“Some houses are born bad,” saith the tagline for 1963’s The Haunting, to date the scariest haunted house movie of all time. Old Victorian manor homes, castles, and turn-of-the-century edifices are breeding grounds for fiction about ghosts and spirits and hauntings and the like. If it’s old enough, chances are lots of people will have died in such a house. And most of us are fairly sure that ghosts simply haunt these abodes; there’s no way they could have actually built one. What the new film Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built presupposes is – what if they DID?
Directed by Michael and Peter Spierig, the Australian brothers behind Undead, Daybreakers, Predestination, and this year’s upcoming Jigsaw, Winchester tells the story of Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren), the heir to the insanely lucrative Winchester Repeating Rifle fortune, began building her massive house in San Jose, CA following the death of her husband and child and just kept building and building and building onto it, to the point that there are staircases that lead nowhere and doors that have no purpose. 500+ rooms in that house, and you can go visit it. The Winchester Mystery House is a popular Northern California tourist destination.
But this movie is about all the ghosts and demons and things that were believed to live in the house when Sarah was still alive, in the late 1800s. Jason Clarke co-stars as a doctor who visits the house to see if Sarah is of sound mind. From the look of the teaser, she might be of sound mind, but the ghosts seem pretty crazy. The film was shot partially on location at the actual Winchester Mystery House, which lends it an air of authenticity. Though, the claim of it being the “most haunted house in history” maybe has some stiff competition.
We love a good Gothic ghost movie, and especially love ghost contractors, so February 2, 2018 can’t come soon enough. Let us know what you think in the comments below!
Images: CBS Films
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!
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