The haunted house is a well-known trope—and yet this familiar horror movie staple is still capable of giving viewers the creeps. After all, it’s the imposing space where spirits prey on fears, and where a character can run — preferably not down the creaky steps to the basement—but can’t hide. “It doesn’t take much to make us scared inside a haunted house,” Leonard Maltin, film historian and cohost of the Maltin on Movies podcast, tells Architectural Digest. “All we need is an indication or belief that something is there, like a shadow of light through a doorway. Less is more.”
The chilling concept dates back to a 1927 silent movie called The Cat and the Canary, in which a family is stalked by a mysterious figure inside a decaying mansion that overlooks New York’s Hudson River. “The movie became synonymous for a long time with the prototypical old dark house thriller,” Maltin says. Five years later, an entry literally titled The Old Dark House starring Boris Karloff (Frankenstein) and Charles Laughton spooked audiences. In the wake of its success, “the old dark house wasn’t just a title,” he notes. “It was a description and a blueprint for a certain type of horror movie.”
Of course, a house is only as haunted as the malevolent ghostly beings inside it. Master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock put his own spin on this idea with the gothic 1940 classic Rebecca, the story of a married woman (Joan Fontaine) terrorized by the presence of her husband’s first wife inside their mansion. In the 1959’s The House on Haunted Hill, an eccentric millionaire (Vincent Price) and his wife offer strangers $10,000 to survive a night in their ghost-occupied abode. “You don’t know what’s coming,” Maltin says. “What’s scarier than tiptoeing down that darkened hallway?”
Answer: Tiptoeing down a hallway in your own tree-lined, picket-fenced suburban home. Nail-biters such as The Exorcist (1973); Halloween (1978), Amityville Horror (1979), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and even Beetlejuice (1988) are all set inside confines intended to provide security. They don’t. “A home is supposed to be the most comforting place of all,” Maltin says. “So when a boogeyman appears, it adds another layer of tension.”
Perhaps the most horrifying example is 1982’s Poltergeist: A family moves into a split-level California residence, unaware that it was built above an old cemetery where the rotting corpses remain. “These people are trying to acclimate and everything goes haywire, so it’s doubly frightening,” he notes. (Not even the TV set is safe!)
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In the new wave of thrillers, the haunted house has expanded into inventive—and equally suspenseful—territory. In the atmospheric World War II–set The Others (2001), a mother (Nicole Kidman) and her two photosensitive children live in an ominous house but pick up on strange behavior after new caretakers show up. The twist is stunning. With its washed-out and foggy backdrop, “it’s effective because of the ‘things that go bump in the night’” factor,” Maltin says.
The 2010 film Let Me In, a remake of the much-loved Swedish film Let the Right One In, is set in an apartment complex and features an oddball girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) who only comes out at night. A secrets-loaded house also plays a crucial role in the sharp new films Parasite (now playing) and Knives Out (November 27). To reveal anything more would serve as major spoilers.
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The fundamental idea of the haunted house, clearly, will not be uprooted anytime soon. “It has never been what you see, but what you think or fear you may eventually see—and that concept has not changed,” Maltin says. “You don’t need visual effects to create that atmosphere. That’s why these movies are timeless.”
