|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
— by Ben Cosgrove
Hollywood has always loved horror. From the silent vampire and hairy-monster flicks of the 1920s through the latest J-horror remake, moviemakers have understood that, like sex, fright sells. (Combine the two, of course, and you've effectively got yourself a license to print money.) And of all the sub-categories of the genre that have popped up over the decades — zombie films, slasher films, murderous creatures from outer space — one theme has always been in style: the haunted house.
With this week's release of the haunted-home-on-the-Bayou film "The Skeleton Key," starring Kate Hudson, it's quite clear that the tradition is in no danger of dying out, and that the ghost in the closet, the beast in the attic and the grumpy spirits bumping along the walls and under the floorboards will have gainful employment in Tinseltown for a very long time to come.
 "The Grudge" (2004)
 |
|||
|
|
Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Karen, a social worker in Tokyo who, after being assigned to care for an older, perhaps mad American woman, is effectively cursed (as are all who enter it) by the house in which the old woman lives. Director Takashi Shimizu's American remake of his own J-horror modern classic, "Ju-on," "The Grudge" is a bit confusing, and at times might take itself a tad too seriously — but it's also smart, wonderfully paced and scary as hell.
"The Devil's Backbone" (2001)
 |
|||
|
|
Writer/director Guillermo del Toro's very strong film takes the haunted-house theme and twists it around just enough to make it feel new. Set in the final year of the Spanish Civil War, as Franco's fascist forces are poised to seize control of the nation, the movie follows young Carlos after he's dropped off for safe-keeping at an orphanage in the middle of nowhere. Turns out the orphanage is haunted by a quite verbal ghost named Santi, and is also threatened by an unexploded bomb ticking away in the middle of the sunburned courtyard. By turns philosophical, moving and downright terrifying, del Toro's film is one of the best, most assured ghost stories to make it to the screen in years.
"The Others" (2001)
 |
|||
|
|
As Grace — a young, severely uptight mother of two young children living (barely) in the mid-1940s in a large manor on the British isle of Jersey, awaiting the return of her husband from the war — Nicole Kidman is a model of nervous energy and sorrow. The kids, meanwhile, suffer from an allergy to direct sunlight, so the house is always shuttered and suffused with a muted, soft light that in itself is hugely spooky and suggestive of all sorts of (quite probably awful) secrets. As Grace's carefully constructed life of solitude and safety begins to unravel — beginning with the arrival of three exceedingly odd servants and the prospect of ghosts haunting every room and cupboard in the enormous place #&8212; director Alejandro Amenábar ratchets up the tension until we're not quite sure who is among the living, who's among the dead and who just might possibly be as crazy as a loon.
"The Blair Witch Project" (1999)
There are an awful lot of people who hate this movie, and if jerky hand-held camera action, zero narrative and a sudden ending that seems to resolve nothing are the sorts of things that bother you, then you're probably not a fan. But this strange little number (still the most profitable movie of all time in terms of production cost versus box-office receipts) also has millions of loyal fans. Folks still happily buy into its pseudo-documentary style and repeatedly find themselves wrapped up in the tale of three film students who head into the woods to debunk the tale of a child-slaughtering witch living in a small house amid the trees. Not only a haunted house, then, but a witch's haunted house. Suggestion: If you're in the woods, and you find a familiar piece of cloth tied in a knot lying outside your tent the morning after a buddy has gone missing — don't open it.
"Beetlejuice" (1988)
A pre-"Batman" Tim Burton exercise in controlled chaos, "Beetlejuice" stars a bunch of hugely likeable actors and actresses at the height of their ... well, likeability (Alec Baldwin, Michael Keaton, Geena Davis, Catherine O'Hara, etc.) in a clever, good-hearted take on the old "There goes the neighborhood" story. With Baldwin and Davis playing recently dead newlyweds trying, ineffectually, to scare the new owners of their home from the premises, and Keaton stealing the show as the titular very dead ringer they bring in to actually get the job done, the film is 90 minutes of pure, spooky delirium.
"Poltergeist" (1982)
 |
|||
|
|
Spielberg wrote and Tobe Hooper directed this enormously popular, influential and eminently parody-able look at what happens when an average American family home is infested with increasingly angry spirits. Legendary for several scenes, especially the family's young daughter (the late Heather O'Rourke) communicating with the critters through the grainy TV and uttering the immortal line "They're he-e-e-e-re," this house-built-on-a-burial-ground extravaganza has to be on any film lover's list of ghost stories. The fact that it's chockfull of great Spielberg moments wonderfully executed by Hooper — the chairs artfully stacked atop the kitchen table the moment the mom's back is turned, for instance — lift it well above the usual run of haunted-dwelling flicks.
"The Shining" (1980)
Stanley Kubrick's re-imagining of Stephen King's novel is filled with so many now-classic pop-culture moments (Nicholson's "Here's ... Johnny!"; Danny Torrance cruising the seemingly endless halls of the hotel on his Big Wheel; the terrifying twin girls appearing out of nowhere; oceans of blood coursing down the corridors) that it's a genuine shock to watch the film now and realize again what a magnificent movie it really is. Set in the remote, thoroughly haunted Overlook Hotel, where caretaker, recovering lush and seriously blocked writer Jack Torrance has decided to try and get his life back on track, the film somehow manages to convey a sense of tension and dread from the very first frame, and it never lets up. As Jack's wife, Wendy, Shelley Duvall frequently performs a creditable imitation of the figure in Edvard Munch's cheery painting "The Scream" brought to life, and the great Scatman Crothers plays a helpful old dude who catches an axe in the chest — a plot development, incidentally, that not even King was twisted enough to put in his novel.
"The Amityville Horror" (1979/2005)
Both the recent remake and the 1979 original of this "based on a true story" tale manage to make creepy what has, over the years, become something of a cliché — namely, the house with bleeding walls and a really angry voice telling the inhabitants to "Get out!" Based on the 1977 best-selling book by author Jay Anson, each movie has its share of memorable moments (James Brolin lying awake at night in the original, the evil of the house seeming to seep into his pores; children's faces appearing in and then vanishing from the house's eyelike windows in the remake), and either one makes for a jolting couple of hours of innocent, atmospheric fun.
|
|
|
|
Photos: Universal Pictures
|
|
|
|
|
