If you've got six hours to spare and you like being creeped out, you could do a lot worse than Stephen King's "Red" — a three-part miniseries that takes viewers inside the creepiest haunted house since Barnabas Collins was biting people in Collinwood on "Dark Shadows."
"Rose Red" (Sunday, Monday and Thursday at 8 p.m. on ABC/Ch. 4) is more than just a haunted house. It's an enormous structure that's somehow alive — and that fact leaves a number of people somehow dead.
King's original screenplay revolves around parapsychology professor Dr. Joyce Reardon (Nancy Travis), who's obsessed with the house. Her boyfriend, Steven Rimbauer (Matt Keeslar), happens to be the sole survivor of the family that built that place back in the early 1900s, and he gives her permission to launch an ESP field trip to the place before he sells it to developers who plan to raze it.
Joyce assembles a team of psychics to spend the weekend in Rose Red, where she hopes to awaken the dormant structure with a history of strange deaths and stranger disappearances. Her team includes a 15-year-old autistic girl (Kimberly J. Brown), whose powers have to be seen to be believed. The others are a suave mind-reader (Julian Sands); a woman (Judith Ivey) who can channel through handwriting; a man (Kevin Tighe) who can see the future; a social misfit who sees the dead (Matt Ross); a young woman (Emily Deschanel) who picks up vibrations by touching objects; and the 15-year-old's big sister (Melanie Lynskey).
The six hours are as much about the past as about the present, as the strange history of Rose Red is revealed. And there are plenty of scenes just chock full of foreboding as well as moments that will give you a start.
By theatrical standards, "Rose Red" isn't particularly gross or bloody — but there are a few gory moments and violent scenes. ABC has quite appropriately slapped a TV-14 rating on the whole miniseries, with a violence advisory on the second and third parts that air Monday and Thursday.
And, at six hours, "Rose Red" is too long, particularly when you figure that a quarter of those six hours is going to be filled with commercials. You'd be better off taping the miniseries and fast-forwarding through the filler.
King — who makes one of his familiar cameo appearances, this time as a pizza delivery guy — doesn't quite wrap everything up in the end. There are some unanswered questions that might have been answered.
But he has created a creepy tale that anyone who enjoys being scared — without being totally grossed out — will enjoy.
E-MAIL: pierce@desnews.com