The 10 Scariest Movie Haunted Homes We'd Never Be Caught Dead In

The visionary Guillermo del Toro helms this sumptuous Gothic melodrama with haunted house themes. The newly wed Edith Cushing moves into her husband Sir Thomas Sharpe’s mammoth yet crumbling estate, Allerdale Hall, along with his sister, Lucille. Edith warily navigates the mansion, drenched in midnight blues, where the only light comes from flickering candelabras. As she moves through the hallways, she searches for the source of the unsettling whispers and creaking floors. The ghosts are unlike any you’ve seen before—spindly creatures with red skin stretched taut over their bones, bent limbs, and dark, hollow eyes. The slow-moving, moaning creatures hold the key to the nefarious Sharpe family history.

At first, Insidious feels familiar, another story about a married couple (Rose Byrne and scream king Patrick Wilson) and their young children moving into a new home, only to experience unusual, supernatural occurrences—randomly blaring alarms, bloody handprints on the children’s bed, and eerie noises. James Wan meticulously crafts his horror scenes with subtlety. In one memorable scene, the camera follows Renai as she goes about the house doing mundane chores, like taking out the garbage, while the unsettling children’s song “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” warbles on a record player.

Through the window from a distance, she catches a barely noticeable shadow of a little boy in period clothing, dancing to the song. It’s little moments like these that make Insidious so frightening. There’s plenty of jump scares, as well, like the sudden appearance of a red-faced demon that will leave your heart in your throat. The most inventive and chilling part of Insidious is The Further, a dark, foggy dimension where lost souls and demonic entities wait for the living.

While director Takashi Shimizu’s Japanese original is arguably superior, he also directs the American version of The Grudge, and both are well worth watching. The English version follows Sarah Michelle Gellar as an American nurse who encounters a haunted house in Tokyo. The way Japanese horror depicts ghosts gives you goosebumps—long-haired, pale figures with wide, black eyes that stare at you with a laser focus, appearing out of nowhere.

One of the scariest scenes is when a ghost crawls down the stairs, its limbs contorted into jagged angles and making a god-awful croaking noise. Another appears directly on top of someone beneath the covers. The Grudge transforms the emotional pain of a person’s life on Earth into a curse that claims all those who enter the space where these traumas occurred—creating an endless cycle of torment.

There’s some 1970s-era cheese in The Amityville Horror, but it’s still one of the OG haunted house movies and a must-see. Based on a true story, the Lutz family moves into a New York home where Ronald DeFeo Jr. slaughtered his entire family. The famous arched windows truly look like eyes, as if the house is sizing up its next victims.

Satanic occurrences plague the new residents, such as being swarmed by flies, waking up at the same early hour that the DeFeos were murdered, and seeing the piercing eyes of a pig outside the second-story window. The Amityville Horror makes the menacing assertion that the dark events tied to the land where our homes are built, as well as the history within a house’s walls, can manifest in evil ways.

Despite being championed by Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese as one of the scariest movies of all time, The Haunting doesn’t rely on jump scares or terrifying monster reveals, unlike the hokey 1999 remake. Instead, Robert Wise’s film takes its time and revels in ambiguity, never allowing the viewer to truly know what’s behind the swaying chandeliers, the loud banging, or the sounds of a girl crying. We learn that the stately mansion does have a tragic backstory when a group is brought there for a paranormal study, including a psychic (Claire Bloom) and a lonely woman who claims to have personal experience with the supernatural (Julie Harris).

What The Haunting lacks in traditional frights makes up for in atmosphere: ominous low angles, a sharp monochromatic palette, and the ornate Gothic surroundings of the sprawling manor. The camera itself has a ghostly presence, observing the characters from afar with a curious tension, using widescreen to capture the lopsided rooms, always leaving us uncertain whether something strange will appear.

Paranormal Activity became a cinematic sensation thanks to its viral marketing that included trailers with night vision clips of terrified audience members and a campaign urging people to demand the film be shown in their theaters. Similar to The Blair Witch Project, the identities of the actors were kept hidden, making it feel as though this footage was truly found. Paranormal Activity is one of the best haunted house movies because of its simplicity; most of the film is observing the couple Katie and Micah (Katie Featherson and Micah Sloat) sleeping in their new home, unaware that an invisible demonic presence is also watching them and waiting to strike.

It makes you wonder what happens in your own home while you’re fast asleep. We are filled with dread every time the video camera time clock reaches 3AM, when the vengeful supernatural forces pull comforters, slam doors, or drag someone into a pitch-black hallway. The lo-fi aesthetic and practical special effects make the scares feel more personal and tangible, culminating in a cruel and devastating ending.

Nicole Kidman delivers yet another arresting performance as Grace, a buttoned-up, devout mother who will do anything to protect her pale, delicate children with a rare condition that makes exposure to the sunlight painful. This means that the inside of the stately Gothic estate on the English countryside is cloaked in shadow and lit by candlelight throughout the film, which only heightens the tension of the ghostly happenings such as a piano playing by itself or doorknobs randomly jiggling.

One of the most terrifying scenes is when Grace finds an elderly woman wearing her daughter’s communion dress and playing with puppets but speaking in her little voice. There’s an antiquated eeriness to The Others in the depictions of seances and nineteenth-century photographs of corpses, all building to a surprising twist ending that completely turns the haunted house genre on its head.

Tobe Hooper, who directed the grimy Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and producer Steven Spielberg, the king of suspenseful blockbusters, join forces for Poltergeist, which follows the Freeling family living in a suburban California home. The film is filled with bold and unforgettable visuals: a knotted tree that comes to life and bursts into a child’s bedroom, a creepy clown doll, a face melting into bone, a little girl sucked into a television set, and a pool filled with skeletons.

The family enlists a team of paranormal experts, including a psychic, to try to rescue Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) and exorcise the sinister and restless spirits that haunt their home. They eventually discover a macabre truth about the land their home was built on. While Poltergeist is certainly scary, it also has a playful side, offering a thrill ride that gleefully drags its characters through a chaotic, rollercoaster-like experience.

The Orphanage blends a traditional haunted house ghost story with a missing persons thriller, set in a decaying estate that was once an orphanage. After living there as a child, Laura Rodríguez (Belén Rueda) returns to the orphanage with her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and their seven-year-old son Simón (Roger Princep), planning to transform it into a haven for children with disabilities.

Soon, Simón claims to have befriended a boy named Tomás, who wears a disturbing sack with a painted-on smile. Laura also sees him appear throughout the grounds. Shot in muted colors, The Orphanage carries a deep sense of melancholy. After Simón mysteriously goes missing, the film moves toward a tragic and shocking ending that reveals the creepy children cliché is more than it seems.

James Wan is a master of horror because he knows exactly how to carefully and slowly form heart-jumping, inventive scares with haunting images. They often strike you when you least expect it, like the sudden appearance of a foot dangling from a ghastly pale body hanging from a tree, or a craggy, snarling witch perched on top of a dresser. The Conjuring is one of his best films, based on the true story of the Perron family, who move into a house where strange occurrences begin—waking up at 3:07AM every morning, bruises appearing on the mother Carolyn’s (Lili Taylor) body, and an unseen figure lurking in a pitch-black bedroom corner.

The way Wan reveals the ghosts—slow and steady, yet quick and lacerating—is truly terrifying. The Conjuring also turns the real-life demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, who also worked on the Amityville Horror case, into compelling protagonists with a romantic love story. It also gives them a connection to the film’s surprisingly moving themes of motherhood.