The Haunting of M, the cinematic equivalent of wandering through a foggy Scottish castle in slippers, muttering “I could have been doing literally anything else.” Anna Thomas’s 1979 one-and-done effort is the sort of independent horror that feels like a passion project… if that passion project involved mist, tedious exposition, and ghosts who clearly had better things to do.
The plot limps along like a ghostly apparition with arthritis: some young woman discovers a mysterious man in a photograph, he turns out to be a dead fiancé, and naturally he comes back to haunt the living because apparently death does not absolve bad taste in family plotting. There’s enough intrigue to make a particularly patient sloth yawn, but the pacing moves at a speed somewhere between a funeral march and watching paint dry on wet stone.
Sheelagh Gilbey and Nini Pitt do what they can with what is essentially a haunted-house board meeting, while the ghost himself, Marion, floats through corridors like a budget-friendly Halloween decoration on autopilot. The castle setting is atmospheric, if you squint and ignore the fact that the audience is probably more haunted by the tedium than the specter.
Cinematography by Gregory Nava tries valiantly to make the place look spooky, but mostly it just makes you wish the film had a faster runtime—or any runtime at all that justified sitting through it. By the end, the big reveal about the murdered fiancé feels like a participation award: “You endured the boredom; here’s a ghost with a grudging sense of closure.”
In short, The Haunting of M is the film you show to people you actively dislike—long enough to make them question their life choices, short enough that they’ll leave the theater alive but emotionally scarred. If ghosts could haunt directors for crimes against pacing, Anna Thomas would be permanently banned from castle interiors.
