Haunted house movies dont have the active fandom of, say, slasher movies. Or vampire movies. Maybe because no iconic actor has ever played a haunted house. Maybe because the horror genre doesnt have famous set designers like we have famous special effects and makeup artists (but we should!). Maybe because haunted houses sit, stuck to their foundations, sessile and passive, gazing out their window-eyes as hordes of zombies and covens of witches and tombs of mummies stumble and fly and prowl past them, chasing their victims instead of hoping their victims are in the market for a property investment.
But in the hands of the right movie makers, these boxes of brick and wood can be terrifying.
In researching my meta-haunted house novel Twelve Nights at Rotter House, I dug deep into the haunted house movie subgenre and discovered five rules for themthe HHOA bylawsbut also learned that some of the best haunted house movies flipped that haunted house model faster than the Property Brothers inadvertently picking up the Amityville Horror house.
1. Haunted House Movies Take Place in Housesright?
The Innkeepers
Its right there in the name: Haunted house movie. Otherwise its a ghost story, right? However, haunted house stories can take place in all kinds of edifices and structures. Even vehicles.The Shining,The Innkeepers, and1408 are all in hotels. Ghost Ship is on a ship. Below is on a submarine. The currently in productionHorrorstr is in a furniture store.Poltergeist IIIand The Sentinel take place in apartment buildings. Theres more to haunted house stories than suburban sprawl.
Haunted house movies, while they can say a lot about where we hang our toothbrushes, are more about enclosed spaces. Defined borders. Walls and floors and roofs. Inside-ness. Youre safe on the sidewalk in front of the We Are Still Here house, but once you cross the threshold, youre Larry Fessenden with a fire poker in your eye. You could take a beached whale carcass, stick candelabra-wielding guests inside it, and it could feel like a haunted house.
2. Haunted House Movies Star Ghostsright?
Session 9
Again, its there in the name. If you dont need a literal house, surely you at least need it to be haunted? This section is going to be a spoiler-fest, solike entering a haunted housecontinue at your caution.
Many great haunted house movies end up without a single ghost in their entire run-time. These houses just appear to be haunted until the Scooby Gang unmasks the human villains at the end. ThinkHousebound,The Pact (sorta), the originalHouse on Haunted Hill (Vincent Price with a puppetry rig strapped to his torso!), Session 9. We realize as the credits roll, that we were actually watching a mystery movie. But youll still find these films in the horror section of your local streaming service.
Thats partly because were looking for an ambiance from haunted house movies, that aforementioned inside-ness, but also because haunted has more than one definition only one of which involves ghosts.
3. Haunted House Movies Feature Spooky Locationsright?
Poltergeist
Hill House, Hell House, Bly Manor, Rose Red, Dunsmuir House, whatever the name of the estate in Crimson Peak isthese mansions all get a prominent place on the poster. Theyre big and creepy and you can just tell from the opening shot that only evil lives there. I mean, who has the house from Poltergeist tattooed on their arm?
But some movies sidestep castle-like mansions masterfully.Paranormal Activityworked because the house didnt look special. It was bland and beige and a lot like the houses most people live in. Poltergeist, as already mentioned. The Witch in the Window. Ghostwatch. The Haunting in Connecticut. But thats part of what made them scary. If you look up and see that your living room looks a lot like the haunted living room on the TV, you might think twice about crossing it to refill your popcorn. And the chances of sleeping with the lights on are much higher.
4. Haunted House Movies Climax with a Big Revealright?
The Haunting
Every movie is a mystery movie in some way. But haunted house movies come pre-loaded with multiple mysteries automatically: 1) Is this house haunted or not? 2) Is the force behind that haunting paranormal or human? 3) What do the ghosts or humans want? The answers to those questions are the big reveal of the movie and often the climax.
But some of the best haunted house movies dont offer easy answers to those questions, likeThe Babadook. And The Innocents. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. In fact, the gold standard for haunted house movies, Robert WisesThe Haunting, has no reveal whatsoever. Poor Eleanor.
5. Haunted House Movies Use Houses as Trapsright?
The Changeling
Michael Myers slashes with a kitchen knife. Candyman disembowels with a hook. Haunted housestheyre a bit more indirect with their murder and maimery. Sometimes they kill with pieces of themselves (Owen Wilson beheaded in a fireplace), but they mostly possess people to do the dirty work. But they do all that by trapping their victims inside. After all, if you can walk outside, its pretty easy to outrun a house. Even Terrified, which was a haunted neighborhood movie, still keeps its spooks indoors.
Still, some of the best haunted house movies let people come and go for most of the film, likeThe Changeling,What Lies Beneath,andThe Amityville Horror. Some haunted house movies are all about the opposite, trying to make the residents leave. LikeBeetlejuice. AndSinister.
In the end, a haunted house movie doesnt need to have a house, have that house be haunted, or really adhere to any predefined conditions. Its an ambiance more than anything else. A place where something goes bump in the night. And, with that flexible of a foundation, an imaginative director can make the haunted house as immediate and terrifying as any other cinematic monster.
Over the years, many have.
J.W. Ocker is the Edgar Award-winning author of horror novels Death and Douglas and the recently released meta-haunted house novelTwelve Nights at Rotter House. He has written for Rue Morgue,Paracinema,ShriekFreak, as well as mainstream publications likeThe Boston Globe,The Guardian, andThe Atlantic. Ocker is from John Waters Maryland but has lived in Robert Eggers New Hampshire for more than a decade. Visit him atoddthingsiveseen.com.
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Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero