Category Archives: Haunted Houses

The Changeling (1980) | Peter Medak

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The Changeling concerns an esteemed New York pianist/composer named John Russell (George C. Scott) who accepts a lectureship position in Seattle for solitude and restoration following the deaths of his wife and daughter in a roadside accident. Claire Norman (Trish  Van Devere), a volunteer at the local Historical Preservation Society, moves him into a massive old Victorian-Gothic mansion located outside the city that hasn’t had anyone living in it in at least twelve years. Russell soon discovers that the house isn’t as uninhabited as he thought, as things begin to occur (banging noises, bathroom water taps, a boy’s image is glimpsed within the water) though it could also be his grief-fueled imagination. He’s told that the house has a history and doesn’t want people living in it.

Later, Russell senses the house wants to tell him something. He discovers a locked secret room that resembles a nursery, containing a rusty wheelchair and an antique music box that plays a song he’d been composing since he entered the house. Claire tries to help, digging into the sordid history of the house, including a revealing seance that leads them to make contact with the spirit within who provides more clues to the 70-year-old mystery that must be solved to find peace.

House II: The Second Story (1987)

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House II opens in the early 1950s, where we find Charles and Judith McLaughlin handing away their baby Jesse to adoption. This is to protect their child from retribution by a powerful ghost named Slim Razor, who has appeared in the couple’s mansion demanding they hand over a crystal skull. After the couple confronts Slim to reveal that they don’t have it or know where it is, Slim kills them.

Flash forward twenty-five years, and their aspiring artist son Jesse is all grown up, Jesse moves into his inherited but long-dormant home with his girlfriend Kate. Odd artifacts about, including a one that is obviously missing from a mantelpiece.  Jesse and Kate are soon visited by Jesse’s rambunctious friend Charlie and his pop-singer girlfriend Lana, aka Puce Glitz.

While looking through the family’s photo albums in the home, Jesse spies pictures of his namesake, his great-great-grandfather Jesse, who was an outlaw from the old West who earned his keep finding lost treasure, including a crystal skull with giant jewels in its eye sockets. Slim Razor also factors into the pictures, elder Jesse’s partner, and details of their falling out over the ownership of the skull are revealed.

An old book on Mexican legends tells more stories about the skull that will unlock the mysteries of the universe and grant everlasting life to those who possess it, as well as the ancient Aztec practice of burial with one’s jewels. Jesse and Charlie determine to dig up the grave of elder Jesse to find the skull. Unearthed, they find the elder Jesse reanimated to life, preserved by the skull’s magical powers, though looking quite old. However, it also returns the spirits of others who’ve been looking for the skull from various times and dimensions, including Slim Razor, who is out to claim what Jesse stole from him prior to abandoning him into the Mojave desert to die.

House (1986) | Steve Miner

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An elderly artist named Elizabeth Hopper (Susan French) is found having hanged herself in the three-story Victorian house in Marin County, California, that she claimed is haunted. Hopper’s nephew, a famous horror novelist named Roger Cobb (William Katt), inherits the house and decides to move in so that he can have the solitude necessary to write his next book, a memoir of his harrowing time as an American soldier in Vietnam. His publisher as well as his fans don’t want him to write but he finds something is compelling him to get it down on paper.

Cobb underwent several traumatic experiences: his son Jimmy (Eric & Mark Silver) disappeared a year ago at his aunt’s home and is presumed dead. The ordeal resulted in a separation from his television soap opera actress wife Sandy (Kay Lenz).  In the home at night, Roger begins seeing things, unnerving things, around the house. They include harrowing flashbacks to his Vietnam War days where he let down a fellow troop named Big Ben (Richard Moll). Ben vowed revenge against Roger for abandoning him to be tortured by the Viet Cong.  Harold (George Wendt), the next-door neighbor, is a bit nosy and keeps coming around as Roger tries to catch these apparitions in the act. Roger is sure that his son is still around the house somewhere and that finding him will redeem what has happened to his life since his disappearance.