I conclude this review with the words that Arabhi is very pleasing and haunting in nature. Once you start listening to this raga, we get hooked to its enchanting melody. It has a distinctive melody of its own, bringing in the mood of great emotional appeal.
movies A Melody In The Haunted
Of the many horror subgenres that have proved popular over the years, the haunted house movie is perhaps the most varied, and has never gone out of style. Unlike vampires or zombies, there are no "rules" to the haunted house movie. All you need is a house, and some spooky s*** going on inside it.
While we wait for Bly Manor to hit Netflix on October 9, there's time to catch up on some must-see haunted house movies. So we've rounded up 16 of the best. Some of these films take inspiration from James's and Jackson's hugely influential novels, while others take the genre in very different directions. Some are funny, some scary, and others just plain weird. But they're all worth a look, and with horror season nearly upon us, now is a great time to start investigating.
Director Gerard Johnstone took inspiration for this spooky New Zealand comedy from both Ghostbusters and The Haunting, and the result is a confident new take on the genre. The film focuses on a troubled teenager named Kylie who is sentenced to house arrest--in a haunted house. The interplay between Morgana O'Reilly, playing Kylie, and Rima Te Wiata as her domineering mother provides the laughs, while Johnstone delivers plenty of atmosphere and spooky scares as the pair are forced to deal with whatever spectral presence is in the house with them.
Burnt Offerings may have been marketed as an Exorcist copy at the time, but it has a very different tone. It's slow and avoids many of the noisy clichés of other possession and ghost movies, instead focusing on creeping dread and a weird, dreamlike atmosphere. Acting legend Oliver Reed delivers an intense performance as a man under the grip of something evil in the house he's renting, while Bette Davis plays an old woman who lives in the attic and might have something to do with it. It takes its time to get there, but the climax absolutely delivers.
Director Oz Perkins might be the son of legendary Psycho actor Anthony Perkins, but his three movies to date have seen the filmmaker step easily out of his dad's shadow. Perkins made this Netflix Original between the disturbing The Blackcoat's Daughter and the recent eerie fairytale Gretel and Hansel. It's an old-fashioned gothic chiller in which a nurse comes to a remote house to look after the old, infirm author who lives there. Of course, some weird stuff starts happening. Perkins successfully avoids many of the clichés of the genre and delivers a subtle, atmospheric movie that'll appeal to fans of classic horror.
The influences on Guillermo Del Toro's haunted house melodrama might be obvious, but the modern fantasy master still puts his own unique spin on the genre. It's a stunningly directed film, with incredible set design and cinematography, and the mix of gothic romance and surprisingly gory horror works well. Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska, and Charlie Hunnam are among the cast getting terrified in a ghost-populated Gothic mansion, but they are secondary to the visuals, atmosphere, and freaky crimson spectres.
There are few movies as weird as Nobuhiko Obayashi's Japanese cult classic House (aka Hausu). Obayashi based his script on wild ideas provided by his young daughter, and the result was a one-of-a-kind comedy horror film about a schoolgirl named Gorgeous who travels with some friends (Kung Fu, Melody, Mac, Sweet, and Fantasy) to stay in her aunt's house. The strangeness doesn't stop with the girls' names--the whole movie is like a deranged fever dream, with non-existent acting, bizarre set design, and scenes that include futon attacks, a limb-eating piano, watermelons that turn into heads, and a creepy cat with glowing eyes. The movie was actually a hit in Japan, but it took a belated theatrical US release in 2009 to finally bring this deranged masterpiece to the attention of Western viewers.
The Conjuring plays out like a horror greatest hits package, but while there might not be anything original going on, and it's skillfully handled by director James Wan. It blends the haunted house movie with the possession film, in which the spirit of the evil witch Bathsheba torments unlucky homeowners Roger and Carolyn Perron. The film is one of the most successful scary movies of the past decade, inspiring a whole connected horror universe.
1979's The Amityville Horror was a pretty pedestrian haunted house thriller, but the sequel was something very different. Like pretty much every Amityville sequel that has followed (and there have been a lot), it has very little to do with the first movie, instead just using the title and throwing in all manner of unwholesome fun. In this one, Burt Young--best known for playing Rocky's loveable pal Paulie--plays an abusive father who is targeted by something evil living in the basement. Before you know it, the whole family is possessed, with incest and shotgun murder providing the prelude to one of the most insane exorcism sequences in cinema.
While the basic plot of The Legend of Hell House is extremely similar to the 1963 classic The Haunting (four people stay in a creepy old house to find out if it's haunted), this British movie remains a highly effective slice of horror in its own right. Unseen spirits psychologically manipulate the unlucky visitors, including Planet of the Apes star Roddy McDowall, while weird, unexplained things happen all around them. It was written by genre veteran Richard Matheson, and the blend of campy horror and genuinely unsettling scares makes it an underrated '70s gem.
The Ju-On series has been running for 22 years and so far includes 13 Japanese movies, four American films, and the recent Netflix TV spin-off. But it's the original 2002 Japanese theatrical movie (which was preceded by two straight-to-video films) that remains the scariest slice of haunted house horror. The house in this case is a normal suburban home, in which terrible murders took place, putting a curse within it. Whoever enters the house then carries the curse to the location they die in, spreading it out like a disease. Along with Ringu, Ju-On helped establish J-horror in the early 2000s, and director Takashi Shimizu ensures the house itself is a deeply unnerving and oppressive location.
This hugely successful ghost story draws clear inspiration from The Turn of the Screw, and is one of the 2000s' most effective haunted house films. Nicole Kidman plays a woman living in a remote country house with her two children after World War II, who becomes convinced there are spectral beings living there with them. The Others is a slow but engrossing mystery that refrains from obvious jump scares associated with many films of its type. The movie has a big twist at the end, making it one of those films you want to instantly rewatch to see the details you missed the first time round.
George C. Scott stars as a grieving father who moves into a haunted house in this super creepy chiller. The Changeling is old-fashioned in the best sense of the term, taking its time to set up the story and ensuring that the audience is fully invested in the characters before delivering the horror goods. Director Peter Medak is a master at evoking maximum chills from minimal props; who would've thought that a bouncing rubber ball or a wheelchair could be so scary? The movie also features one of the most frightening séances in horror.
The first screen adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, released only four years after the novel's publication, remains one the greatest haunted house movies of all time. It set the template for the genre, and is still a remarkably effective chiller all these years later. Part of this is due to director Robert Wise's inventive filmmaking approach, which at the time was considered radical. The sets were all built with visible ceilings, to provide a claustrophobic feeling, and Wise used a new wide-angle camera that was still in development that caused the image to distort, adding to the feel of unease. Combined with clever visuals effects, fractured editing, and strong performances, the result is an all-time horror classic.
It is still subject to debate to what extent Ossessione anticipated the poetics of neorealism. Rather than reading Ossessione as a more or less imperfect forerunner, I prefer to point out what did find expression in Visconti's first movie and was not to be found again in the neorealist film production to come: a cinematic representation of a Fascist society. While the neorealist movies often expressed, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat has argued, a "displacement of collective responsibility for Fascism by consistently shifting culpability away from ordinary Italians" (1999: 84), Ossessione represents the very containment of vision, spaces and desires enacted by Fascism within ordinary Italians. Visconti, and the group of young communist intellectuals around the journal Cinema, allegorically staged through the characters of the black-clad femme fatale and the indecisive tramp--swept away by a passion with murder at its heart, imprisoned in a house conquered through violence and obsessed with finding a way out to other stories, other realities--the predicament of the human subject under Fascism.
vsual. offers this series of abstract prints, each of which features a timeline of color throughout a visually notable film. Choose from horizontal line, concentric circle, or varying width line designs, and movies like 28 Days Later, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and 12 Angry Men. The ones based on animated films are particularly vibrant.
We prefer seeing movies in their purest form, without 3D, meal service, or other distractions. But over the years, movie studios and theaters have attempted other gimmicks to draw viewers in. The Royal Ocean Film Society explores a some silly and superfluous movie add-ons, including Smell-O-Vision and the terrifying EMERGO! 2ff7e9595c
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