Ghost Stories and Haunted Houses
The ghost story is the oldest kind of horror, and it still works because it's built on something everyone has felt: a house that remembers more than it should, and people who can't let go. These are the best of them, films plus two series, for a night with the lights low and every creak in your own house suddenly audible.
They split into two traditions. Haunted-house films like The Conjuring, Insidious and Hokum are built for jumps: a quiet room, a long wait, then a bang. Ghost stories in the older sense, like The Others, The Innocents and The Haunting of Bly Manor, are about grief and guilt, and the ghost is often the saddest character in the story. His House and The Night House manage both at once.
Most of these are light on gore, because the fear is in the doorway rather than on the floor. Talk to Me and Crimson Peak are the exceptions, and the notes say where. If you want two hours rather than ten, skip the series and start with The Conjuring or His House. For more, see Scary Movies Without Gore and Scary Series to Binge; for younger viewers, Family Halloween Movies.
The Conjuring
Movie · 2013The modern haunted-house film in its purest form: a family, a Rhode Island farmhouse in 1971, and Ed and Lorraine Warren arriving with cameras and crucifixes. James Wan stages each scare like a magic trick, telling you where to look and then hitting you from somewhere else. The hide-and-clap game is the scene to wait for.
His House
Movie · 2020A refugee couple from South Sudan are placed in a run-down house in an English town, on terms that mean they can't leave, and something has followed them there. Remi Weekes builds one of the best haunted houses of the decade out of peeling wallpaper and survivor's guilt. Some bloody nightmare imagery; frightening and deeply sad.
The Others
Movie · 2001Nicole Kidman keeps her children in the dark, literally: they can't be exposed to sunlight, so every door in the house must be locked before the next is opened. That one rule turns an old mansion on Jersey into a maze of shadows. A ghost story told through sound, candlelight and suggestion, best seen knowing nothing more.
The Haunting of Hill House
Series · 2018The ghost story as family saga. Five siblings who grew up in a haunted mansion are still haunted as adults, in every sense, and Mike Flanagan cuts between their childhood and their present until the two collide. It earns its scares and its tears in equal measure. Best watched over a week, not crammed into a weekend.
Hokum
Movie · 2026Adam Scott plays a brusque novelist who checks into a remote Irish hotel to scatter his parents' ashes, and finds the staff muttering about a witch sealed in the honeymoon suite. The newest film here, and an old-fashioned spook-house built for jumps, with a dry streak of humor and a mystery underneath. From the director of Oddity.
Talk to Me
Movie · 2022Australian teenagers pass around an embalmed hand at parties: grip it, say the words, and a dead spirit takes you over for ninety seconds. Then someone holds on too long. The dead here are some of the scariest ghosts of the decade, and one injury scene is very hard to watch. It's about grief as much as possession.
The Shining
Movie · 1980The haunted hotel, and maybe the best one. The Overlook's ghosts are polite, well dressed and patient, which makes them worse than anything that jumps out at you. Whether Jack Torrance is being haunted or simply losing his mind is a question the film never settles, and room 237 is a place you'll think about at 3 a.m.
The Night House
Movie · 2020Rebecca Hall plays a widow alone in the lakeside house her husband designed, who starts finding things in it that he kept from her. The scares come from the architecture itself: shapes in doorways and corners that become figures if you stare. A haunting about grief and suicide, and Hall is extraordinary in it.
The Haunting of Bly Manor
Series · 2020Mike Flanagan's follow-up to Hill House adapts The Turn of the Screw: a young American au pair takes a job looking after two orphaned children at an English country house in the 1980s. It's a gothic romance more than a horror show, with fewer scares and more heartbreak, which some viewers love and others find too slow.
Poltergeist
Movie · 1982A suburban California family's new house starts with playful tricks, like chairs that stack themselves, then escalates until their youngest vanishes and her voice calls out from the television. Produced and co-written by Steven Spielberg, and it shows: a ghost story with the wonder of an adventure film. Rated PG in 1982, but the clown doll and the tree still terrify children.
The Sixth Sense
Movie · 1999A boy who sees dead people and the child psychologist trying to help him. Better remembered for its ending than for its scares, but the scares are real: the ghosts appear quietly, in kitchens and bedrooms, looking just as they did when they died. PG-13, and one of the most rewatchable ghost films ever made.
The Orphanage
Movie · 2007A woman moves her family into the seaside orphanage where she grew up, and her young son starts playing with friends nobody else can see. Then he disappears. Spanish, backed by Guillermo del Toro, and that rare ghost story that is both properly frightening and devastating. A few sudden injuries, one of them shocking; otherwise almost bloodless.
Insidious
Movie · 2010The twist on the formula: moving house doesn't help, because it isn't the house that's haunted. A family's young son slips into an unexplained coma, and the things creeping through their home have come for him. PG-13 and bloodless, with one daytime jump scare in a kitchen that became famous on its own. It gets sillier in the final stretch.
Under the Shadow
Movie · 2016Tehran in the 1980s, with Iraqi missiles falling on the city. A mother and her young daughter stay on in their apartment building as the neighbors flee, and the girl insists a djinn has come in through the crack in the ceiling. A haunting built from wartime fear and the limits placed on women. In Persian.
Presence
Movie · 2024Steven Soderbergh's experiment: the whole film is shot from the ghost's point of view, drifting through a suburban house as a new family moves in and slowly comes apart. Quiet, short and more unsettling than frightening, it plays like a family drama overheard by something that can't look away. The last scene recasts everything.
Host
Movie · 2020A group of friends hold a séance on a video call during the 2020 lockdown, and one of them doesn't take it seriously. Made remotely during that lockdown, it runs under an hour and uses the glitches of a laptop screen to land jumps you won't see coming. Best watched on a laptop, alone, in a dark room.
Ghost Stories
Movie · 2017A professional debunker of psychics is handed three cases he can't explain: a night watchman, a teenager on a lonely road and a businessman waiting on his first child. A British anthology in the tradition of old portmanteau horror, with Martin Freeman in one segment and some very effective jumps. People argue about the ending.
Crimson Peak
Movie · 2015Guillermo del Toro's gothic romance: a young American writer marries a charming baronet and moves into his crumbling English mansion, which bleeds red clay through the floorboards. The ghosts are warnings rather than threats, and the house is gorgeous. Less frightening than most of this list but bloodier, with a couple of violently grisly scenes.
The Innocents
Movie · 1961The definitive film of The Turn of the Screw, the same story Bly Manor retells. Deborah Kerr plays a governess who comes to believe the two children in her care are possessed by the dead, and the film never tells you if she's right. Black and white, slow, and full of figures at the far edge of the frame.
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