3.5/5

I make a habit of not watching the based on movie before reading the propagating book, so the fact that I’m reading not one but two of said unfortunate works (A Clockwork Orange sneaking in during my youth due to college fanboys and the like) is not something I plan on ever happening again. However, it happened, and I will not lie that my expectations have been adjusted accordingly.

While the book is horror, the movie is horror horror horror, tragic past combined with morbidly saturated cinematography sprinkled with heart-stopping pop-outs galore. The facts are there, but the plot is vastly different, one phrase of the book playing a much larger role and, indeed, the setting the mood and thematic content for the entirety. In short, the book is nicer, and while I don't agree with the Jane Austen comparison at all, I did admire the spectrum of emotions and thoughts the main character experienced; an authorial sensitivity to human psychology at both the highs and the lows that you don't often come across in literature as a whole.

The balance between cheerful normality and burgeoning dread was well developed one, but ended up sacrificing the more poignant extremes of the movie horrors for its focus on stability. I wasn't a fan of being scared out of my wits every five minutes, but as it is horror, and there were certain masterfully handled cinematic scenes that I was disappointed to not discover in the book, I could have handled a little more thrills and chills. Other reviews have spoken of Hill's talent at writing mood, and while I do emphatically agree with that, I'm someone who's childhood reading was half Tolkien and half Stephen King. If you want to scare me via paper these days, you need to provide a little more visceral imagery than descriptions of internal panic and full bodied terror. Accurate replication of the feelings of fear are all very well, but real terror will strike only when you give me something physical to envision

Spoiler

, a movie favorite of mine being the main character stepping up to a window, our view from the opposite side allowing us, and only us, to watch with horror the ghostly visage coming up alongside him. That scene sold me on the trailer, and later on the movie as a whole

.

However. Neither the book nor the movie end well, but when it comes to the overcast of nervous paranoia chasing the reader or viewer long after the finishing, the book had the movie beat. The movie's extended use of the book's main point of fear

Spoiler

, children dying in horribly gruesome ways and coming back to haunt forevermore,

ended up sucking the life out of the original shock, while the book saved up its cards till the moment was right. This made for a far more full-fledged sense of 'you reap what you sow' that pushed up this reader's evaluation that final half star.