Great movies about haunted houses – Part 10

I love horror films so many movies have given me and the wife so much pleasure scaring the bejeezus out of us. Some of my favorites include (WARNING: SPOILERS!):

“Burnt Offerings”: A man, his wife, his son, and his aunt move into a beautiful house that they pick up for a total steal. The house has only one occupant that stays on the top floor and the wife takes it upon herself to take care of her. Over time the wife starts to act a little weird and the aunt gets sick and starts dying. After the aunt dies parts of the house actually rebuild themselves. The husband finally gets sick of the weirdness and decides to move out. The wife goes to say goodbye to the old lady upstairs (whose always tending to her picture collection) and is gone for a while. The husband goes upstairs to look for his wife and finds an old lady up there. He asks if his wife is around and the old lady turns around and it turns out she’s the wife! The son is outside waiting still and all of a sudden his dad flies out the window and crashes into the car. Then, the chimney collapses on top of the kid. The next scene shows a new family moving into the house and they pan upstairs to the photo collection and among the dozens of pictures are the aunt, the husband, and the son. Creepy.

“The Shining” (Stanley Kubrick version) Nothing says scary more than Jack Nicholson – however, he was still able to do some real acting in this film. A man, his wife, and son (I sense a pattern here) move into a hotel to watch over it for the winter as the man tries to write his next novel. Weird things start happening and the kid starts to see creepy things all over the hotel. The father slowly starts to lose his mind and starts to see ghosts telling him that he’s been in the hotel since it was built. One of the ghosts tells him that he needs to kill his wife and son and the father grabs an axe and tries to hunt and kill his family. This leads to a chase through a large hedge maze and the mother and son are able to escape and the father freezes to death in the middle of the maze. The final image of the movie is an old picture of a party at the hotel and the father is in the middle of all of the revelers.

“The Ammityville Horror” (original version) considered a staple among haunted house films (but not the sequels!). A young family move into a beautiful house that had been on the market ever since the last owner went on a killing spree taking out his whole family. There were rumors that the guy had been possessed,