The Haunting In Connecticut

The Haunting in Connecticut has its origins in a Discovery Channel documentary on the titular case and the filmmakers have gone all out to bring us a series of extras to back up the claims that the film is based on "true events". The various featurettes have had as much attention lavished upon them as the ghoulish spectres that haunt the house in the film and really pad out the story of the family beset by ghouls from beyond the grave. Given the amount of testimonies by ‘experts’ there isn’t as much psycho-babble as one would imagine and everything remains fairly accessible to even those who may only have the most passing interest in the paranormal.

In Two Dead Boys: The Making of The Haunting in Connecticut (14 mins) director Peter Cornwell discusses the origins of the story and his attempts to create a character-driven genre piece that focuses as much on the human drama as the creepy goings-on in the house. A few key cast and crew members are also briefly interviewed about their roles and they discuss a number of ‘strange occurrences’ that supposedly plagued the set. Well, it is a film about a haunted house…

The two-part documentary The Fear is Real: Reinvestigating the Haunting (16 mins and 24 mins, respectively) features a series of interviews with various members of the family whose story the film is based on. Everything from their son’s cancer to the neighbours’ varying opinions to the paranormal investigators who urged the family to go public with their ‘problem’ is discussed. At one stage during the interview with Carmen Snedeker-Reed, the mother of the family, a crucifix prop falls off the wall behind her… Ahem.

Anatomy of a Haunting: A Conversation with Parapsychologist Barry Tuff PhD and Psychic Jack Rourke (12 mins) does it exactly what it says, while Memento Mori: The History of Post-Mortem Photography (10 mins) provides some interesting insight into the rather morbid bygone American tradition. An interview with the author of Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography In America, Stanley B Burns MD, sheds fascinating light on this most macabre of traditions and how it helped poorer families personalise the death of a loved one and immortalise their images.

While the running time of each extra is quite slight, there is a lot of information packed in, and as most of the segments are talk-based Q&A sessions, the lengths seem appropriate. For those keen to immerse themselves further into the story, these extras will enable them to do so, offering exclusive insight and much food for thought. Also available are a couple of deleted scenes from the feature.