You've got the spirit: The 25 greatest films about ghosts

The greatest of all cinematic ghost stories, and one of the greatest films period, is Kenji Mizoguchi’s fable about an ambitious potter (Masayuki Mori) who is persuaded by the spirit of a deceased noblewoman (Machiko Kyo) to leave his wife and child. He does so for a time, and then upon realizing his folly, he returns home to his family where he unexpectedly encounters another ghost. Mizoguchi’s masterpiece is an exquisitely directed yet profoundly simple meditation on greed and kindness that will resonate so long as men stubbornly succumb to their worst impulses.

Speaking of men succumbing to their worst impulses, here’s the none-too-cheery story of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), an author who, seeking isolation as the winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, finds madness instead. Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s bestseller makes early use of the steadicam to thrust the viewer into the vast emptiness of the hotel, where the ghosts of a previous caretaker’s murdered family await. If you’re making a list of the creepiest specters in film history, no one would argue if you placed the Grady twins right at the top.

Peter Medak’s horror classic stars George C. Scott as a grieving widower who moves into a creepy old Victorian mansion that harbors a sinister secret. Unlike its 1980s genre-mates “Poltergeist” or “The Entity," there are no flashy visual effects or grisly scenes of face-shredding terror. Medak hooks the viewer with an atmosphere of quiet menace occasionally punctuated by bumps and creaks and the inexplicable appearance of a toy ball. It’s a masterful haunted house yarn that evidently gives Martin Scorsese nightmares, so proceed with caution!

What if the ghost in the ghost story doesn’t know he’s a ghost? M. Night Shyamalan’s haymaker of a twist ending turned his third feature into a word-of-mouth blockbuster in the summer of 1999, earning the writer-director comparisons to such master storytellers as Rod Serling and Steven Spielberg. Though the script would’ve worked regardless of casting, the presence of then megastar Bruce Willis completely threw the audience off the scent; no one could’ve guessed that he was one of the dead people haunting Haley Joel Osment’s every waking moment.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s J-horror masterpiece is a deliberately paced nightmare machine of a movie in which ghosts are faintly viewable via webcam. It’s the first haunted internet movie, but it’s so much more than its gimmick; it’s a meditation on loneliness, which posits that the afterlife — neither heaven nor hell — may just be a horrifying loop of agony. And maybe that’s what we deserve. Kurosawa’s contempt for the World Wide Web felt curmudgeonly 18 years ago, but in terms of the communication system’s ironically isolating effect on society, he seems downright prophetic today. 

This is the Cadillac of haunted house movies and arguably still the scariest. Robert Wise is on fire in this movie, making skillful use of the widescreen frame (with brand spanking new anamorphic 30mm lenses) to enhance the claustrophobic horror of being stuck in a paranormally distressed mansion. His amazing cast (particularly Julie Harris, Claire Bloom and Russ Tamblyn) sells the largely unseen terror with a broadness that could’ve easily teetered over into parody with the wrong director. Mike Flanagan’s 2018 loose take on Shirley Jackson’s novel for Netflix is well worth checking out, too, but this is how it’s done.

The prolific and occasionally brilliant Sidney J. Furie hit a home run with this unnerving account of a single mother (Barbara Hershey) who believes she’s being sexually assaulted by a malevolent spirit. Her psychiatrist (Ron Silver) steadfastly refuses to buy this explanation, but when a team of parapsychologists gets involved, the impossible turns out to be the irrefutable truth. Hershey gives a fierce performance as a woman driven to the brink of madness by the refutation of her victimhood.

Steven Spielberg staged a great big haunted house movie in the heart of mundane suburbia, and every person who grew up with a fear of thunderstorms or a scary looking tree outside the window or, god forbid, a creepy clown doll has been battling nightmares ever since. Pretty much every childhood phobia is exploited in the Tobe Hooper-directed movie, while the blasé parenting of baby boomers is lightly skewered.

This gonzo wuxia classic from the glory days of Hong Kong cinema isn’t much in the scares department, but it’s a hugely influential work from the great Tsui Hark that, for whatever reason, isn’t as celebrated as other films of that era. Leslie Cheung plays a hapless debt collector who, while spending the night in a haunted temple, falls in love with a beautiful ghost (Joey Wang) enslaved by the evil Tree Devil. It’s a thrilling film stuffed with wacky ideas and set pieces, most of which work far better than they should (including Wu Ma cast as a master swordsman who raps the “Tao Te Ching”). 

Masaki Kobayashi’s supernatural anthology certainly lives up to its title’s translation (“Ghost Stories”), though probably not in the manner Western audiences expect. The filmmaker’s deliberate, contemplative approach to these stories is formal in the extreme; he’s not telling tales so much as reflecting on their meaning to Japanese culture (where they’re all very well-known). At three hours, it’s a demanding sit for audiences primed to pick up their smartphones every other minute, but if you rid your living room of devices and give yourself over to Kobayashi’s superlative craftsmanship, you’ll find the eerie sights and slithering deep under your skin.

Hayao Miyazaki’s enchanting masterwork concerns a young girl’s journey through the spiritual world of a fantastical hot-springs bathhouse. Of the many odd apparitions she meets along the way, the most memorable is a masked ghost known as No-Face, who has a peculiar habit of consuming other characters. Perhaps more than any other work in his impressive oeuvre, “Spirited Away” drifts along to a gentle dream logic; it’s a miraculous film of constant discovery that speaks to something curious and ineffable inside all of us.

The definitive, gore-and-orgy-packed version of Richard Matheson’s terrifying tome — “the scariest haunted house novel ever written,” according to Stephen King – has yet to be made, but John Hough’s briskly paced take on the material (adapted by Matheson) capably hits most of the horrifying highs. Clive Revill stars as a physicist who hunkers down with a small group of spiritually sensitive individuals in what is reputed to be the most haunted house in the world. They confirm this fairly quickly and spend the rest of the film simply trying to survive. It’s a good movie, but read the book first (preferably during a week when you don’t need much sleep).

Henry James’ subtly chilling “The Turn of the Screw” is such a perfectly unadorned narrative that many filmmakers mistakenly feel the need to amp it up with jump scares or sex. The best adaptation to date is still Jack Clayton’s “The Innocents," which stars Deborah Kerr as the governess charged with the care of two children (Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin) at what turns out to be a deeply haunted mansion. Clayton provides a little more backstory than is present in James’ novel, but he generally stays true to the narrative that’s been unnerving readers for over a century.

Alejandro Amenábar followed up his mesmerizing “Open Your Eyes” with this chilling slow-burn of a ghost story starring Nicole Kidman as a mother of two young children who begins to suspect their house is occupied by apparitional “others." The film’s hook is that the kids are photosensitive, which necessitates that the house remain in a state of candlelit darkness. Amenábar is clearly riffing on “The Turn of the Screw," and his twist ending suggests he might’ve been gunning for a concluding wallop akin to “The Sixth Sense." He doesn’t quite land it, but the mood’s the thing and it’s unremittingly eerie.

Two years after scoring a haunted house hit with “Insidious," James Wan doubled down on the genre with this go-for-the-jugular scare-fest based on a real-life paranormal investigation undertaken by Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga). Wan is at the height of his fright-inducing powers, as he places inventive new spins on old chestnuts like the creepy basement and the antique wardrobe. (In this case, it’s not what’s inside but what’s on top.) The blockbuster has inspired not just a franchise but also a horror universe at Warner Bros., but thus far, the returns have been greatly diminished.

No one expected much from a schmaltzy paranormal romance directed by one-third of the creative team behind “Airplane!” and “The Naked Gun," but Bruce Joel Rubin’s achingly sincere screenplay and the powerfully erotic chemistry generated by Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore transformed this midsummer programmer into the top grossing film of 1990. It’s a clever love story/whodunit combo in which Swayze attempts to solve his own murder from beyond the grave with the help of a crabby medium (Oscar-winner Whoopi Goldberg), and Jerry Zucker balances all of these elements with stunning ease. He gets away with two tear-jerking reunions in the last 20 minutes! Why he decided to quit filmmaking after his follow-up, “First Knight," flopped is a frustrating Hollywood mystery.

Guillermo del Toro’s Spanish Civil War ghost story takes place at an orphanage fearful of an uncertain future, symbolized by the massive, unexploded bomb embedded in its courtyard. A new arrival (Fernando Tielve) to the estate is given the bed of a boy who has perished and is said to haunt the orphanage. Del Toro generally opts for the somber, understated tone of “The Innocents” and “The Changeling"; he prefers slow-building dread and the terror of the unseen to easy jolts. He worked a lushly romantic variation on this aesthetic with the hugely underrated “Crimson Peak” (which makes a perfect double feature with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca”), but “The Devil’s Backbone” leaves the deeper groove. It’s a sad film that resonates all too palpably today as a new generation of traumatized children is separated from their parents.

Peter Jackson’s first studio film flopped at the box office, but this restlessly imaginative horror-comedy stands as a worthy companion to “Ghostbusters." Michael J. Fox stars as a paranormally attuned conman who teams with three ghostly accomplices to stage bogus exorcisms. Fox’s skills wind up proving vital when the spirit of a deceased mass murderer begins knocking off the living to up his body count. Jackson careens from juvenile comedy to blood-curdling horror with such abandon that you expect him to eventually literally lose the plot. Instead, he wraps up the film with a brilliantly edited hospital sequence that might be the best thing the Academy Award-filmmaker has ever done.

What sounded like a lazy “Saturday Night Live” sketch or, worse, a retread of a so-so Bob Hope/Paulette Goddard vehicle wound up being a lightning-in-a-bottle smash that dominated the 1984 box office. The key to the film’s success, aside from Bill Murray being Bill Murray, is that it’s legitimately frightening when it needs to be. Ivan Reitman’s movie opens with a sensational scare in the New York Public Library and scatters a series of massive jumps throughout (courtesy of a crack ILM visual f/x team that included John Bruno and Richard Edlund). Even people who hate horror movies rushed out to see “Ghostbusters." Save for “The Frighteners”, there hasn’t been anything like it since. 

William Castle’s finest hour and 15 minutes stars Vincent Price in fiendishly fine form as a millionaire who baits five financially struggling schemers with the promise of $10,000 if they can hack it out for one night in a haunted house. Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Ennis House serves as the exterior for the mansion, which gives the low-budget film a flair it might’ve otherwise lacked. Castle enticed audiences with the “Emergo” gimmick, which involved little more than a skeleton being flung out at the audience during a climactic scene. It worked. The movie was a huge hit and holds up well today with or without a plastic skeleton (as does William Malone’s 1999 remake).

This wackadoodle horror-comedy melange makes “A Chinese Ghost Story” look like “The Innocents." When the Japanese film studio Toho asked writer-director Nobuhiko Obayashi in the mid-1970s to make a movie akin to “Jaws," he hit up his 12-year-old daughter, Chigumi, for ideas. This is how we were blessed with the story of seven schoolgirls — with names like Gorgeous, Fantasy and Kung Fu — who make the ill-fated mistake of dropping by a carnivorous house. You might say it’s “Little Red Riding Hood” on acid, but, really, it’s a fever dream of a whole lot of stuff on acid. And it’s an exhilaratingly great trip.

Herk Harvey’s massively influential ghost story is an early triumph of American independent cinema and a testament as to what a talented director with a unique vision can pull off on a shoestring budget. This tale of a woman who takes a job as an organist in Salt Lake City after mysteriously surviving a car accident in Kansas isn’t terribly suspenseful; the twist ending should be clear to anyone paying attention. But that’s not the point. It’s the dreamlike atmosphere that gradually curdles into a doozy of a nightmare that keeps the viewer transfixed. 

The idea of spending most of a film in an empty apartment with a celebrity’s personal shopper might sound positively tedious, but Olivier Assayas’ 2016 triumph turns this premise into a stylishly strange and unconventionally eerie ghost story. Kristen Stewart is spellbinding as a young woman who, when she’s not picking up or returning impossibly glamorous clothing for her supermodel employer, is keen to make contact with the spirit of her recently departed twin brother. As bizarre, unexplained phenomena begin occurring in Stewart’s life, Assayas ratchets up the suspense in wholly unexpected ways.

Casey Affleck plays an actual ghost under a sheet with two eyeholes poked out — just like a child’s Halloween costume — in David Lowery’s unusually moving story of grief and closure...or something along those lines. Lowery sidesteps thematic clarity by turning Affleck’s journey into a time travel story narrative of sorts, at which point you’re wondering if the film is going to turn into a spook-laden riff on “Primer." The film winds up being defiantly inscrutable, but, emotionally, you’re deeply invested. It’s such a wonderfully screwy movie.

The very rare Hollywood remake that improves on its foreign inspiration, Gore Verbinski’s “The Ring” amps up the terror of Hideo Nakata’s 1998 film by prioritizing mood over narrative coherence (whether that was the intent, and the number of rewrites done on the screenplay would suggest it was not). The Pacific Northwest setting and Samara’s freaky equine influence add two layers of creepiness absent from Nakata’s movie (the ferry scene is incredibly disturbing), while the open-ended conclusion is, thematically, far more intriguing. As for Samara vs. Sadako, they’re both utterly terrifying.