Technically it’s not the house’s fault, but the setting makes the film. Cannily sensing it was time for found-footage horror to get a second chance after the burst of imitators that followed The Blair Witch Project, writer/director Oren Peli brought a similar approach to this story of a San Diego couple name Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat) whose sparkling modern home becomes a playground for a vengeful demon.
Poltergeist inspired several sequels and a remake, but it’s the Paranormal Activity films that take its baton and run with it, making newly constructed housing feel as unsafe as an old dark mansion.
Paranormal Activity (2009): All Mod Ghouls The eponymous supernatural killer (chillingly played by Tony Todd) draws power from the fear he conjures in Cabrini-Green residents who already feel like they have no escape from the poverty and crime surrounding them. Candyman accomplished much the same using Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing development as its backdrop. Poltergeist confirmed that ghost stories could work in the American suburbs. Everett Collection / Courtesy of TriStar PicturesĬandyman (1992): The Boogeyman in the Big City Tony Todd and Virginia Madsen in Candyman, 1992. Its first audiences got an added treat as well thanks to “Emergo,” which sent a plastic skeleton flying over the crowd at a key moment. (Castle used a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home for the exterior shots even if the inside is all cobwebs and shadows.) Price is in fine form and Castle keeps the jolts coming throughout a film that recognizes its own silliness and happily leans into it, having fun with haunted house clichés even as it doles them out. Vincent Price stars as Frederick Loren, an eccentric millionaire who offers a seemingly random gathering of five strangers a small fortune to spend the night in a quite modern looking haunted house. What’s sometimes lost is that Castle made a lot of extremely entertaining films, House on Haunted Hill among them. Castle is rightly remembered for gimmicks like “Percepto!,” which made the seats vibrate for audiences of his other 1959 film, The Tingler. Where The Uninvited set the standard for the classy, unsettling haunted house movie, William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill established the template for its schlocky opposite. Here are 11 more inventive movies that take the stock horror setting and rework it in new and exciting ways.
Grounded by Hall’s complicated performance, it’s a sophisticated, emotionally complex and often quite scary haunted house movie that seems to have no connection to the cobweb-laden haunted house of tradition.īut the history of horror movies is filled with films that play with viewers’ expectations about what sorts of houses get haunted and what sorts of spirits trouble them. Owen’s spirit lingers over the place, in ways that might not be entirely metaphorical. Written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski ( Super Dark Times) and directed by David Bruckner (best known for his contributions to films like The Signal and V/H/S), the film stars Rebecca Hall as a recently widowed teacher left alone in the house after her architect husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) takes his own life. Close your eyes and picture a haunted house: it probably looks nothing like the luxurious, upstate New York lakeside home featured in The Night House.