Robert Wise’s The Haunting remains one of the creepiest haunted house films ever made, despite the fact that you never actually see a ghost. Instead, it’s all shadows, creaking doors, ominous wallpaper, and the fragile unravelling of Julie Harris’s nerves. What Wise delivered wasn’t a carnival of scares, but a psychological chamber piece that still…
Tag: haunted house
The Haunting (1999) – Review
In 1963, Robert Wise helmed an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which was a wonderfully executed psychological thriller with subtle horror aspects. Flash forward to 1999, when Jan de Bont, the director of Twister, helmed a new take on the novel, one that didn’t bother with pesky little things like subtlety.
Amityville 3-D (1983) – Review
The tagline to this movie was “Warning: In this movie, you are the victim,” having now sat through this film I certainly feel victimized, of course, that tagline was actually referring to the fact that the film was released in 3D, which in the 80s was almost a requirement for third installments of a horror…
The Amityville Horror (1979) – Review
“The events of this movie are based on misleading information, when it’s not just outright bullshit, and is basically a cinematic hoax.” Sadly, this was not the disclaimer found at the start of American International Pictures’ The Amityville Horror, but it should have been, as this “based on true events” movie is more fiction than…
The Legend of Hell House (1973) – Review
When tackling a haunted house story one of the more troubling aspects to tackle is why the residents don’t simply “Get Out” instead of hanging around while the walls drip blood and ghostly forces are trying to tear their faces off, and the two best literary examples of this would be Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting…