What Are The Best Scary Movies About Ghosts & Haunted Houses?

What's the best ghost story in cinema?

The Shining, The Entity, The Haunting, The Sixth Sense..?

Horror cinema is awash with great films about ghosts and haunted houses. There's the classics like The Innocents and Don't Look Now as well as modern greats like Insidious and The Conjuring. 

Ghosts - in horror cinema that wants to scare its audience - have proven to be perfect "villains" to unsettle and get under the skin.

They are the unseen terror. The threat that appears to transcend the normal boundaries of right and wrong. 

One of my favourite ghost stories in cinema is 1961's The Innocents. A chilling film that proved to be a trendsetter for future movies about paranormal activity and haunted houses. 

Here's The Guardian's film critic Peter Bradshaw explaining what's so great about The Innocents:

"Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), now on national rerelease, is an elegant, sinister and scalp-prickling ghost story – as scary in its way as Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist. It has to be the most sure-footed screen adaptation of Henry James, taken from his 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, clarifying some of the original's ambiguities and obscurities, but without damaging the story's subtlety. Deborah Kerr plays Miss Giddens, a governess hired to look after two children in a country estate: Flora (Pamela Franklin) and Miles (Martin Stephens). Miss Giddens finds something she describes as "secret, whispery, and indecent": the house is haunted by the souls of Peter Quint, a drunken, disreputable valet, and Miss Jessel, the former governess whom he seduced. Without admitting it, the children can see the ghosts as well; the spectres have become their secret, parasitical friends. Flora's pertly knowing innocence and Miles's insolent adult hauteur show how the children become possessed and corrupted by them. Clayton brilliantly uses slow dissolves to create ghostly superimpositions, and the harmless squeals of bath-time fun, or squeakings of a pencil, suggest uncanny screams. The most disturbing scenes take place in daylight: Quint's appearance in the garden is heralded by the sudden silencing of the birdsong. It's a moment that makes your blood run cold. The whole film does that."

Another great is Don't Look Now. 

John and Laura Baxter are in Venice when they meet a pair of elderly sisters, one of whom claims to be psychic. She insists that she sees the spirit of the Baxters' daughter, who recently drowned. Laura is intrigued, but John resists the idea. He, however, seems to have his own psychic flashes, seeing their daughter walk the streets in her red cloak, as well as Laura and the sisters on a funeral gondola.

—James Meek <james@oz.net>

Fast-forward and we have the work of James Wan in films such as Insidious and The Conjuring.

 

"Directed by James Wan and scripted by Leigh Whannell, the Australian co-creators of Saw, and produced by Oren Peli, the Israeli writer-director of Paranormal Activity, this is a supernatural horror flick by and for horror buffs. A pleasant, apparently American couple and their three small children move into a new house where things go bump in the night and the eldest child experiences a three-month coma. They get even bumpier when the family moves elsewhere and the situation become more problematic than that in The Amityville Horror. The build-up is slow and sure, the shocks are exponential, Barbara Hershey as the husband's mother is even creepier than she was in Black Swan, and a bad time is had by all. The film cost $1.5m to make and has taken $45m at the US box office." Source: The Guardian

What are your favourite movies about ghosts and haunted houses?