Café de Nuit

Hi folks,

I'm looking for "inspirational" reading or movies on my all-time favourite horrour topic: haunted or sentient houses. I've read through pretty much all of the mainstays - "The Haunting of Hill House" (surprise!), "Hell House", "Shining", "Amityville", etc. - plus watched a fair number of "obligatory" movies but, well, I'm always looking for just one more solid story in the genre (though I'm not really looking for "true life" books - got a fair number of them but just isn't quite what I'm in the mood for of late).

Anyway, I'm hoping that the fantastic FoS members will be able to offer up something new that I never would have thought to try. Thanks in advance!

House of Ill Lament wrote:I'm looking for "inspirational" reading or movies on my all-time favourite horrour topic: haunted or sentient houses.

It's pretty dang hard to beat Hill House (or Hell House, for that matter), but you might find Anne Rivers Siddons' The House Next Door an interesting take on the phenom.

Have you seen Stephen King's Rose Red? It's about a group of psychics studying a haunted house. I can't remember if I liked it very much.

The movie? Awful.
The concept sounds great - and the lead up is okay, but once the movie gets into gear, you just want to forget the whole thing.
Think the Shining but without any subtlty.
For example, the way they describe the house's history, you just can't believe that the whole place wouldn't be studied by black-helicopter scientists - or at least be sealed off with biohazard signs.
Most the characters are just so damn irritating and irrational that you root for the house to eat them. Which of course begs the question - why doesn't it do just that?

The only positive side of this movie is that the characters examine the situation much like PCs might - just like the audiance who has watched countless ghost story movies before, the characters already know what to expect. This might give you some insight into what your players might do.

Brandi wrote:
It's pretty dang hard to beat Hill House (or Hell House, for that matter), but you might find Anne Rivers Siddons' The House Next Door an interesting take on the phenom.

It is an interesting take (yep, read it. ). I admit it's definitely a far more subtle house than Belasco House (I admit, "Hell House" was a bit...sensationalistic..in parts for my taste, but it wasn't a bad story even if it did focus heavily on psychic phenom.)

I do have "Rose Red" - to leap to the other posters - and, it would actually make Belasco House look subtle. As ScS says, any house that's publically known to grow after people have stopped construction on it would seem to be met with a slightly different approach than it was in the flick. On the other hand, there were some gorgeous set-pieces and fun "haunted house" ideas in it (any film where psychic investigators get ate by a house I can be more forgiving of as for some reason psychics & ghosts are like pineapple on pizza to me - some people love it but I just don't like the mixing flavours. ). "Diary of Ellen Rimbauer" - the movie, not the book - went so subtle though it's hard to stay awake through it. Guess I'm just too picky at times.

Thanks for the suggestions/thoughts though.

Although not quite what you asked for, I would have to reccomend the hidiously bad movie "The Shaft" as a good reference for both what a Phatasmogoria (sp?), or sentient place of evil, might behave like, and how it most certainly shouldn't. Note how the initial behavior of the "Killer Elevator" might reasonably be explained as a mundane coincedence and accident. See how blatantly supernatural behavior tips the characters off instantly. Ignore the confusion over weither the movie is a ghost story or a "Science-gone-mad" parable (Seriously, skip ahead to the death scenes, you'll thank me later).