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Featured image: Still from The Haunted House, 1908
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Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott: The Best Haunted House Movies
Bill Newcott reviews The Vigil, the Hassidic Jewish horror movie you didn’t know you needed, and takes us on a tour of the most watchable haunted house movies.
Comments
Thanks, Bob–I’m going to check out your Haunted House recommendations!
There has been an unwarranted omission: from 1963, “The Haunting,” the film version of Shirley Jackson’s, “The Haunting of Hill House.”
Also, “The Old, Dark House,” one of the goodies in the string of horror films from Universal in the first few years of the 1930s, deserve mention. True, there is some over the top silliness there, but it’s still a good watching experience.
But I liked and am grateful for the video, which I’m going to re – watch to make some notes.
For lovers of “general eeriness” movies, I recommend the low budget movies Val Lewton produced for RKO in the 1930s, especially “Cat People,” “The Seventh Victim,” and “The Curse of the Cat People.” If I were forced to compile a personal Top Ten ( a typically American, and dumb, thing we’re fond of ), the latter two would be on it. A few years ago, the kinds of surveys of scholars and critics which get done all the time showed, “The Curse of the Cat People,” to be, in their opinion, the 35th greatest film of all time.
It really is that good, a beautiful, black and white little art movie which keeps the viewer almost hypnotized, it’s so good.