Ranking The Most Haunted Houses In Hollywood History
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Halloween is just around the corner–probably cast in shadow and wielding a butcher knife–and with the release of Guillermo Del Toro’s gothic horror CRIMSON PEAK, which Bryan Liberty reviewed for The Tracking Board, we wanted to investigate the spookiest structures in cinema and rank our favorites.
But we realized it was hard to choose just one, so we’ve broken it down into a few categories. Let us know if you agree or disagree, and don’t forget to vote in our poll below… or else.
MOST GORGEOUSLY GOTHIC HAUNTED HOUSE
In honor of Del Toro’s gothic horror revival, let’s start with a tip of the hat to production designers. Del Toro’s Crimson Peak gives us a gorgeous, decrepit manor that’s sinking into a hill of oozing red clay. The walls drip red, with tattered holes in the ceiling and walls condemning the chilly Allerdale Hall. However, the expansive homestead is a Gothic horror lovers’ dream, with a romantic aura of rich color. Black moths flutter inside its hallowed halls as pits of red clay bubble in the basement. It’s a beautifully sinister building that you couldn’t pay us to spend the night in.
In the 1961 classic Edgar Allen Poe adaptation The Pit and the Pendulum, Vincent Price lives in a towering, isolated castle that lives at the edge of a steely cliff. The foreboding castle is adorned with luscious color, stained glass windows, and…oh yes, a torture chamber in the basement. With an enormous swinging pendulum above a looming pit, buried remains behind brick walls, and secret passages galore, this Gothic crypt is just the bees knees.
On to the grandaddy of all Gothic haunts – The Innocents. The 1961 Jack Clayton-helmed masterpiece sets us in a house that is the definition of eerie. With darkened corridors lit only by candles and the grey light from long windows, this aging structure is the perfect setting for an old-fashioned ghost story. A small pond and field behind the house adds to the terror, serving as the landscape for one of the film’s most terrifying images. Shot in spectacular black and white stock, this house boasts enough dreadful shadows and darkened staircases to captivate and terrify all at once.
We’re going to have to give it up to Crimson Peak. Every room boasts enough beauty, madness, and horrifying terror to satisfying even the most die-heard Gothic horror fan. It’s both equally gorgeous and ghastly all at once.
WINNER: Allerdale Hall (Crimson Peak)
HAUNTED HOUSE WE’D MOST LIKE TO LIVE IN
Most haunted houses in the history of horror don’t exactly inspire you to call up your real estate agent and drop a down payment. Not only are they typically creaky, paint-stripped fixer-uppers, but they’re, you know, haunted.
That said, when I first saw Beetlejuice, I fantasized about moving into the Maintland’s gothic Connecticut house–drab wallpaper and dusty attic in all. Tim Burton’s trademark visual style is all over the house, which becomes increasingly modernist throughout the film as the Deetz’s imprint it with their high-fashion New York sensibilities. It’s the quaint Connecticut town (actually shot in Vermont) however, and that three-walled porch that make the Beetlejuice house such a steal.
The Freelings home in 1982’s Poltergeist, directed by Tobe Hooper and produced by Steven Spielberg, has its own draws. Sure, the maroon carpet screams, well, 1982, Sure the house is decidedly called-out as part of the urban sprawl McMansion wave that took off around that time. And, yes, it’s built on top of a haunted cemetery–from which somebody forgot to remove the bodies. But aside from that, this Agoura Hills mock-Tudor is the total package.
Casper, based on the comics Casper the Friendly Ghost, says it all right in the title. While the thought of a dead little boy wanting to be your best friend is creepy when you really think about it, Whipstaff Manor and its Gaudi-inspired accents is just the right balance of ghostly and gorgeous.
While the Poltergeist house offers normalcy, the skeletons in the pool are little off-putting. The spirits haunting the Beetlejuice house are fun, complete with a chorus line of football players, though those pesky sandworms are certainly a nasty problem not worth their hassle. We’ve gotta give it up to Casper‘s abode, which has fun inventions, a magnificent ballroom, and a handy ride that gets you shaved, showered, and ready for the day. Plus, you know we want some of those pancake breakfasts Casper makes.
WINNER: Whipstaff Manor (Casper)
MOST HAUNTED HOUSE THAT’S NOT REALLY A HOUSE
The history of haunted house films has featured plenty of haunted places that weren’t actually houses at all. Take one of the most acclaimed ‘haunting’ films in history, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, based on the novel from Stephen King. The Shining features Jack Nicholson losing his mind in The Overlook Hotel–a labyrinthine Colonial Revival hotel tucked away in the Colorado mountains. With ballrooms, bartenders, and hedge maze, the Overlook offers an expansive environment in which the murderous ghosts get to play.
The King-inspired 1408 adds an element of claustrophobia to the murderous ghosts infecting a hotel, while the King adaptation Christine, directed by John Carpenter, features a Plymouth Fury haunted by the spirit of its previous owner, now running down innocent teenagers.
Event Horizon is arguably a haunted spaceship, although whether the ghosts in that film were actually demons from hell, aliens messing with a weaker race, or simply black hole induced madness remains undetermined.
But we shall not forget one of the most potentially awesome, yet poorly executed horror movie premises in recent memory, 2002’s Ghost Ship. How two super cool things–a movie taking place on a rusty old ship and ghosts–was so rife with flaws we’ll never know. Then again, the poster’s tagline ‘Sea Evil’ makes up for most them.
WINNER: The Overlook Hotel (The Shining)
MOST HAUNTED TOWN
Some of the most truly terrifying haunted house stories are about not only the houses themselves, but the towns in which they’re built. The rural Rhode Island setting of The Conjuring certainly sets the tone for what’s to come, as does The Amityville Horror, set in Amityville, New York and based on the true story of a reported haunting there. Amityville has the charm of a autumnal New England village, and the despair of an actual murder–six of them, sadly–that inspired the series of films. The subsequent haunting that famously drove out the Lutz family has given Amityville a reputation to this day.
Just across the bridge from Long Island’s Amityville, New York City famously served as the setting for Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II. Amityville’s ghosts affect the small town of a few thousand people, but Marshmallow Man terrorized a pink-slimed city of 8 million people.
But the endlessly creepy town of Silent Hill, West Virginia could take the cake. Not just because of the cult that has taken over the place–including the bizarre Pyramid Head–but because adding ‘West Virginia’ to anything automatically makes it 20% scarier.
WINNER: Amityville, New York (The Amityville Horror)
THE MOST HAUNTED HAUNTED HOUSE
Let’s get down to brass tacks: which haunted house is the most haunted?
Certainly the Poltergeist house, which features a bedroom filled with a tornado of swirling objects, an aggressive oak tree and an overactive television is a contender. The Overlook Hotel is certainly not a place I’d ever want to check-into, but then again, exactly what the hell is happening in there is never entirely clear.
1959’s House on Haunted Hill, directed by William Castle, was so haunted that the psychotic ward of the mansion offered each of his guests a pistol and $10,000 just to stay in the place overnight. While the film ultimately doesn’t reveal all that many ghosts hanging around, it does end with Vincent Price breaking the fourth wall and warning his audience that the ghosts will “come for you!” So that’s worth something.
The movie itself may not make into the cinematic canon of essential American films, but consider the 2001 Robert Zemeckis-produced remake of Castle’s 1960 classic haunted house story 13 Ghosts, affectionately titled Thir13en Ghosts (because numbers in titles = scary). The spectral glasses that allow the ghost hunters to see nearby spirits generates some genuinely heart-stopping scenes–not to mention some grisly ones.
