Best Haunted House Movies Of All Time? Hmm

Den of Geek has a list. It's a nice list. But is it the best list?



Haunted house movies are rather more tricky to define than you might think. If you confine yourself to ghosts that are confined to a specific house, you narrow the scope a lot. You must exclude The Woman in Black, as the ghost is active (and deadly) outside Eel Marsh House. The same can be said for The Innocents, as in the film (and Henry James 'The Turn of the Screw', of course) the ghosts are seen some distance from the building. One could easily include The Orphanage (El Orfanato) using the same loose criteria, I think. Perhaps this is a quibble too far. But another problem with this list of 'movies' is that it includes two British TV productions, Ghostwatch (1992) and the aforementioned Woman in Black (1989).



Still, both are very well scripted ghost stories. And at least the Den of Geek list includes plenty of older movies, going all the way back to 1944. There are a few more recent movies that might not cut it a decade or so down the line. The Skeleton Key isn't half bad, but one of the best? I haven't seen Crimson Peak, so I can't comment on it. And I'm intrigued by Hausu (19770, as it's a bit of early J-Horror that passed me by. And that's one of the most valuable things a list like this can do, not just stimulate debate about stuff you know, but remind you that there's always more to discover.