The Conjuring: Last Rites is the final movie in Warner Bros.’ acclaimed horror franchise, which gained popularity throughout the 2010s for making the haunted house movie cool again. The concept of a family being haunted by demonic spirits in their own home is nothing new within the horror genre, but The Conjuring movies executed this formula perfectly.

While there have been countless great haunted house movies over the years, it’s also a formula that can feel very tired and basic if the filmmaker doesn’t have a clear vision. It’s one of the oldest horror tropes in the book, but that doesn’t make it any less effective when it’s done right.

The Legend Of Hell House

The reason that haunted house stories are so popular is exactly the same reason they’ve been around so long: they exploit a natural human fear of something supernatural invading our most private space. This makes the haunted house an incredibly effective trope in classic horror, and The Legend of Hell House takes advantage of it better than most films from its era.

Directed by John Hough, the film centers around a group of scientists and psychics who attempt to put their clashing worldviews aside to explain and eradicate a supernatural presence from a haunted house. It has all the violent, Gothic imagery you’d expect from this period of ’70s horror, with the atmospheric storytelling that would later inspire movies like The Conjuring.

Paranormal Activity

Paranormal Activity is a very different kind of haunted house movie, abandoning the typical Gothicism of the subgenre for a more updated, technologically minded story that explores what place ghosts have in the modern world. The film is told heavily through found footage of security cameras and digital devices, turning the formula of old, Victorian mansions sharply on its head.

Admittedly, found footage horror can be quite polarizing. While movies like The Blair Witch Project or The Visit display how effective it can be at creating an uncanny, disturbing atmosphere, it’s also become far too common for movies to use this structure just for the sake of it.

Thankfully, Paranormal Activity’s use of found footage genuinely feels earned, and it brings something interesting to the story that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible. It allows the audience to see this home from another perspective, not through the eyes of the characters. This adds a whole new dimension that totally reinvented the haunted house subgenre.

The Woman In Black

Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black is one of the formative haunted house novels, and while James Watkins’ 2012 adaptation often gets a bad rap, it does an admittedly great job of recreating the dark, Gothic atmosphere of the original text. The movie centers around a young lawyer who discovers something evil lurking in the home of his deceased client.

The Woman in Black’s ending takes a pretty major diversion from Hill’s original text, but the film still deserves praise for its methodical control of tension and dark imagery. It feels like a very traditional haunted house story; perhaps it’s this lack of originality that critics didn’t enjoy, but it certainly pleased many fans of the genre.

Insidious

Three years before making The Conjuring, James Wan delivered a very different kind of haunted house story with Insidious. Also starring Patrick Wilson in the lead role, this movie centers around a modern family who move into their dream home, but quickly seek the help of a supernatural expert when their son displays signs of possession.

Narratively, there are plenty of similarities between Insidious and The Conjuring. They’re both haunted house stories, they both follow normal families getting caught up in supernatural events, and beneath the surface, they’re both stories about society’s morphed perception of the “perfect” family.

This makes Insidious a very natural and logical companion piece to The Conjuring. While some fans often write off Insidious as Wan’s “trial run” for the more successful Conjuring franchise, there are plenty of strengths in this subversive ghost story that deserve praise on their own merit.

Presence

It can often feel like haunted house stories are everywhere within the horror genre, and as such, they can sometimes end up coming across as derivative or over-familiar. But thankfully, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence came along to genuinely push the genre forward for the first time in a long while.

Presence is a haunted house story told from the perspective of the ghost. Soderbergh takes a first-person approach with his camera, using lots of static sH๏τs and long, unbroken sequences to put the audience in the spirit’s shoes while the real drama of the story plays out among the human characters.

It’s such a fascinating and refreshing way to subvert a trope that’s been around for several decades, pushing the boundaries of filmmaking forward in a way that leaves audiences baffled as to why this hasn’t been done before. The details of the story also leave room for some very sharp commentary on human behavior and our obsession with being watched.

Poltergeist

It’s almost impossible to discuss the haunted house trope without mentioning Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, which completely reinvented the wheel upon its release in 1982. The film is a tense, fast-paced piece of atmospheric horror that uses its dense imagery and relatable characters to suck the audience into the story and never let them go.

Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist screenplay is the reason this has become such an enduring piece of horror. Without ever sacrificing the tension or momentum of the story, he also manages to weave in a тιԍнт, allegorical deconstruction of suburban America and the contemporary delusion of domestic bliss.

Although the rest of the Poltergeist sequels were nowhere near as critically acclaimed as Hooper’s original, there’s still something to be said about the fact that audiences kept coming back for more. This was the beginning of a lasting transformation in ‘80s horror, and one that Spielberg would later build upon with projects like Twilight Zone: The Movie.

The Others

The Others is glowing proof that movies don’t have to completely reinvent the genre in order to stand out among the crowd. Alejandro Amenabar’s eerie ghost story fits very neatly into the existing canon of Gothic horror, but it does so with such undeniable confidence and style that it still manages to leave a lasting impression.

The movie stars Nicole Kidman as a single mother who moves into a large new home with her children, but soon becomes convinced that something supernatural is happening within their walls. The Others is often remembered for its shocking ending, but everything about this high-quality horror earns its spot as one of the defining haunted house stories of the century.

The Shining

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, but it’s not always the first movie that comes to mind when considering the haunted house trope. And yet, that’s exactly what this is: the story of a family who become the guardians of an old building crushed under the weight of the lost souls haunting it.

There’s a level of technical craftsmanship and narrative control on display in The Shining that leaves it leaps and bounds ahead of most horror movies of its era, and that’s exactly why audiences still rally around it today. Kubrick was in top form with every single frame of this project, and The Shining irrevocably left its mark on the haunted house subgenre.