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. 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. Owen’s spirit lingers over the place, in ways that might not be entirely metaphorical. 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.
But 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. Here are 11 more inventive movies that take the stock horror setting and rework it in new and exciting ways.
The Uninvited (1944): The The One That Made Haunted Houses Safe for Stories of Doomed Romance
The Uninvited casts Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey as Rick and Pamela Fitzgerald, a pair of sophisticated London siblings who purchase a stately, coastal home in Cornwall. They get more than they bargain for when strange incidents start to suggest that the house might be haunted by restless spirits with ties to an odd, bewitching woman named Stella (Gail Russell) who lived in the house as a child. The debut film of Lewis Allen, The Uninvited is a masterful slow burn ghost story in which odd happenings — weird gusts of wind and areas of the house that frighten animals — give way to more direct attacks. In the end, modern cosmopolitan attitudes and a refusal to believe in the supernatural can’t make the past any less restless.
House on Haunted Hill (1959): The One That Set the Gold Standard for Camp
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. Castle is rightly remembered for gimmicks like “Percepto!,” which made the seats vibrate for audiences of his other 1959 film, The Tingler. What’s sometimes lost is that Castle made a lot of extremely entertaining films, House on Haunted Hill among them. 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. (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. It’s camp as a kind of pop art. 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.
The Innocents (1961): The One That Proved Freudian Symbolism Can Be Terrifying Too
The “psychological horror” label is often redundant, but it’s more apt than usual when applied to Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Henry James’ beyond-ambiguous novella The Turn of the Screw, which may be a ghost story—unless it’s the story of a woman slowly losing her mind. Working from a script written in part by Truman Capote, Clayton’s film follows Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), a governess hired to care for the orphaned niece and nephew of a wealthy uncle (Michael Redgrave). Coupled with Kerr’s nervous, highwire act performance, Clayton’s dreamy approach and generous use of Freudian symbolism immerse viewers in a world in which repression wrestles with decadence in an atmosphere of crumbling beauty.
The Haunting (1963): The One Where The Ghosts You Don’t See Are the Scariest
Two years later, director Robert Wise followed with another story in which what the visitors bring with them to a haunted house poses just as much a threat as any supernatural beings they might encounter. An adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, the film is set apart by Wise’s powerful use of suggestion and an innovative approach to sound that makes unseen forces feel like imminent threats. It’s a movie that makes thinking about what’s just outside the door as frightening as seeing it. But it might have been a mere technical exercise if not for its cast, particularly Julie Harris as the fragile Eleanor, who arrives as part of an outing to the infamous New England estate known as Hill House carrying a burden that only grows heavier during her stay.
House (1977): The Haunted House as Hilarious Nightmare
Some movies depict madness. Others embody it. For this beyond-description horror movie, director Nobuhiko Obayashi brought wild ideas he first explored as an experimental filmmaker and maker of striking TV commercials to the story of six schoolgirls who run into supernatural trouble while staying at a spooky house — trouble that takes the form of a creepy cat, a severed head sharp teeth, and other bizarre images. In the imposing, hilltop manor filled with malevolent fixtures, including a bleeding clock and a hungry piano played by disembodied fingers, danger lurks in every room. That Obayashi turned to the weird imagination of his young daughter for ideas might have something to do with it. It plays like a half-remembered nightmare from childhood. You might be able to laugh at it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not creepy.
The Changeling (1980): The One With Old Tricks For a New Era
House aside, the 1970s weren’t exactly a golden age of haunted house movies. The Amityville Horror became a hit without being any good. (Provided you extend the definition of haunted house to a haunted hotel, that changed with 1980’s The Shining.) Peter Medak’s The Changeling, however, served as a reminder that, with a few modifications, the old-fashioned haunted house set-up could still work even as the end of the 20th century approached. Opening with a scene of horrific tragedy, the film follows acclaimed composer John Russell (George C. Scott) as he attempts to start over by moving into a mammoth Victorian home. Ghosts make this difficult, to say the least. Sometimes pairing a modern sensibility with an old tradition is its own kind of inventiveness.
Poltergeist (1982): The One That Showed There’s No Shelter in Suburbia
In the decades that followed, the most innovative haunted house movies moved away from the traditional crumbling Victorian manor. Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist proved that a newly constructed, deeply cluttered house of the sort seen in other movies made by writer/producer Steven Spielberg could be just as terrifying. JoBeth Williams and Craig T. Nelson co-star as ’60s kids who’ve settled down into the Reagan ’80s only to find that all the comforts middle-class success can afford offer no protection against hungry, mischievous spirits determined to prey on their children. The film brilliantly turns all the trappings of suburbia — from trees to toys to the TV set — into potential threats, creating a nightmare vision of suburbia in which no place is truly safe.
Candyman (1992): The Boogeyman in the Big City
Poltergeist confirmed that ghost stories could work in the American suburbs. Candyman accomplished much the same using Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing development as its backdrop. 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.
Paranormal Activity (2009): All Mod Ghouls
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. 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. Technically it’s not the house’s fault, but the setting makes the film. Instead of the wild whip pans and frenzed motion of Blair Witch, Peli leans heavily on stillness, quiet, and creeping dread — until the arrival of supernatural threats disrupts everything. Katie and Micah live in a place filled with clean surfaces and modern technology but find neither offers any kind of protection against creatures from the beyond.
Under the Shadow (2016): The One About the Horror of War
British-Iranian director Babak Anvari sets this tale of supernatural terror against another unexpected backdrop, this time a Tehran apartment building rattled by the escalation of the 1980s war between Iran and Iraq. Declining to leave against the advice of her husband, a doctor who’s seen the worst of the war from the frontlines, Shideh (Narges Rashidi) stays behind as the city becomes a war zone, her daughter becomes ill, and it becomes increasingly clear that a malicious djinn has moved into the building. The film seamlessly blends observations about the oppressiveness of the Iranian regime — which has sidelined Shideh’s work as an activist and an aspiring doctor — with unsettling moments of supernatural forces determined to finish what the war started.
His House (2020): The One Where the Ghosts Travel With You
A similar mix of history, politics, and freaky imagery can be found in Remi Weekes’ His House, set largely within the walls of a public housing unit assigned to Bol (Sopé Dìrísù) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku), a pair of refugees from war-torn South Sudan seeking asylum in England. As they attempt to fix up their dilapidated new home they start to suspect they’ve been followed by an apeth, a night witch determined to haunt their present as it reminds them of their traumatic past. Weekes mixes pointed commentary — like a scene where Rial seeks directions from some Black teenagers only to be mocked for her accent — with affecting drama and some truly ghoulish imagery. It’s an old-fashioned haunted house story, but one drawn directly from the alarming headlines of today.