Creaking floors, hidden passageways, strange sounds, maybe a ghost or 13 … who doesn’t love a juicy haunted-house story? Cinema quickly jumped on the genre with adaptations of literary works, two of the earliest and most notable silents being 1927’s The Cat and the Canary and 1928’s The Fall of the House of Usher. The Cat and the Canary in particular was influential in establishing some of the genre’s most enduring conventions, from the isolated mansion to family secrets. As long as there are creepy old homes where something terrible once happened—and thank goodness there always will be—haunted-house flicks will be around. Here are 10 of the best.
10. The Uninvited (1944, dir. Lewis Allen)
The takeaway from this classic Paramount chiller is simple: Don’t buy a house on a whim. Rick (Ray Milland) and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ruth Hussey) are British siblings enjoying the countryside in Cornwall when they happen across a big, empty seaside house. Pamela immediately falls in love with the place, dubbed Windward House, and persuades Rick that they should buy it. The Fitzgeralds breeze past some red flags—the last tenants left because of “disturbances”—and move in. Indeed, those “disturbances” range from strange voices to ectoplasmic houseguests. The previous owner’s granddaughter Stella (Gail Russell) is inexorably drawn to Windward House, but her attraction to it is complicated since it throws her into trances where she attempts to jump off cliffs. Associate producer Charles Brackett had wanted Alfred Hitchcock to direct but turned to Lewis Allen, whose respectable, unfussy approach left a template for others to follow.
9. The Changeling (1980, dir. Peter Medak)
George C. Scott plays John Russell, a composer and university music professor mourning the deaths of his wife and daughter in a car accident. As every widower knows, nothing eases grief like moving into a long-uninhabited, spooky old mansion. John does so, only to be haunted by mysterious clanking noises and visions of a child drowning in a bathtub. “The house is not fit to live in. It doesn’t want people,” cautions an old biddy with the historical society that owns the property. Shouldn’t that have been on a disclosure form? Allegedly based on real events experienced in Denver by playwright Russell Hunter, Peter Medak’s The Changeling gets the atmosphere right, so that even a child’s ball rolling across the floor can induce shivers.
8. The Conjuring (2013, dir. James Wan)
Say what you will about self-proclaimed “demonologists”: they sure do inspire big movie franchises. The Conjuring, based on a 1971 “possessed house” incident from the case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren, has prompted its own cottage industry. The Perron family—mom, dad and five daughters—has moved into a Rhode Island farmhouse in hopes of enjoying quiet country life. But their new home, the site of a horrific event back in 1863, has other plans. Annoyances like odd noises and a noxious smell graduate to stopped clocks and a dead dog. Mrs. Perron (Lili Taylor) reaches out to the Warrens (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), who are conveniently giving a lecture at a nearby college, to inspect the house. Director James Wan leans into the Warrens’ Christian faith and keeps the frights family-friendly and gore-free. Earning nearly $320 million globally on a $20 million budget, the movie itself was anything but cursed.
7. The Others (2001, dir. Alejandro Amenábar)
The first English-language work from Chilean writer-director Alejandro Amenábar is an eerie, elegant and resolutely old-fashioned ghost story. It is 1945 on the Channel Islands, and Nicole Kidman is Grace Stewart, a tightly wound wife and mother whose husband has yet to return from the war. When three domestic servants turn up at her door seeking employment, Grace hires them on the spot. She especially needs help caring for her young children, Flora and Nicholas (Alakina Mann and James Bentley). Not only do the kids have a rare allergy to sunlight, but Flora is testing Grace’s patience with tall tales of seeing a strange little boy in the house. The atmosphere of The Others is boosted by Javier Aguirresarobe’s exquisite cinematography and a moody score composed by Amenábar himself. Oh, and the ending is perfect—the movie saves its most unsettling revelation for last.
6. His House (2020, dir. Remi Weekes)
The terror of being a stranger is the foundational unease of His House, the story of a South Sudanese refugee couple newly arrived in England. There is the language barrier. There is racism. There is a haunted house. Sopi Dirisu and Wunni Mosaku portray Bol and Rial, a married couple from war-torn South Sudan. Their punishing journey to Europe has resulted in the deaths of several fellow refugees, including their beloved daughter, Nyagak. Bol and Rial are left to grieve as they await approval for their asylum request, all the while confined by British authorities to a dilapidated house outside London. Then their dead daughter appears—along with a mysterious, malevolent figure. As the house becomes a prison for the parents’ guilt, Bol suspects the apparitions are evil spirits. His House is a remarkable debut for Remi Weekes, who draws on South Sudanese folklore to give the haunting a cultural specificity rarely seen in the genre.
5. The Haunting (1963, dir. Robert Wise)
For many aficionados of classic horror, this adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is the quintessential haunted house picture. To be sure, it’s impossible to resist the voice-over narration of Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson) as he introduces viewers to Hill House and its lengthy history of mysterious deaths. Because such homes invariably draw curious adults who should know better, Markway arranges a weekend at the mansion with two female psychics (Julie Harris and Claire Bloom) in hopes of recording paranormal activity. Tagging along, presumably for comic relief, is Russ Tamblyn as a girl-crazy trust fund kid who is Hill House’s heir apparent. Director Robert Wise provides the Gothic atmospherics—clanging pipes, doorknobs turning ominously—with canted angles and David Boulton’s lush black-and-white cinematography. Wise’s ultimate focus, however, is the architecture of character, not the house. Harris delivers a fascinating, fractured and vulnerable performance as Eleanor Lance, who sees the investigation as a last chance to break free from her controlling family. Her personal turmoil ensures that The Haunting refers to both external and internal forces.
4. The Devil’s Backbone (2001, dir. Guillermo del Toro)
Set in the waning days of the Spanish Civil War, The Devil’s Backbone finds Gothic horror in a secluded refuge for the orphaned children of Spanish loyalists. The orphanage’s newest arrival, Carlos (Fernando Tielve), is assigned a bed whose last inhabitant, Santi (Junio Valverde), is either dead or simply missing. Carlos quickly surmises that the boy’s disappearance might be connected to “the one who sighs”: an ashen-faced, waterlogged, ghostly boy who keeps popping in and out of view. The orphanage’s supervising adults are too caught up in their own melodrama to notice anything unusual. Kindly older Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi) is in love with Carmen (Marisa Paredes), a widow who wears artificial legs. Carmen, meanwhile, sneaks away for sex (Casares is impotent) with the younger and volatile Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), who is hiding from Nationalist forces. In the hands of lesser storytellers, these disparate plot threads could be a jumble, but Guillermo del Toro weaves them together masterfully. The result is also a visual stunner, thanks in part to Guillermo Navarro’s cinematography, his second collaboration with del Toro after Cronos (1993). The film is equal parts frightening and poignant—and like many of the director’s works, the living humans can be scarier than the otherworldly.
3. Poltergeist (1982, dir. Tobe Hooper)
Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams are Steve and Diane Freeling, a middle-class California couple residing in a newly developed subdivision when weird things start to occur. The youngest of their three kids, absurdly adorable 5-year-old Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke), begins conversing with the white noise on the television set. “They’re here!” the girl tells her parents in what became one of the most versatile—and, subsequently, irritating—catchphrases of the 1980s. Ironically, shortly after “they” are there, Carol Anne isn’t. She is whisked away by supernatural forces to a nebulous plane of existence that necessitates a house call from a spiritual medium. The conventional wisdom is that Tobe Hooper directed Poltergeist in name only, that it bears the imprimatur of producer and co-writer Steven Spielberg far more than the man behind The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. There are some telltale hints of Hooper’s influence, particularly when a paranormal researcher looking into a bathroom mirror claws his face off, but the movie’s vivid suburban setting and elaborate special effects are unequivocally Spielbergian. Regardless of who did what, Poltergeist is plenty scary, and a cautionary tale for anyone who wants to build on a 19th-century cemetery.
2. The Innocents (1961, dir. Jack Clayton)
The hauntings that occur in The Innocents are either the product of a pair of dead lovers or the mind of a deranged, sexually repressed governess. The film refuses to say. An adaptation of Henry James’ 19th-century novella The Turn of the Screw and a 1950 play by William Archibald, it is purposefully ambiguous on that count. Director Jack Clayton locks the audience into the viewpoint of Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr, never better), hired to look after an orphaned brother and sister, Miles and Flora (Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin, respectively) by their remarkably uninterested uncle (Michael Redgrave). Soon enough, Miss Giddens catches glimpses of ghosts she believes to be her predecessor as well as the uncle’s valet, both of whom were embroiled in an affair and died under tragic circumstances. Are the visions real or imagined? Miss Giddens, raised by a strict vicar, fears that the ghosts mean to possess the bodies of Miles and Flora—a deeply unsettling scenario. Then again, the governess clearly has issues of her own, as evidenced by her disturbing flirtation with little Miles. Scripted in part by Truman Capote and lensed by Freddie Francis in sumptuous, high-contrast black and white, The Innocents uses the haunted house genre to plunder the repressed weirdness of Victorian England.
1. The Shining (1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Stephen King made no secret of his disdain for Stanley Kubrick’s loose adaptation of the author’s 1977 novel. That is King’s prerogative, of course, but The Shining reigns as one of our most enduring horror movies. Film writer David Thomson credits the film as the director’s sole (!) masterpiece, “serenely unanchored in any fixed genre, effortlessly invented, inspired alike by the hollow brain of a house and the naughty little germ of a man, Jack.” The character in question, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), is a recovering alcoholic hired to serve as caretaker of the Overlook, a resort hotel, during a snowbound winter. Jack, his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and 5-year-old son Danny (Danny Lloyd) move into the vast, empty and reportedly haunted space. Nicholson’s performance is a magnificently grandiose display of arched brows, maniacal laughter and scenery-chewing worthy of splintered gums. Duvall, meanwhile, conveys raw, exhausted terror—aided, no doubt, by Kubrick’s relentless psychological pressure on her during production. Is Jack Torrance going mad from isolation and forced sobriety? Is he being seduced by the ghosts of the Overlook’s checkered past? The Shining’s haunting imagery is what stays with you: hypnotic Steadicam shots of Danny riding his Big Wheel through endless hotel corridors, a tsunami of blood erupting from elevator doors, a single typed sentence repeated on hundreds of pages in a manuscript. And that doesn’t even factor in the creepiest twin girls you would never want to come across. The Overlook doesn’t create Jack’s demons so much as liberate them. In the end, that might be the scariest haunted-house idea of all.
Honorable mention: Beetlejuice (1988, dir. Tim Burton), Burnt Offerings (1976, dir. Dan Curtis), Dark Water (2002, dir. Hideo Nakata), House (1977, dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi), House of Usher (1960, dir. Roger Corman), Ju-on: The Grudge (2002, dir. Takashi Shimizu), The Legend of Hell House (1973, dir. John Hough), Monster House (2006, dir. Gil Kenan), The Orphanage (2007, dir. J.A. Bayona), Rebecca (1940, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 