No order…
The Uninvited (1944)
The Innocents (1961)
The Shining (1980)
Dead of Night (1945. Only the “Christmas Party” segment really counts as a haunted house, I guess, but that segment is great, as is the whole film.)
Haunted (1995)
“The Hungry Glass” (1961. Feature-length episode of the TV show
Thriller.)
The Woman in Black (1989)
House on Haunted Hill (1959. Does this count? I’m willing to allow it.)
Ghostwatch (1992)
The Changeling (1980)
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Some notes, mostly on what I didn’t include:
The Haunting (1963) would make it if only I could get past Julie Harris’s performance, which I find grating in the extreme. But I can’t (unfortunately, as I love the book—and the film’s set design). Incidentally, I actually don’t hate the much-hated 1999 remake.
I moderately liked
The Others and
Stir of Echoes, but just moderately.
I left off some favorite old-dark-house movies (e.g.,
The Old Dark House,
The Phantom of Crestwood) because the houses aren’t, ultimately, haunted.
House on Haunted Hill might fall into that category, but it’s a special case and I’ll let it slide.
The opening segment, with the painting, of
Three Cases of Murder (1955) has a house that I guess is haunted, though I wouldn’t call it a “haunted house” story. (If you’ve seen the segment, you know what I mean.) It is one of my favorite spooky pieces of film, though. (Unfortunately, it’s the only good sequence in the three-sequence anthology movie.)
I considered the 1968
Whistle and I’ll Come to You adaptation. It might make the list another day.
1408 is fun. If only it kept up the atmospherics instead of the CGI ghouls and attempt at a twist, I think I would have liked it even more. I was pretty bored by
Amityville Horror,
Burnt Offerings,
Legend of Hell House (despite, alas, Roddy McDowell being great and Gayle Hunnicutt being gorgeous),
Crimson Peak (despite, alas, some remarkable set design), and the 1981
Ghost Story (despite, alas, Fred Astaire).
Poltergeist is OK, I guess, but I find it really more action/fantasy than horror.
I need to rewatch
The Changeling. I liked it when I saw it, but I need to rewatch.
Hell House LLC (2016) is pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. It can be an honorable mention.
I know I’ve left out something, or many somethings. But of all the old spooky flicks I love, few of them involve haunted houses. A few more involve ghosts in general (adaptations of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” for example), but all in all I haven’t seen that many
great ghost movies. That’s too bad, because an old-fashioned M.R. James-ian ghost story is by far my favorite kind of spooky tale.
