Haunted House

WATCHcanon

1408

John Cusack alone in a hotel room for most of the running time, and it is the best single-location King film.

WATCHcanon

Barbarian

Go in knowing nothing. The structure is the point and every synopsis ruins it.

WATCHknown

Burnt Offerings

A family rents a summer house that heals itself by consuming them. Karen Black, Oliver Reed and Bette Davis.

WATCHknown

Carnival of Souls

Made for 33,000 dollars by an industrial film-maker in Kansas, and it looks like a dream somebody had.

WATCHcanon

Crimson Peak

Del Toro doing full gothic romance. The house is the best thing in it and it is sinking.

WATCHknown

Dark Water

Nakata again, and the saddest of the cycle. A custody battle with a damp patch on the ceiling.

WATCHcult

Deadstream

A disgraced livestreamer broadcasts himself alone in a haunted house for the clout, and gets exactly what he deserves.

WATCHcanon

Doctor Sleep

Reconciles King's novel with Kubrick's film, which should not have been possible.

WATCHcult

Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum

A web-streaming crew live-broadcast from a real abandoned Korean hospital for the views.

WATCHobscure

Hell House LLC

A team building a Halloween haunted attraction in a real abandoned hotel, and the footage is all that is left.

WATCHknown

His House

A South Sudanese couple in British asylum housing. The haunting and the bureaucracy are the same thing.

WATCHcult

House

Toho asked their ad director what would scare children. He asked his eleven-year-old daughter and filmed her answers.

WATCHcanon

Insidious

Wan's best jump scares and the film that built the modern haunting industry. The Further is silly and it works.

WATCHknown

Ju-On: The Grudge

No plot to speak of, structured as loops. Either its weakness or the reason it works.

WATCHcanon

Oculus

A haunted mirror, and a sister trying to prove it killed her parents by filming it destroying her too.

WATCHcult

Oddity

Irish, small, and it contains one of the best-constructed scares of the decade. The wooden man.

WATCHcanon

Paranormal Activity

15,000 dollars into 193 million, and a decade of imitators nobody asked for.

WATCHcanon

Poltergeist

A suburban family, a television, and a chair-stacking sequence that has never stopped being copied.

WATCHknown

Presence

Soderbergh shoots the entire film from the ghost's point of view, handheld, in long takes. It works.

WATCHknown

Relic

Dementia as a house that grows corridors. The last ten minutes are unexpectedly tender.

WATCHknown

Session 9

Shot in a real abandoned asylum, and the building does most of the work.

WATCHcult

Terrified

Argentinian, and it front-loads three of the best scares of the decade in the first twenty minutes.

WATCHknown

The Autopsy of Jane Doe

Two coroners, one body, one basement. A masterclass in escalating a single location.

WATCHknown

The Babadook

A film about a widowed mother who resents her son, wearing a monster as a coat.

WATCHcult

The Boogey Man

A haunted mirror and a Halloween score Ulli Lommel could not afford to license properly.

WATCHcanon

The Conjuring

Old-fashioned, extremely well made, and the reason there are now nine of these.

WATCHknown

The Devil's Backbone

Del Toro's other Spanish Civil War film, and he has called it the companion to Pan's Labyrinth.

WATCHknown

The Entity

A woman is repeatedly assaulted by an invisible entity, and the film sides with her against the psychiatrists.

WATCHcanon

The Fog

Carpenter's follow-up to Halloween: a Californian coastal town, a hundredth anniversary, and something owed.

WATCHknown

The House by the Cemetery

Fulci's dream logic at its least coherent and most atmospheric. The dubbing of the child is a war crime.

WATCHcult

The House of the Devil

Ti West made a 1983 film in 2009, on 16mm, and the first hour is a girl walking around a house alone.

WATCHknown

The House That Dripped Blood

Four stories tied to one house, written by Robert Bloch, with Christopher Lee and a very young Jon Pertwee joke.

WATCHknown

The Innkeepers

Ti West's other 1970s-feeling film, about two clerks working the last weekend of a haunted hotel.

WATCHknown

The Innocents

The Turn of the Screw done perfectly, and it never once tells you whether the ghosts are real.

WATCHknown

The Night House

Rebecca Hall carrying a film about grief with unusual use of negative space.

WATCHknown

The Old Dark House

James Whale between the two Frankensteins, having a wonderful time, and Karloff is the least of it.

WATCHcanon

The Orphanage

Produced by del Toro, and it is a film about a mother rather than a house.

WATCHcanon

The Shining

King hated it. Everyone else was right. The geography of the hotel is deliberately impossible.

WATCHcanon

The Sixth Sense

The twist made it famous and the film does not need it. It is about a boy nobody believes and a marriage that ended.

WATCHknown

Under the Shadow

Tehran during the War of the Cities, a djinn, and a mother the state has already stripped of options.

WATCHknown

Verónica

A Madrid teenager holds a séance during a solar eclipse and brings something home. Loosely based on a real police file.