The 25 Scariest Ghost Movies

Although it's a horror-comedy, House has its share of scares, as my mid-'80s bed sheets will attest. It follows a horror novelist (William Katt) who moves into his recently deceased aunt's home, only to realize that it's haunted by all manner of ghouls and flying garden tools. Believe it or not, they're walking on air!

Seeing it play out like a hybrid of The Shining and The Amityville Horror (with an even darker ending), you realize how ahead-of-its-time Burnt Offerings was, coming three years before either of those films. In the movie, a family rents an old house for the summer, and guess what? It's haunted! Spookiness ensues.

A bit convoluted and heavy-handed, this English-language French production nonetheless provides oodles of beautifully shot haunted house atmosphere. Released on DVD with the uninspiring title House of Voices, Saint Ange tells the tale of a young cleaning woman in 1950s France who gets a job tidying up a abandoned orphanage but finds that the children who died there have not left. Watching this film, you have to think that the makers of The Orphanage had seen it at least once.

Like The Wonder Years with an extra helping of murder and racism, Lady in White wraps nostalgia up in a complex supernatural mystery as a man relates the story of his ghostly childhood encounter while locked all night in his elementary school. The film achieves scares by masterfully placing you in the boy's shoes and recapturing all those childhood fears that you paid psychiatrists to help you forget.

While certainly not the best haunted house movie, this story about a model who moves into an apartment building that doubles as a gateway to Hell provides plenty of surreal, scary imagery, including a memorable scene in which the model finds her father walking around her apartment...dead.

Its popularity suffered from being released just a few months after The Sixth Sense, but Stir of Echoes isn't as similar to that film as it was marketed. It tells the story of a man who begins to see the ghost of a girl after being hypnotized by a friend. His young son also has the "gift," but the kid's ability doesn't play as large a role as the kid in The Sixth Sense -- which is good, because Stir of Echoes is its own movie, featuring a well-written mystery and ample chills. And Kevin Bacon.

This Thai hit introduced little new to the realm of Asian ghost movies, but it handled the conventions incredibly well, piling frightful scene upon frightful scene as a vengeful ghost seeks payback against those who wronged her.

One of the few horror movie remakes that managed to bring something new to the table, House on Haunted Hill transformed the campy original into a dark and twisted work with startling visuals (including clever use of video cameras) and, unlike most ghost movies, explicit gore.

A sort of supernatural homage to Hitchcock, What Lies Beneath is a slick, big-budget production about a woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) who begins to think that her house is haunted by the ghost of her next-door neighbor. It has the classic feel of an old-fashioned murder mystery with the added fright factor of the ghost of the victim returning from her watery grave.

This Stephen King adaptation mines some of the same terror as his other haunted hotel film, The Shining, presenting an otherworldly anything-can-happen fright-fest that pulls the rug out from under you so many times that you never trust that everything will be OK.