If you've ever seen The Haunting on TV, forget about it. Be under no illusion about the WIDESCREEN tag - this is a different film from the BBC's regularly served 'classic', mangled in a hideous pan & scan accident. Terror Vision's print of one of the two best ghost movies ever made (the other being Jack Clayton's The Innocents, of course) is a clean black and white, Panavision transfer that restores the director's careful compositions to something like original scale. Compare versions and even the most die-hard letterboxing sceptic will be batting on-side.

The Haunting is a masterclass in tell-don't-show horror cinema. There are no ghostly white sheets, sinister faces, and aside from a little doorknob rattling, the incredible breathing door (like something out of Cronenberg's Videodrome), no physical manifestation of the supernatural at all.

To Hill House - "An Evil Old House, the kind some people call haunted" - come four crusaders: Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), anthropologist and explorer in the realms of darkness; the cool, Quant-dressed Theo (Claire Bloom), "something of a witch"; Luke (Russ Tamblyn), who stands to inherit the stately New England pile and has no truck with the other side; and Eleanor (Julie Harris). Harris is the focus - a timid, mouse of a woman, harbouring a streak of guilt a mile wide over the death of her domineering mother. Hill House is her chance to escape, to begin anew.

Give or take, the four wander this huge, oddly angled house, plagued by slamming doors, frantic banging, vague voices in the night, cold spots, and an icy chill falls over the movie as the quartet gradually begin to realise that in some way the house is alive, watching, wanting.

The chief benefit of this long overdue new print is to restore the central character to Wise's film: Hill House itself. Previous TV attempts gravitate towards keeping the human protagonists front and centre, but in doing so rob the film of its sense of scale. Wise's original places these people in the heart of wider frames, allowing the house to dwarf them, as Harris says, like small creatures swallowed whole. This remarkable building is again allowed to dominate, and thus even the slightly hysterical performances seem to matter less.

Nor does the film (adapted from Shirley Jackson's classic novel The Haunting of Hill House) make the same basic mistakes as the Clayton's 1961 picture. From the outset the house is evil, offering no real explanation for its malignancy. Evil is as evil does, seems to be the message. The Innocents fumbles when it gives its baleful spirits a face; The Haunting leaves everything to the shadows that seep through the house even in the daytime. Okay, so there is nothing in here to quite beat Freddie Francis' extraordinary shots of the ghosts glimpsed across the lake in the earlier film, but the cumulative horror is still chilling. (Before West Side Story and Sound of Music, Wise served an apprenticeship under Val Lewton, co-directing the brilliant Curse of The Cat People.)

With contemporary cinema in the thrall of SFX, the best Hollywood offers these days is dreary, half-witted Poltergeist and its progeny - silly, ugly, essentially reassuring, and not in the least scary. They make The Haunting desirable in any form. Here (complete with its original trailer) it's essential.