Tuesday, April 30, 2024

The 20 best haunted house films of all time, ranked

best haunted house movies

Yet it’s also a thoroughly engrossing and genuinely frightening haunted house story, the kind of thing that will have you watching it over and over again, looking for all the hidden specters. The UK’s Broadcasting Standards Council reportedly received more than 20,000 phone calls and thousands of letters—all of them angry—following the initial broadcast. We’re bending the rules here, since The Shining is more a haunted hotel movie than a haunted house movie. However, this Stanley Kubrick masterpiece is so genius that it deserves to be in the upper echelons of basically every movie list ever written. Not only is it genuinely creepy—this tale of the Torrence family spending a winter stuck in a summertime resort is also rich in what-does-it-mean symbolism that’ll keep you guessing long after the credits roll. Alice (Lizzy Willis) is orphaned when her parents die in a fire, so she moves in with her grandmother Beth.

Dead Boy Detectives

That’s thanks in part to the trio of stars—Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, and Mia Wasikowska—at its core, but the film’s sweeping, chillingly seductive energy is pure del Toro. In this creepy, found-footage-style flick, five friends hit the road in an RV for an adventure in search of the scariest haunted houses. In this classic '60s-era horror film, a group confronts supernatural forces in a 90-year-old New England haunted house. For others, few things beat the thrill they get from action-packed survival flicks.

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best haunted house movies

The story is about young woman, her father, and her friend/crush who try to survive the night when members of a cult invade a bowling alley. Guy Pearce costars in Sunrise as the film’s outrageously infuriating villain, and he is the best reason to watch the movie. The plot involves a mysterious man named Fallon (Alex Pettyfer) who wanders into town and winds up staying with a single-parent family led by Yan Loi (Crystal Yu). Fallon has dangerous secrets, some of them involving his past enemies, and some of them involving exactly who (or what) he is. There are good ideas in Sunrise, but it is slow to get where it’s going, and it disappointingly falls apart towards the end. After getting lost in the woods and remaining missing for a week, Rana (Flavio Zaviera) is presumed dead by everyone except her mother.

Them: The Scare

No, not the action-packed Michael Douglas political thriller of 2006 – this is the 1977 supernatural horror film of the same name, The Sentinel. The franchise also has an interesting romantic subplot that will really subvert the horror fan’s expectations. This Southern Gothic film follows a hospice nurse who takes a new job at a plantation home, not knowing that she’s stepping into a tangled web of hauntings, history, and Hoodoo. In it, James Brolin and Margot Kidder portray the real-life Lutz family (George and Kathy), moving into a new house.

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When Anne starts claiming that Bobby’s spirit is with them in the house, and the neighbors warn them that they should leave, Paul is ready to pack his bags. Granted, Anne and Paul had a lot on their minds when they moved into the New England house. John Cusak stars as Mike Enslin, the skeptical author of books about supernatural phenomena. Variety called it “a grubby, grotesque excursion into religioso psychodrama,” so obviously it’s a must-watch. Director James Wan has said that he developed the film in response to the Saw film franchise. The broadcast caused a massive surge in phone calls to the BBC; over 1,000,000 people called the switchboard to register their complaints and concerns about its contents.

As a result, Lewis Allen helmed this 1944 tale about a brother and sister moving into a mansion in Cornwall, England—and he made a quiet, tense thriller replete with gorgeous shots of the Cornish coast. The movie was a launchpad for young star Gail Russell, who was signposted for celebrity but tragically passed away at the young age of 36. Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can't Go Home Again, but Laura (BelĂ©n Rueda) doesn't heed the novelist's advice. Rather, Laura takes her family back to the closed orphanage she was adopted from with the hopes of reopening it to help children with disabilities.

best haunted house movies

Throughout, We Are Still Here is a modern haunted house classic with singular personality to spare. Whether or not you see the film’s big twist coming is kind of irrelevant. I don’t think you’re going to be able to predict every twist and turn of this deeply unsetting story of a mother (Nicole Kidman, in one of her best) and her children being harassed by ill-tempered spirits. George C. Scott, haunted by the deaths of his wife and daughter in a freak accident, becomes drawn to a decades-old ghost story in a small town.

Festival of the Living Dead

When she arrives, she comes face to face with the vengeful spirits of a family killed years before. When a young solicitor goes to a small town to settle a deceased woman's estate, he becomes embroiled in the local supernatural legend of a woman in black. This 2005 remake of the 1979 original inspires serious chills after a young family moves into a house with a sinister past.

This is the family-friendly, “spooky” version of the annual Halloween festivities at Knott’s Berry Farm. However, please note that guests cannot wear Halloween costumes or make-up at this event. If you’re in the Santa Clarita area and are a fan of all things haunted, you may be familiar with The Darm Realm, Restless Souls Manor, and The Farm, all iconic home haunts in the area for several years in their own rights. Participants can expect claustrophobia, electrical shocks, moving floors, foul odor, strobe lighting, projectiles, fog, darkness, dizziness, suffocation, disorientation, and loud noises. This festival is definitely the scary version of Halloween, which comes back to life at Knott’s Berry Farm each year. Sign up to unlock our digital magazines and also receive the latest news, events, offers and partner promotions.

Maybe you always thought that inward yawning noise was silly when you heard people talking about how terrified they were? In between the scares, if you can look out from between your fingers long enough to notice, this is a smart film with a strong emotional core. It’s got some brilliant set design, some great performances, and some of the most gleefully swoopy camerawork in any film made since 1980.

Even so, the actor practiced the piano pieces Russell plays so that he could actually tickle the ivories on screen. Also, the actress who portrays historical society agent Claire (Trish Van Devere) was Scott's wife in real life, and they made five feature films while they were married, as well as a made-for-TV movie and a play. Films in the following century like The Cat and the Canary (1927), The Old Dark House (1932), and Rebecca (1940) certainly presented creepy, decrepit manors, but their walls were haunted by earthly threats.

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