murder house
8 titles
Horror films set in a house or hotel where something is wrong, and the people who stay anyway. The eight run from 1928 to 2022, and several are about a family line as much as a building.
The earliest film here puts the curse in a family. Roderick Usher is convinced his family is tainted by generations of evil in The Fall of the House of Usher, and goes to ruthless lengths to stop his sister Madeline's wedding. The later films give the history to the building. A brother and sister move into an old house on the English coast in The Uninvited, hear stories about its previous owners, and start hearing sounds in the night that nobody can explain. Dr. Markway takes three people to Hill House, a mansion with a lurid history of violent death and insanity, in The Haunting, to prove ghosts exist. In The Amityville Horror, the real estate agent discloses the house's history in full, George and Kathy Lutz buy it anyway, and George says, "Houses don't have memories."
The Shining moves the fear into a hotel: Jack Torrance takes a caretaker job at the Overlook, and he, his wife Wendy and their son Danny live there isolated from the rest of the world for the winter. The Freelings in Poltergeist are happy where they are, a close-knit family in a peaceful suburban home, and the first odd occurrences amuse everyone. Hereditary goes back to where the shelf started: when Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, dies, her daughter's family begins uncovering secrets about its ancestry, the bloodline fear of The Fall of the House of Usher again. Barbarian ends the run on the same decision: a young woman arrives at her Airbnb late at night, finds a strange man already there, and stays the night. Several of these start with a family happy in the house, and you wait for that to stop.
