1977’s The Haunting of Julia (also known as Full Circle) opens with a truly horrifying incident.
Julia (Mia Farrow) is an American housewife who is living in London. One morning, her young daughter Kate starts to choke on her breakfast. The panicked Julia attempts to perform a tracheotomy (!) on her daughter. It should be noted that Julia is not a doctor and her attempts to perform a difficult medical operation on her daughter do not go well. In fact, Kate dies. The traumatized Julia demands a divorce from her husband Magnus (Keir Dullea). While Magnus is reluctant to actually sign the papers, he does agree to a separation.
Julia moves into a new home. As soon as she moves in, strange things start to happen. There are odd noises. Appliances turns on by themselves. At first, Julia blames Magnus but soon, she spots a girl who looks like Kate in a nearby park. Julia runs after the girl, just to discover that she’s vanished.
Was the little girl Kate or is Julia seeing something else? Julia starts to research the history of the house and even consults a psychic who, after conducting a seance, informs Julia that she should leave the house immediately. The mentally fragile Julia refuses to leave the house, feeling that doing so would mean abandoning the spirit of her daughter. Meanwhile, Julia’s acquaintances are turning up dead….
Based on a novel by Peter Straub, The Haunting of Julia is an atmospheric ghost story. (While I haven’t read Straub’s original novel, the film version seems to be owe more than a little bit of a debt to Don’t Look Now.) I think I was eleven years old when I first came across The Haunting of Julia airing on one of the local stations down in Shreveport. I didn’t watch the entire film. In fact, I only caught the final ten minutes and I had to watch the movie with the volume turned down very low because my mom didn’t like me watching horror movies. In this case, my mom was probably correct because what I did see of The Haunting of Julia left me totally traumatized and scared to go to sleep. No matter what else one might say about this film, it has an absolutely haunting and terrifying ending. Trying to get that final image out of your head is not easy.
When I recently rewatched The Haunting of Julia on TCM, I discovered that it was still just as frightening as I remembered it being. I also discovered that, for the most part, Julia is a remarkably unlikable character. While Julia is not solely responsible for all of the terrible things that happen over the course of this film, it’s still hard not to wonder just how stupid you would have to be to try to perform a tracheotomy with no medical training. Afterwards, it’s understandable that Julia’s in denial and one can understand how she convinced herself that Kate’s spirit was trying to contact her. But it’s still hard not to feel that a lot of people end up dying because she’s essentially an idiot. Mia Farrow gives a typically eccentric performance as Julia, one that suggests that she wasn’t all there before she accidentally killed her daughter. The rest of the cast is full of dependable British character actors, all of whom bring the film to frightening life. This is a film where you have more sympathy for the people around the main character than for the main character herself.
That ending still packs quite a punch. Don’t watch The Haunting of Julia alone.
Through the Shattered Lens 