Everybody who enjoys horror fare will likely have at least one haunted house or supernatural abode classic on their all-time favourites list. Movies such as Poltergeist, The Shining, The Haunting or The Amityville Horror.

This last film boasts interesting parallels to the just-released, shot-in-Winnipeg movie The Haunting in Connecticut. Both are based on real-life tales of malicious apparitions wreaking havoc on ordinary families. Eleven years after the supposed calamities that occurred in Amityville, N.Y., Ed and Karen Parker went through something comparable in their old Connecticut residence, which was once a funeral parlor.

They'd moved to the home because of its proximity to a hospital for their cancer-ridden, teenage son. Shortly after, the boy began seeing disembodied entities. When they commited him to a mental hospital, their trouble only worsened and they enlisted the services of psychic investigators.

Though names have been changed to protect the family, director Peter Cornwell's film is a decidedly less-is-more approach to the genre.

Virginia Madsen is Sara Campbell, the impassioned matriarch of the household, while Elias Koteas turns up as the dedicated specialist knowledgeable in all matters otherworldly.

Uptown recently spoke to Australian-born Cornwell. We began by discussing the influences he drew on for this movie.

Cornwell: (Australian director) Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, and that film's whole feel. I think Robert Wise's The Haunting is the prototype of this sort of film. It really set the bar high and kept everything natural so that when the supernatural elements began to take hold, the film worked that much better and was much more suspenseful for those very reasons.

You can't have everything be unbelievable and unrealistic, or else the horror of this family's experience won't really work.

U: Did the real-life family get a chance to see the film?

Cornwell: Karen, the character Virginia Madsen plays in the film, saw it. She cried.

Screenwriters Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe really did their research before I came to be involved. and they went through several drafts figuring out this great story. So by the time I came to it, everything was in place and that allowed me to get to work.

It was our theory that when people claim they see ghosts, it's as if they were real people: it's never Casper, and the beings are not transparent or floating. So we didn't use a lot of CGI on the film for those reasons. We went with just in-camera special effects for the most part, though there is some 'movie magic' involved - but it's more in line with the lineage of traditional haunted-house horror movies.

THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT
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