5.19.2016

Haunted House Movies

On Good Friday 1999, two of my best friends and I decided to do a thematic movie night in which we rented haunted house movies. We tried to do it by decade. We went to a video store (remember those?) at picked up:

The Uninvited
The House on Haunted Hill
The Innocents

The Haunting
The Shining


. . . And one other movie. That none of us can remember.

(It also occurs to me that we didn't really have a 70s movie in there, unless there's another one we're forgetting we watched.)

It would help if we could even remember something about the final movie, but after the mind-numbing Shining, and given the late (early) hour, we simply can't. I only vaguely have the notion HBO had something to do with it. Like, we'd had to settle for some HBO movie rather than a "real" one. But I can't even remember who starred in it. A guy . . . with dark hair . . . I think there were kids?

Clearly, this movie did not leave much of an impression. I was debating whether it might have been Haunted with Aidan Quinn, but the plot doesn't sound familiar to me. So then I also watched the Beyond Darkness trailer, which has the dark-haired man and the kids, but it didn't spark any remembrances either.

Hmm.

In truth, haunted house movies are my favorite kinds of scare—so long as they stay largely psychological and don't get too gory. I even love really bad haunted house movies. So if you have any favorites, feel free to suggest them!

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