced that she’s not losing her mind and there really are spirits in the house. I kept waiting for her to triumph, to stop Magnus, to put the ghosts to rest, to solve the puzzle. Instead, she gets drugged and raped by Magnus’s brother, killed by the ghost, and the in-laws get all her money. WHAT.I liked the movie better.
