The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A ghost is a person whose spirit continues to live on following death in non-corporeal and insubstantial form (as opposed to other more physical forms of undead such as vampires and zombies). Hauntings refers to ghostly phenomena – films featuring ghosts and/or haunted houses and other places.
A common plot in a many ghosts stories is of the living investigating a haunted place to find who the ghost was and achieving a form of exorcism by aiding them in complete their Unfinished Business and depart.
The haunted house is a long-standing tradition and concerns the investigation of a large old gloomy mansions. More modern variants have tried numerous other form of dwelling from suburban houses to hotels, supermarkets, ships and submarines.
There is the misconception that the ghost story and haunted house film originated in the 1930s. The first Hollywood effort was not until well into the 1940s and the genre did not fully develop until the 1950s/60s, reaching a peak in the 1970s.
The 1980s brought the introduction of visual and makeup effects. The 1990s/2000s introduced the Found Footage investigation of the haunted house. In the 2000s onwards, the ghost story has become so prolific that it is rare to find efforts that stand out from the formula and cliches.
There is also the Asian ghost story – see Asian Horror – where hauntings tend to be less centred around dwellings and more about personal vengeance and the grievances.
The depiction of ghost stories is so numerous that this topic has been split between actual ghost stories (here) and those that depict ghosts in a comedic or other vein – for which see Ghosts in Light Fantasy
The third of the Prom Night films, a direct follow-on from the second in which Mary Lou becomes a campy Freddy Krueger-like villain firing off bad puns amid her dispatches
From Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a ghost story that creates an incredibly haunted atmosphere. As with most of Kurosawa’s work, dazzling ideas sit alongside a murky and impenetrable plot where you are baffled trying to make sense of what is happening
As part of the mid-00s fad for English-language remakes of Japanese horror films, Kiyoshi Kuroawa’s unfathomable but undeniably creepy internet horror is reworked as a standard teen film
This was the first of two sequels to the Wes Craven scripted Pulse, the English language version of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s intensely spooky film about ghosts from the internet
Kimo Stamboel, one half of the Mo Brothers, solo directs a film about an orphanage where deviltry and horrors are stirred on a return visit by children who were raised there
The rarity of a Bollywood horror film. This blatantly steals the plot of What Lies Beneath but spins it through the Bollywood formula with the addition of songs and much implied sensuality to create something unique
Silent movie based on the life of Edgar Allan Poe. Today we’d call it a biopic, although it readily departs into fantasy with Poe having drunken visions of the raven, ghosts and the afterlife
A film from the Pang Brothers in which a heroine enters into an extraordinarily conceived fantasy world that would appear to be taking place in her own imagination
A Japanese-made variant on the oft-used Groundhog Day timeloop theme. This pushes well into horror movie territory with a group of teenagers trapped in a typical school day and facing a monster figure pursuing them
Two Americans fleeing an armed bank robbery with hostages take refuge at a house that they discover it is haunted. A vy the numbers effort before arriving at a confused twist ending.
South Korean horror film about a pair of high-heeled shoes that take over their owner. Some okay jumps in a standard K-horror ghost story
Takashi Shimizu, creator of the Ju-on/The Grudge series, makes a film about an actress who becomes haunted after taking a role based on a true-life murder
The haunted house genre is one that has become thoroughly exhausted by overuse in recent years. This puts the elements together with a professional assemblage but is essentially no different to the 347 other haunted house films that this site has seen in the last twelve months
A film directed by actor Zack Ward – his best known role was probably as Postal Dude in Uwe Boll’s Postal. Not a terribly interesting film – it starts as a ghost story before this proves to be a red herring and then meanders around without much direction
Kiyoshi Kurosawa attempts to give the J-horrors of Ring and The Grudge a run for their money and creates an intensely haunted film. As with much of Kurosawa’s films, this also comes with a deeply unfathomable plot
Ghost story in which Sarah Michelle Gellar receives a series of mysterious visions as she travels across Texas
Cheaply made sequel to the remake of House on Haunted Hill that turns it into a teen film dominated by gore set-pieces
Singaporean film about tourists experienced haunted spirits in the jungle, this owes much to The Blair Witch Project
A New Zealand-made ghost story that hardly seems to have been seen by anybody. The film shuffles around cliches from 1970s ghost story tv movies but only dissembles them into an embarrassingly silly film where very little of substance is directed with a ludicrously overwrought intensity
One of the worst Stephen King adaptations due to being placed in the hands of Mick Garris, a director who has no concept of subtlety and constantly tries to turn every scene into a pop-up scare like a tatty carnival haunted house ride
This is possibly the worst haunted house (or in this case apartment) film ever made. In a genre where the effect is heavily dependent on mood and atmosphere, the filmmakers make the brave attempt to shoot the entire thing with natural lighting and by eschewing any effects
The third of the Japanese Ringu/Ring films. A new director means a different approach but what also becomes apparent is that the original was never intended as a series and the attempts to further draw it out result in a confusing mishmash of ideas
Kaidan eiga (Japanese ghost story) that was a huge hit, spawning several sequels and an English-language remake, plus a horde of imitators. For all its reputation, the film is often crude, nevertheless does evince an eerie atmosphere
This is the English-language version of the Japanese horror Ring and actually a much better and far spookier film, where the new script gives the story more depth
The second of the Japanese Ring/Ringu films where director Hideo Nakata improves over the original with a series of eerie scares if a frequently incomprehensible mishmash of story ideas
This starts out as a seeming ghost story without creating much tension then features Tom Sizemore going psycho, before arriving at one of the most confusing of all attempts to conduct an M. Night Shyamalan twist ending
Sequel to The Ring, the English-language remake of Ringu. The filmmakers have returned to the source and brought in original director Hideo Nakata only to produce one of the most disappointing of all the Ringu/Ring films
The question you ask going in is after seven Japanese films and a tv series, a Korean film and two previous English-language films, what is left for filmmakers to wring out a third American The Ring film? The answer seems to be not much – just a rehash of the basics for the 18-25 crowd
Filipino variant on the Japanese ghost story (Ring, The Grudge et al). Much more low key than some of the other variants but with moments of undeniably spooky effect and with an ambitious story that takes place across three different decades
A Stephen King scripted tv mini-series about the investigation into a haunted house. This is not quite a classic in the vein of its model The Haunting but is a solid and effective entry
Spooky Russian film about a haunted plane flight, this recalls something of The Twilight Zone’s famous Nightmare at 20,000 Feet episode
The underrated Curtis Harrington makes a quickie possession film about a haunted drive-in theatre. Cast soon after Carrie, the film is headed by a fierily passionate performance from Piper Laurie
The original Ring was a classic, an eerie ghost story that was a success that spawned a series of copies right around the Asian region. Here the Ring cycle has been rebooted in a heavy letdown that abandons all of the creepy atmospherics of the original for a series of pop-up CGI effects
The thirteenth film in the Ring/Ringu franchise. The question is whether the return of original director Hideo Nakata to the franchise can revitalise the series
The two most popular Japanese horror franchises come together to fight it out. Both series work on the provision of intensely uncanny effect but brought together the result is diluted at best
The first film from Pascal Laugier who has emerged as a leading French horror director since, a ghost story set at a girl’s boarding school, Laugier does produce some eerie jumps but the script is a frustrating tangle of narrative loose ends
A multi-director horror anthology where all the directors are Latin American
A horror film that was the biggest box-office hit ever in Indonesia as a family tragedy stirs up hauntings and the occult. A follow-up to an earlier 1970s film that has become a cult hit.
An incredibly bad film from the heyday of the VHS era. The incoherent plot involves hauntings and a voodoo curse before arriving at a totally surreal ending
The first of the Scary Movie sequels. The Wayans Brothers extend the gag beyond the slasher movie to take on the ghost story and exorcism film while aiming squarely for Lowest Common Denominator humour
Fourth of the Scary Movie films and the usual crude inanity, although under David Zucker the movie parodies have expanded well beyond what can be labelled scary movies any longer
Just when you thought that this witless and unfunny series has died off, it drags itself out of mothballs for another outing. As with the other entries, it is a bunch of recent movies overrun with crude, moronic gags
Based on the popular series of children’s horror tales, this Guillermo Del Toro written/produced effort borrows the idea from the Goosebumps film of having the stories come to life and the idea from Stranger Things and It with a group children fighting against them. On screen, the finished result never quite seems as much as it promises to be
A low-budget horror anthology that is rough around the edges but shows promise
A trio of Japanese tv movies that retell supposedly true life ghost stories
The last film from the great Mario Bava – an uncanny effort filled with some strikingly spooky scenes that leaves you uncertain whether what we are seeing is a haunting, a possession or is taking place in a mad woman’s fraying mind
The live-action film version of the popular Hanna-Barbera animated tv series. Despite James Gunn on script, this is not very good, a one-dimensional, no-brain film trying to look like a one-dimensional, no-brain cartoon
Sequel to the live-action Scooby-Doo, this is at least a better film than its predecessor, being more polished in its slapstick and effects but still has no more ambition beyond being a silly no-brain film
Obscure horror anthology from the great era of regional drive-in cinema. The stories lose any potential due to incredibly dreary direction
A British horror anthology made up of three stories from director Michael Armstrong. As always the episodes are variable but the episode with the killer Punch and Judy dolls stands out
Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa conducts a remake of the British thriller Seance on a Wet Afternoon. Where the original was a mundane film that depicted a kidnap scheme involving a fake medium, Kurosawa builds this out as an actual ghost story
Adam Wingard’s regular scriptwriter Simon Barrett directs a revival of the girls’ boarding school ghost story. I had very high expectations of this
Ghost story BBC mini-series adapted from a novel by horror writer James Herbert that unfolds between two different eras. With an amazing cast of Before They Were Famous names.
Excellent and overlooked film with Kathryn Harrold as a psychiatrist trying to deal with the fact that one of the patients in an asylum has vast psychic powers
Michael Winner directs a film about a sinister apartment building but his typical crude and heavy-handed style fails to conjure anything remotely scary
William Brent Bell, director of The Devil Inside and The Boy, returns with a ghost story where a widower and daughter are haunted by his ex-wife
Modest name cast, including a highly entertaining Val Kilmer, in a film about a group of strangers brought together at a mysterious backwoods house
Horror film where escaped convicts wander into a Western ghost town where a gold treasure is guarded by mummies
Husband and wife find their new home in the countryside to be haunted. A ghost story that is not up to much before what has become one of the biggest cliche endings in the book
Very obscure independently-made ghost story – and justly so … It seems more interested in being a vague, incredibly pretentious woman’s psychodrama than it ever is in the usual ghost story stuff of spooking and scaring an audience
Spookily effective Japanese ghost story about a mother’s pilgrimage around a series of shrines to raise her daughter’s spirit from the dead
Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel throws much of the book out but has duly become a classic. Jack Nicholson goes grandly mad amid Kubrick’s stupendous production and unsettling set-pieces
Stephen King expressed dissatisfaction with the way Stanley Kubrick handled his novel and here remakes it as a tv mini-series that adheres more closely to the book. While Kubrick’s film is far better, this is not bad where even the perpetually awful Mick Garris subdues his tendency to overdo everything towards some subtlety
A Thai ghost story that later underwent a lesser Hollywood remake, this generates quite a degree of atmosphere in the story of a photographer who is haunted by a ghost girl who appears out of his photographs
An English-language remake of a Thai horror film about haunted photographs. Another by-the-numbers remake that is a pale shadow of its original
Haunted house film that comes with the novelty of being shot entirely in one take. This delivers some okay but never standout jumps but in the end you appreciate it more for its technical novelty than producing scares
Fascinating and original Taiwanese film about scientists investigating a haunted house and employing various methods to trap the ghosts
Scott Derrickson film that is badly underwritten in terms of proper explanatory rationale. That said, you cannot deny that Derrickson manages to produce the scary goods on a number of occasions
The original had some undeniably effective jumps but suffered from a lack of explanatory rationale but this makes for a shaky house of cards when the same arbitrary happenings are extended for a sequel
A horror film set around a haunted house attraction that is made with near-total amateurishness. The film seems to have multiple plots happening all at once and becomes impossible trying to figure out what is happening
Low-budget film about a team of FBI ghost hunters investigating an abandoned prison where mysterious things are going on
The film that made the name of M. Night Shyamalan and still a strong and spooky story despite the variability of Shyamalan’s offerings since then. What made the film a classic was its twist ending, something that has been relentlessly copied by numerous genre films since
A considerable word of mouth hit, this generates a very spooky atmosphere with highly unusual shooting techniques
Tim Burton adapts the classic Washington Irving ghost story, although throws most of it out, to make his own beautifully designed period piece spearheaded by another eccentric Johnny Depp performance
Another version of the popular figure from Japanese urban legend, which has appeared in a number of films. This is an anthology where four Japanese directors have come to L.A. to shoot a series of strictly average short horror tales, not all of which feature the Slit Mouth Woman
Film made without dialogue about haunted happenings at a cabin in the woods that attains quite a haunted atmosphere
Called the Russian 2001. Andrei Tarkovsky makes one of the great SF films, a haunting ghost story set on a space station as an alien planet below drives the crew mad with recreated doppelgangers of their loved ones
Steven Soderbergh’s English-language remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic SF film. Soderbergh trims Tarkovsky’s long-windedness and makes the plot tighter, more intimate but this still emerges as a lesser version than the original
Film about premonition of an airline disaster and the survivor being haunted in the aftermath. Not dissimilar to the James Herbert adaptation The Survivor, this goes in predictable directions while never being entirely clear what is happening
Daniel Myrick, one of the co-directors of The Blair Witch Project, conducts a remake of a Danish-Swedish ghost story, relocating it to Lousiana. Myrick does nothing remarkable with the material, even at the twist ending, largely treading in the safety of antebellum cliches
Troubled teenager is sent to a reform camp only to find he has raised a force that is exacting brutal vengeance against his bullies. This feels like one of the underdog gets supernatural comeuppance films that we had after Carrie but is rather well made on all fronts
Passable but slight tv movie adaptation of a Stephen King short story about a teacher facing undead pupils
This is essentially The Sixth Sense rehashed as a teen horror film and conducted without any finesse – here you can see the twist ending coming miles in advance
Highly original piece that works as a supernatural version of Black Hawk Down with a unit of soldiers cut off in rebel territory and surrounded by spirit beings. Grippingly effective both in terms of the tension and a script that treats the phenomenon with scrupulous rationalism
A work of brooding Italian Gothic, a loose sequel to The Terror of Dr Hichcock. Featuring oodles of atmosphere and the genre’s indisputable queen Barbara Steele as a wife haunted by a dead husband
South Korean horror film that feels like The Sixth Sense crossed with the enigmatic games of Don’t Look Now. The film takes place in a cryptically baffling mandala of dreams, hallucinations and possible deathdream that eventually proves rather absorbing
The black sheep among the Japanese Ringu films. A sequel released the same time as the first film, this lacks the other’s uncanny atmosphere and was ignored
Banal ghost story mostly noted for starring a teenage Elisabeth Moss
Here gimmick master William Castle turns his attention away from the usual into making a light fantasy comedy about a family who buy a house inhabited by ghosts
A blatant copy of The Blair Witch Project with a group of people armed with video cameras investigating a haunted house
Marc Forster film that starts in with a beautifully filmed sense of disquiet mood and eerie reality disjuncts but loses it when it opts for another M. Night Shyamalan twist ending
TV movie in which Catherine Bell is a 911 operator who receives calls from a ghostly child
Enormously underrated directorial effort from screenwriter David Koepp in which Kevin Bacon gains the ability to see the dead. A film filled with some genuinely spooky moments
Stir of Echoes was a spookily effective film. Alas in this sequel, we go from Kevin Bacon as a medium to Rob Lowe as a haunted Iraq War veteran amid a series of routine pop-up scares
From the world’s oldest living director ( Manoel de Oliveira who turned 102 when this was released) comes a ghost story that remains soporifically dull and never seems to get started
A film from the famous poverty row studios of its era that has gained a certain cult reputation. The film transcends its cheapness to create an undeniable spooky atmosphere in its tale of a ghostly revenant, even if the cult has tended to overstate its effectiveness
An Indian horror film about a folk tale of a witch spirit the Stree, this was a popular success that was then built out into an Indian version of The Conjuring Universe
From the director of Excision, another film that satirically digs its claws into middle-class values but there is the feeling we have seen all of this before and the film fails to provide anything funny. Added to this is a barely scary ghost plot the film occasionally remembers to get back to
Mind-bogglingly bizarre documentary that conducts a tour of the bizarre practices of Chinese religion
Fairly negligible film about a family who move into a house to face the vengeance of a witch