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Monster House (2006)
Scariest Room: The basement. It’s filled with stolen toys – and a corpse encased in cement.
How To Survive It: Destroy the house’s heart and free the tormented spirit trapped inside. Alternatively, just stay away from it until you’re over 18 and it loses interest.
The Skeleton Key (2005)
The Horror House: Nurse Caroline Ellis (Kate Hudson) is desperate to do something meaningful with her life, so she takes a job in a crumbling plantation house in deepest darkest Louisiana, providing end-of-life care to its elderly inhabitant. The titular key lets her snoop through the house’s dustier rooms, and the voodoo paraphernalia she finds in the attic suggests the man’s illness might not be entirely natural.
Who Lives There: The elderly Violet Devereaux (Gena Rowlands) and her bedridden husband, Ben (John Hurt).
Scariest Room: That secret attic room, with its eerie records and shrouded mirrors, is pretty scary.
How To Survive It: Stay sceptical – there’s no such thing as magic, is there?
Poltergeist (1982)
The Horror House: Cuesta Verde is a beautiful new development of modern family homes, ideal for upwardly mobile types. The problem is that the land used to be a cemetery, and rather than moving the graves elsewhere, the developers decided to cut a pretty important corner – they moved the headstones, but not the bodies. The spirits of the dead aren’t happy about it.
Who Lives There: Steven (Craig T. Nelson) and Diane (JoBeth Williams) Freeling, and their three children.
Scariest Room: The kids’ bedroom, with its portal to another dimension in the wardrobe and a selection of terrifying toys.
How To Survive It: Just move out.
The House By The Cemetery (1981)
The Horror House: Most of the time, all it takes to turn a house into a haunted house is one wrongful death. Oak Mansion has seen a lot worse than that in its time. It’s not so much that the house is near the cemetery – it’s that there’s practically a cemetery in the house.
Who Lives There: Most recently, Norman (Paolo Malco) and Lucy Boyle (Catriona MacColl), with their son Bob (Giovanni Frezzi).
Scariest Room: The cellar. This might actually be the scariest horror cellar of them all.
How To Survive It: Really, really don’t move in.
The Haunting (1963)
The Horror House: Hill House has seen so many tragedies that it’s reputed to be one of the most haunted houses in the world. Which is why Dr Markway (Richard Johnson) persuades a team of psychics and sensitives to go and stay there for a while – he reckons he can prove the existence of the supernatural. But the house’s weird architecture and off-putting angles might be enough to drive a person mad.
Who Lives There: No-one, permanently, though psychics Theo (Claire Bloom) and Nell (Julie Harris), and Hill House heir Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn) stay there for a while.
Scariest Room: The bedroom, where unseen figures bang on the door and hold people’s hands in the dark. Brrrrr.
How To Survive It: The house seems to thrive on negative emotions, so just don’t feel sad, scared or guilty and you’ll be fine.
The Legend Of Hell House (1973)
The Horror House: The Belasco house is one of the most haunted houses in the world, home to the “Roaring Giant” and several other ghosts, all victims of the previous inhabitant’s sadism. Dying millionaire Mr Deutsch (Roland Culver) pays a team of psychic investigators to stay there until they can prove that life after death exists, but to do so, they’ll need to survive the house’s horrors.
Who Lives There: No-one, though it was previously the home of Emeric Belasco (Michael Gough)
Scariest Room: The horrible chapel, with its secret chambers and lethal crucifixes.
How To Survive It: Value science over faith and insist that all paranormal activity is down to electromagnet waves.
House On Haunted Hill (1959)
The Horror House: Yet another gothic mansion stuffed to bursting point with ghosts and ghouls, the hapless visitors to the house on Haunted Hill at least knew they were taking a risk by crossing the threshold: they’re all guests of eccentric millionaire Frederick Loren (Vincent Price), who’s offering £10,000 to anyone who can spend the whole night there.
Who Lives There: No-one – Loren rented it for the evening.
Scariest Room: The basement. Basements are always bad news, and this one is especially so, since it houses an enormous vat of acid that’s been used to kill people (or dispose of their bodies) multiple times.
How To Survive It: Bring your own bullets, and steer clear of that acid.
The House Of Seven Corpses (1974)
The Horror House: The house in question is Beal Mansion, and that probably tells you most of what you need to know. It’s an abandoned mansion that’s reputed to be haunted after seven murders were committed there, so filmmaker Eric Hartman (John Ireland) decides it’s the perfect location for his next movie. Because he apparently hasn’t watched any haunted house movies, ever.
Who Lives There: No-one.
Scariest Room: All of it is pretty creepy, but the Escher-like staircases are especially spooky.
How To Survive It: Take more than seven friends with you.
House Of Wax (1953)
The Horror House: The House of Wax is a waxwork museum in New York, filled with detailed wax figures from history. Its Chamber of Horrors includes some rather obscure figures, but the attention to detail is very lifelike. Maybe too lifelike.
Who Lives There: Professor Henry Jarrod (Vincent Price) and his assistant, Igor (Charles Bronson).
Scariest Room: The aforementioned Chamber of Horrors, initially created against Professor Jarrod’s will (though he found some enthusiasm for it in the end).
How To Survive It: Don’t touch the figures, and try not to bear any resemblance to any historical figure.
The Collector (2009)
The Horror House: The Chase family’s home was a total normal upper middle class home until the Collector (Juan Fernández) decided to make them his latest victims and installed traps in every room. The windows are boarded up, the doors are booby trapped, and even the phone isn’t safe.
Who Lives There: Michael (Michael Reilly Burke) and Victoria Chase (Andrea Roth), and their daughters Jill (Madeline Zima) and Hannah (Karley Scott Collins).
Scariest Room: No room is free of traps.
How To Survive It: Unless you've got the kind of superhuman strength and/or cunning and defeat the Collector, you're out of luck. It’s probably safest just to be out on the night he chooses to attack.
