The 10 Worst Haunted House Movie Clichés

Used in: Practically every haunted house movie ever made

It’s easy to understand why filmmakers rely upon the age-old “Let’s slowly inspect odd sounds” action device—if done right, sequences in which characters creep around unlit hallways with flashlights beaming and hearts a-pounding can generate ample suspense. Known as a “slow burn,” patient scenes of this nature pull on the viewers’ nerves until there’s no choice but to either shriek in terror or gasp for air.

That rarely happens, though; usually, unexpected noises are followed by predictable investigations and even more foreseen jump scares. The family’s cat runs across the room, or an object falls off of a table and crashes into the ground. Nine times out of 10, it’s not the household specter at the end of investigation—it’s a lame payoff that shows off both the filmmaker’s inefficiencies and lack of confidence. Not to mention, elicits a mixture of groans and bird-flips from the audience.

Used in: The Shining (1980), Haunted (1995), American Horror Story (2011, FX television series)

Don’t get us wrong—if the ghost of a former lingerie model lives in the film’s house, there’d better be a scene in which the weak-willed father succumbs to the nudie spirit’s flirtations. That doesn’t mean we have to respect the movie for it, however. Presenting one or more of the protagonists with a supernatural love interest, or even a one-scene fling, instantly drains a film of its menace, even if the sexy ghoul turns out to be a manipulative demon. Who wants a romance novel interlude in a supposedly terrifying film?

Besides, Stanley Kubrick already wrote and closed the book on the seductive ghost scene in his masterpiece of a loose Stephen King adaptation The Shining. One of the film’s scariest moments (and it’s a flick chockfull of pee-your-pants force), Jack Torrance’s (Jack Nicholson) excursion into the Overlook Hotel’s Room 237 is a brilliant example of paralyzing sound design, slow-burning dread, and sexual bait-and-switch. What starts off as Jack’s chance to tongue down a hot naked blond descends into a nightmarish make-out session with a rotting, old lady corpse, a hideous apparition that issues a devilish cackle.

Any haunted house movie-maker who tries to either emulate or top Kubrick’s Room 237 knockout is playing his or herself. This one’s a cliché simply because it’s already been perfectly executed.

Used in: The House On Haunted Hill (1999), Insidious (2011)

For all of the smack-talking we’re doing here, the truth of the matter is that if any of these tired haunted house tropes were to somehow happen in real life, we’d soil our underwear. Just imagine how you’d react if you were walking down a hallway late at night, en route to pour a late night glass of milk, when a ghost jumped out in front of you and its head started rotating like a spinning top. Of course you’d halt with the abruptness of a deer confronted by headlights, and scream with the pitch of an eight-year-old girl who’s found a spider in her hair.

But movies aren’t reality, and the old “freaky spinning head” trick with ghosts is an obvious sign that the director doesn’t have the fortitude to let his or her make-up department’s ghoul designs scare for themselves. A cheap parlor trick, the wigged-out head tactic, as seen in the above clip from 1999’s forgettable House On Haunted Hill remake, always feels hokey, even in this year’s otherwise effective hit Insidious.

Used in: The Legend Of Hell House (1973), The Amityville Horror (2005), The Messengers (2007)

Not too many haunted house movies feature households with pets, and that’s a positive—based on the few examples of domesticated animals in these kinds of genre flicks, the temptation to have the dog, cat, or bird attack any one of the human characters is too overpowering to resist.

It makes sense; the family dog is often a source of love and companionship, so there’s an immediate horror associated with said dog turning cold and lashing out against its owners. And when the non-human assailants are the neighborhood critters or Mother Nature’s daily players, the film in question suddenly takes on a wider, beyond-the-front-porch sense of inescapable menace.

In 1973’s The Legend Of Hell House, a cat’s vicious assault on one helpless character is a memorable, if not somewhat cheesy by today’s standards, shock; on the flipside, seeing crows go all batty in the middling 2007 ghost bomb The Messengers makes for a glaring problem in an already shitty flick. Leave the animals out of it—if a director can’t scare us with actual ghosts, they should’ve tried a comedy, not a haunted house picture.

Used in: Poltergeist (1982), Beetlejuice (1988), Thirteen Ghosts (2001), The Others (2001), The Haunted Mansion (2003), Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark (2011)

In the laziest of horror movies, kids see the darndest things—more specifically, ghosts that their parents don’t catch glimpses of until the shit hits the fan in the final act. Traditionally, youngsters are the easiest to scare, whether it’s through imaginary creatures in closets or the evil Dinner Broccoli Monster, so there’s an inherent believability and a relatable tension attached to the sight of a movie family’s littlest member scoping out a house’s macabre presences before anyone else.

That being said, the fact that munchkins are the most foolproof people to frighten means that it takes little effort for a horror screenwriter to center a haunted house flick around a pre-teen who’s shook, burdened with seeing ghosts that no one else sees, or even buys. As evidenced in last month’s disappointing Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark, anchoring a spook house flick on a young lead (the vast majority of whom are dreadfully inadequate actors) can give a film an overwhelming air of kiddie frights, leaving the final product feeling like an expanded Nickelodeon special airing in late October.

Used in: The Shining (1980), The Grudge (2004), The Haunting In Connecticut (2009), Insidious (2011)

Haunted houses conceal massive amounts of dark secrets, violent memories, and, more often than not, buried skeletons—why else would the crib be plagued by the undead? That much is understood, yet too many filmmakers insist of showing the audience what exactly happened in the home’s tragic and sinister past.

The most overused method of doing so: placing the main characters back in time, in the midst of whatever homicide or traumatic event happened in the house. It’s slightly less annoying than having the old caretaker dictate the “Once upon a time” exposition in an overlong monologue, but interactive flashbacks mostly show a screenwriter’s laziness, as well as the director’s unwillingness to construct original scares.

In The Shining, the flashback sequence isn’t meant to teach the hero how to defeat the evil, or how to empathize with its plight—Jack Torrance’s supernatural trip to the Overlook Hotel’s golden era motivates him to kill his family. Which proves this list’s primary thesis: When making a haunted house movie, don’t ever try to redo anything Stanley Kubrick did in The Shining. One-upping that film’s mastery is a futile mission.

Used in: Amityville 3-D (1983), The Haunting In Connecticut (2009)

Villains rarely ever “die” at the ends of horror movies; typically, they’re dismembered or shot to hell, yet they almost always find a way to come back for unnecessary jump scares and inferior sequels. It’s not like there’s anything the protagonists can do about that; when challenged by flesh-and-blood serial killers or costumed slashers, a movie’s heroes and heroines have the option of causing bodily harm to the baddies—the rest depends on how badly the studio executives need a perfunctory yet profit-guaranteeing follow-up.

Fighting a house, though? You can’t exactly punch a home’s lights out, or drive a stake through the building’s heart, because, well, buildings don’t have hearts, dummy. But they do have flammable walls and ready-to-ignite electrical sockets. Thus, the simplest way to end a haunted house’s reign of terror is to set the pad ablaze, but that’s just it: It’s the “simplest” method possible. And it’s been done before. As ardent movie lovers, we demand more creativity from the industry’s paid screenwriters.

Unimaginative film producers are already infuriating—we don’t need a haunted house movie sequel hinged upon an inexplicably reassembled house to further piss us off.

Used in: The Changeling (1980), Beetlejuice (1988), Poltergeist (1982), The Haunting In Connecticut (2009), Insidious (2011)

There always comes a point in haunted house movies where the central family can’t take it anymore; the ghosts won’t stop terrorizing the brood, and taping Ghost Hunters marathons isn’t give anyone useful tips on how to terminate the paranormal activity. So who are you going to call? Not the Ghostbusters, silly—Peter Venkman and his boys are too cool to fall into such clichéd terrain. No, haunted house movie character, you’re more apt to seek out the nearest medium or middle-aged psychic to eradicate the home of its evil spirits.

And that means it’s time for an old-fashioned séance, though the “hold hands and sit around a table” maneuver never actually works. Having been done to death over the years, spiritual communication scenes were a laughing matter until Insidious nicely subverted expectations by inserting a gas mask into the séance’s proceedings. Unless the filmmaker has an equally batshit idea, it’s best to find new ways to exorcise the demons. We’d suggest Ouija boards, but Paranormal Activity already nailed that.

Used in: Burnt Offerings (1976), The Amityville Horror (1979), The Shining (1980), Session 9 (2001), The Amityville Horror (2005)

Dream House better have a number of tricks up its proverbial sleeve, because the film’s trailer curiously reveals a big twist: Daniel Craig, playing the central family’s patriarch, is told that he’s a mental patient accused of murdering his wife and two daughters. It’s the kind of “Oh shit” moment that most films save for the climax, but Dream House’s marketing is centered upon that plot-point, so there has to be more surprises in store, right?

Frankly, who gives a shit? The whole “daddy’s gone crazy” concept is just one of the film’s many clichés on display. Going as far back as 1976’s underrated book-to-film chiller Burnt Offerings, haunted house flicks have exploited the father’s banked upon stability and protective presence in the family structure; by turning pops against his wife and kids, mommy and her seeds subsequently lose their supposed-to-be fatherly security.

Experienced horror movie watchers, meanwhile, lose all hope that the movie playing before them will take any legitimately creative risks. In other words, a realization sinks in: The filmmakers have, how we now like to say it, “pulled a Dream House.”

Used in: Burnt Offerings (1976), The Haunting (1999), The House On Haunted Hill (1999), The Others (2001), 1408 (2007), Return To The House On Haunted Hill (2007), Grave Encounters (2011)

Viewers who can’t fuck with haunted house movies share common questions: Why doesn’t the family just leave? Move away? Shack up in a motel that’s run by anyone other than Norman Bates? Any sane individual would haul ass to the nearest Best Western at the first sight of a door slowly creaking open on its own, let alone hang around for ghastly phantoms to show up for and initiate deadly meet-and-greet sessions.

The most routine technique for addressing that logical inquiry is to restrict the characters from stepping foot off of the property, making the desired retreat impossible to execute. In the case of Burnt Offerings, trees suddenly crash to the ground as the family’s car speeds towards the exit; in the more recent found-footage pic Grave Encounters, the building’s interior design constantly reconfigures itself.

No matter how cleverly handled the no-escape angle may be, it unavoidably gives a movie’s screenwriter an all-too-convenient pass to keep the plot moving. And you know what means? That’s right: more opportunities for the scribe to abuse any of this list’s aforementioned clichés.