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Old 02-17-2008, 12:45 AM
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English Gothic/ Haunted Houses


The Amityville Horror (1979)



"We're all aware of the controversy behind the Amityville Horror story: is it true, or is it a hoax? Well, with the original film installment, it's of little difference. the horror seems very real as we watch a family tormented by a series of wicked hauntings.
When the Lutzes move into a beautiful but nevertheless looming new house (which plays like a character itself), their joy turns quickly to misery as the angry spirits left from a hideous murder years ago begin to torment them. The appropriately bare-bones delivery of the film jostles the viewer as we watch Mr. Lutz descend into madness at the hands of the ghosts, abandoning his family in a veritable hell!" - Fortunato


The Changeling (1980)



"As a child the now iconic bouncing red ball, child's abandoned wheelchair and creepy music box singed my mind and caused a restlessness I had not experienced until that time (eventually these images were replaced by a very different horror movie featuring a dream-invading child murderer).
Yet I do not think I fully understood the scope of The Changeling until recently reviewing the film as an adult. (To get a similar effect as when I first saw this I decided to use my old Vestron VHS copy and popped my video in with all the lights out.)
I have to say WOW! Those images still packed the punch intended but now the whole story line, character interaction, hidden meanings and musical score became an essential aspect of the fright factor.
The story revolves around a professional musician and professor who during car trouble (on vacation with his family) makes his way to a phone booth to call for help while his wife and daughter frolic near the stalled car in the snow. Along come two vehicles barreling down the
icy roads in opposing directions and he is helpless to witness an accident that suddenly takes his family from him.
After several months of recovering from the traumatic loss (especially of his little girl) he moves to an area where he has some friends, a new job, and into a home that has a very eerie and somewhat familiar past to it. As time goes on he realizes that someone or something is trying to make contact with him from within the gothic dwelling and more importantly wants something from him.
Is it because he lost a child that he is able to be reached by this entity?
One of the things that strikes me as truly interesting and scary about this film is that not one but 3 children are directly impacted negatively throughout it, starting with his daughter at the beginning of the movie and continuing through the mystery of his new home, on towards another young girl who has nothing to do with any of the injustices that are eventually exposed, but happens to live in the wrong place.
Is there anything truly scarier than children in peril? Who or what is The Changeling?
Watch this classic and see why movies such as The Ring, Silent Hill and Premonition have all borrowed from it over the years." - Cinestro


The Haunting (1963)



"There's no single drop of blood or a surprise scary appearance of visible ghostly figures but still Robert Wise made a milestone of horror out of it. This is a film that still today's new uprising filmmakers of haunted house movies should consider as a 'Holy Book' for them specially in terms of cinematography, lighting, sound effects and characterization. From the very beginning of Eleanor's entrance into the house made you feel that there was something lurking around every corner, or there was something that was going to happen, but you just didn't know quite when. A brilliant adaptation from the novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson where a whisper coming from the creepy walls of Hill house at midnight works in a more terrifying way than a scream." - Roshiq


The Innocents (1961)



"The film starts with Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), a nineteenth century British governess, is appointed to take care of two children, Flora and Miles. Upon arriving at the bleak mansion she meets the housekeeper and also Flora. Miles arrives a few days later from school. The children seem like little angels but, following a series of bizarre events and examples of the children's wicked impulses, Miss Giddens begins to suspect that all is not what it seems. An unresolved mystery that charges the events of this Gothic story with a dreadful sense of uncertainty far more thrilling than the simple supernatural chills of a typical haunted house movie.

The film made masterly in every way with a great performance from beautiful Deborah Kerr as the troubled Victorian governess, superb black-and-white wide screen photography by Freddie Francis and Georges Auric's truly distinguished soundtrack of laughs and whispers. Not forget to add the remarkable performances by the two children, and we're given a ghost story that stays with us not because of spring-loaded frights, but because of how it tingles our nervous system throughout the eerie, unsettling finale. Truman Capote's screenplay centered on the question: are the two children really possessed by the ghosts of the dead, or is their governess merely imagining everything? Producer-director Jack Clayton keeps the film firmly grounded in reality, so that the essence of this psychological study strikes far more strongly.

The Innocents is one of the most intelligent and evocative ghost story filmed in those golden years of cinema when the audience around the globe witnessed some brilliant celluloid works on English Gothic and Psychological horror ever made. This film adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw is like a lost Titanic that sunk into the middle of the phenomenal success of Psycho (1960), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and The Haunting (1963)." - Roshiq


The Shining (1980)




Honorable Mentions:

House on Haunted Hill (1959)

The Legend of Hell House (1973)
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Last edited by _____V_____; 04-12-2014 at 02:29 AM.
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