Recently restored and having re-entered the critical consciousness, The Old Dark House is an early film from legendary horror director James Whale ( Frankenstein). Our first pick for this list is cheating a bit, but hey, it’s our list. We can’t promise you that all these hauntings will have a tidy ghost dispersal at the end - but they will leave you wondering if that noise you heard in the dark was all in your mind. We invite you to try these psychological haunted-house recs if you’re in the mood for something a bit different. But sometimes, the ghosts aren’t real - or maybe they are real, but they’re also connected to the workings of the mind, rather than, say, a real demonic possession or an external supernatural event. Many haunted-house movies work because the ghosts within them are real. And that feels especially true in 2020, when, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, many of us have probably deepened our relationships with our own homes over the past seven months.Īs we look forward to what will certainly be a unique, very indoor Halloween 2020, we thought it’d be fun to take a look at haunted-house movies - and specifically the kind that play with the tension between the internal and the external, the supernatural and the psychological. Sometimes it’s a manifestation of personal trauma and psychosis ( Martyrs or The Babadook) or a manifestation of even larger cultural trauma ( Poltergeist or Pan’s Labyrinth).Īnd, of course, sometimes, the ghost is you, the viewer. Sometimes it’s an event that hasn’t happened yet - a premonition rather than an apparition (think Eve’s Bayou). Sometimes it’s a person inside of the house who’s haunted, not a thing (think Insidious). And one of the greatest things about a ”haunted” house is that what haunts it might not be a ghost at all. One of horror storytelling’s greatest strengths is its ability to viscerally capture, through images and sensory details, the experience of mental collapse or psychological dysfunction.
#Mystery house movie series#
While Bly Manor takes many liberties with its initial inspiration, Henry James’s classic gothic horror novella The Turn of the Screw, the series shares one of the book’s most common haunted-house tropes: The ghosts may or may not be a manifestation of what’s going on in your own head. With the recent arrival of The Haunting of Bly Manor to Netflix, a miniseries in the vein of 2018’s hit The Haunting of Hill House, the haunted-house genre has gotten a timely boost.
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