The Uninvited

The first Hollywood ghost film to play the haunting entirely straight, with no comic relief and no rational explanation at the end.

A brother and sister buy a clifftop house in Cornwall cheaply. There is a room that is always cold, the smell of mimosa, and crying before dawn.

Before this, American studios treated ghosts as either jokes or hoaxes with a scientific reveal. Paramount let this one be real, and the séance sequence is truly frightening for a film of the period.

Charles Lang's cinematography is the reason to watch: the cliff, the studio-built fog, and the manifestation, which is a shape you keep almost being able to read.

The theme was later given lyrics and became the standard Stella by Starlight.

It also has a lesbian subtext that the Production Code office fought over at length and did not entirely remove.