The Haunted House is one of the oldest tropes in the Horror genre, that can be traced back to tales of cursed temples in the ancient world. It has been done so much that it hard to have a haunted house tale that stands out from the rest. You must either have a very competent director, or a very clever marketing to create a success. The two films I will be discussing do exactly those.
Now I know I have mentioned my admiration for Stanley Kubrick on this blog before. And I will readily admit that I tend to be a bit biased towards his films. But I truly believe that he created one of the greatest, and by greatest I mean top 5 of all time, horror movies. I could probably write an entire dissertation over The Shining, and it's pretty much been done before, but for the readers sake and my own needs of sleep tonight, I wont. The Shining takes places in a closed-for-the-winter Hotel in Colorado, where Jack Torrance and his wife and son begin their tenure of being the hotels care takers for the winter. Having a natural psychic ability, Jack's son Danny begins to have ominous visions of the hotel and seeing ghostly figures. Months into the job, Jack's mental state begins to deteriorate as begins to have hallucination and conversations with dead patrons of the hotel. After becoming violent towards Danny and his wife, Wendy, Jack's last bit of sanity leaves as he begins to hunt his family down, all while the hauntings of the hotel become more and more vivid and real.
Kubrick's stunning cinematography and script coupled with Jack Nicholson's performance, portrays the devolution of the human psyche with astonishing subtlety and effectively. This film is riddled with little tid-bits that viewer subconsciously consumes but still feels the weight of. Kubrick uses little jump scares and almost solely relies on atmospheric eeriness and and unsettling imagery to do all the frightening that is needed. If there were truly ever haunted place that sought to destroy its inhabitants, Kubrick captured it flawlessly.
A lot of horror films use the "Based on a true story" tag pretty liberally and it has lost a lot of its weight in today landscape. However in 1979 when The Amityville Horror was the marketing ploy was fairly new and with the recent release of the tell-all novel by the same name, the film grabbed some attention and though a critical failure, it was a commercial hit. The Amityville Horror centers around a family who moves into a house that recently was plagued by a murderous father slaughtering his entire family. Immediately they notice strange phenomena as the house rejects a priest who attempted to bless it, and begins to drive the father into violent obsessive shut-away (sounds familiar right?) As the house haunting continue to get worse and worse, information comes to light about the houses satanic past. After a final terrifying night, the father comes to his senses and the families flee the house for good.
This movie gained a lot of attention for being based on a true story, and then subsequently because it wasn't quite so true. Many of the details were embellished or altered drastically, resulting in several law suits and tainting the movies legacy a bit. However purely from an objective standpoint the movie itself while succumbing to much more generic tropes than The Shining, still manage to produced a truly haunting and malevolent atmosphere. Even though it was a much more traditional haunted house moive, this film conveys cliches well and tastefully, to the point where it's well done enough you don't really mind them, and given it's age you can understand how influential it is to modern day horror films.
Both these films are excellent for different reasons. Though similar in the tale of a house tearing a family apart and driving the patriarch mad, they separate by taking two different routes down the road of conventionality and both ending up and the same destination of well done horror movies.
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