"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" -- or, rather, a homicidal boy in Stanley Kubrick's eerie 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's horror novel. With wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and psychic son Danny (Danny Lloyd) in tow, frustrated writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a job as the winter caretaker at the opulently ominous, mountain ...
Thanks to the carelessness of a cute little dog, newlyweds Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin are killed in a freak auto accident. Upon arriving in the outer offices of Heaven, the couple finds that, thanks to a century's worth of bureaucratic red tape, they're on a long celestial waiting list. Before they can earn their wings, Davis and Baldwin must ...
After the blockbuster success of Pirates of the Caribbean, another Disney theme park ride is adapted for the big screen in this family-friendly mix of comedy and chills. Jim Evers (Eddie Murphy) is a real estate agent whose latest project is to find a buyer for a huge but dilapidated old house in New Orleans. However, when Evers visits the ...
One of the most highly regarded haunted house films ever produced, Robert Wise's The Haunting (based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House) weaves the dark tale of a questionably sane young woman and a sinister house which holds a terrifying past. Invited to join anthropologist Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), ESP expert Theodora ...
The Uninvited is one of the rare Hollywood ghost stories that does not cop out with a "logical" ending. In fact, the film has more in common with British ghost tales of the period, in that the characters calmly accept spectral visitations as though they were everyday occurrences. Roderick Fitzgerald (Ray Milland) and his sister, Pamela (Ruth ...
Peter Medak's The Changeling is among a handful of films, including The Haunting (1963), Ghost Story (1981), and Lady in White (1988), that have successfully recreated the intimate, drawing-room atmosphere of supernatural horror fiction. After his wife and daughter are killed in a snowbound car accident, classical composer John Russell (George C. ...
The owner of an Irish castle decides to attract visitors by falsely claiming that the building is haunted, only to have a pair of real ancestral spirits start causing trouble in this uneven attempt at fantasy-comedy. The story centers on Jack and Sharon (played by Steve Guttenberg and Beverly D'Angelo), naive American tourists who are initially ...
This second filmed version of Stephen King's best-selling horror novel credits King as the scriptwriter as well. The 4 1/2-hour long made-for-TV epic takes a more subtle approach to the horror and spends more time on the human elements than the now legendary Stanley Kubrick predecessor ~ Andrew Olthuis, All Movie Guide
The whimsical Oscar Wilde fantasy yarn The Canterville Ghost is updated to WW2 in this economical but attractively produced MGM filmization. Charles Laughton plays Sir Simon de Canterville, a feckless 17th century British aristocrat who, after proving himself a coward on the field of honor, is walled up alive in his own castle by his unforgiving ...
In this supernatural thriller, a woman believes that a visitor from another dimension is trying to guide her into a sinister mystery. Feeling lonely after her daughter leaves home for college, Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer) begins to sense that something is wrong in her house, and feels a spirit is trying to contact her. At first her husband Norman ...
In this remake of William Castle's campy 1958 classic, an eccentric millionaire named Steven Price invites a diverse group of people to a reputedly haunted mansion that was formerly the site of an insane asylum. Steven offers his guests $1,000,000 each if they can spend the entire night at the old house without fleeing in terror. It sounds simple ...
This sequel to a box-office sleeper hit that spoofed teen slasher flicks takes its cues from haunted house and possession films, particularly The Haunting (1999) and The Exorcist (1973). Although many of the first film's main characters were homicide victims, Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, and Anna Faris return anyway to "re-possess" their roles for ...
Based on the popular cartoon character, this family-oriented "ghost story" is about a not-so-scary spirit who bonds with a little girl (Christina Ricci). The eternally irritable Ms. Carrigan (Cathy Moriarty) discovers that the only thing she's been left in her recently departed father's will is a rickety old house in New England. Naturally, the ...
This Disney Studios attempt at entering the horror genre is a British production based on the chilling novel by Florence Engel Randall. An American family, headed by composer Paul Curtis (David McCallum) and his wife Helen (Carroll Baker), is renting an old mansion in England. The mansion's owner is Mrs. Aylwood (Bette Davis), who lives in a small ...
Guillermo del Toro, who quickly became one of the most talked-about directors in contemporary horror films with his first two features, Chronos and Mimic, takes on a more subtle tale of terror with this psychological suspense piece. Casares (Federico Luppi) and Carmen (Marisa Paredes) operate a small home for orphans in a remote part of Spain ...
"For God's sake, GET OUT!" was the ad campaign for the 1979 shocker The Amityville Horror. The film was based on the allegedly true story of the luckless Lutz family, who move lock, stock, and barrel into a new home, only to find that it is possessed by the demonic spirits of its previous owners. Variations of the Seven Deadly Plagues emanate from ...
Writer/director Brad Anderson, known for whimsical romantic comedies like Next Stop, Wonderland, was inspired by the astonishing, creepy visage of an abandoned mental hospital in Danvers, MA, to make the intense psychological horror film Session 9. The film stars the redoubtable Scottish actor Peter Mullan (from Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe) as ...
It's a wildly varied group that takes shelter from a raging English storm in the forbidding mansion of the Femm family. Among the reluctant guests are stuffed-shirt Philip Waverton (Raymond Massey): Philip's sensitive wife Margaret (Gloria Stuart); their mutual friend, disillusioned war veteran Roger Penderell (Melvyn Douglas); vulgar self-made ...
Paramount followed up its successful Bob Hope/Paulette Goddard co-starrer The Cat and the Canary (1939) by warming up another venerable "old dark house" stage play, Paul Dickey and Charles Goddard's The Ghost Breaker, pluralizing the title to accommodate both stars. This time Hope plays radio personality Lawrence L. Lawrence (the middle initial ...
Steve Guttenberg stars in this thriller as a once-respected reporter who has fallen on hard times and is now working for a sleazy tabloid. He happens upon a story that he hopes might put him back in the good graces of better newspapers; in 1939, five people disappeared in an accident aboard the elevator of a luxury hotel. It's believed that their ...
This 1981 John Irvin picture constitutes an adaptation of Peter Straub's colossal, bestselling novel. The central plot -- shared by both book and film -- revolves around the four elderly members of the Chowder Society (Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and John Houseman), who gather in each other's drawing rooms each winter to ...
Dan Curtis, director of TV's Dark Shadows series, directed this eerie haunted-house thriller about a house which draws energy from its inhabitants and selects its own "keeper" from the family of Ben and Marian Rolf (Oliver Reed & Karen Black), who rent the strangely-affordable house one fateful summer then find themselves slowly succumbing to its ...
Scared Stiff is the 1953 remake of the 1940 Bob Hope-Paulette Goddard vehicle The Ghost Breakers, reupholstered for the talents of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. While Martin handles the straight plot scenes, just as Hope did in the earlier film, the Hope-like wisecracks are fairly evenly divided between Martin and Lewis. Lewis is for the most part ...
This fourth film version of the Mary Roberts Rinehart-Avery Hopwood stage chestnut The Bat is so old-fashioned in its execution that one might suspect it was intended as "camp" (though that phrase wasn't in common usage in 1959). Agnes Moorehead plays mystery novelist Cornelia Van Gorder, whose remote mansion is the scene for all sorts of ...
In the wake of such Satanic-themed thrillers as Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen comes The Sentinel. When New York fashion model (Cristina Raines) splits with her fiance (Chris Sarandon) and moves into an old brownstone, she soon discovers she has more than she bargained for in the lease. As luck would have it, a mysterious blind priest ...
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