Hollywood’s most terrifying houses

Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 4:14 pm

By Don Kaye, Special to MSN Movies

Hollywood’s most terrifying houses

“The Haunting in Connecticut”

Everyone knows that the housing market is in terrible shape these days, but what do you think your place would be worth if it were infested by ghosts or demons? The new movie “The Haunting in Connecticut,” based on an allegedly true story, might not get into the financial aspects of buying a haunted house, but it certainly does offer a warning to prospective buyers that they should always do thorough research.
Was your new home previously used as a funeral parlor, like the one in “The Haunting in Connecticut”? Is your deluxe suburban ranch built over an Indian burial ground, as it was in “Poltergeist”? Do the neighbors appear and disappear from your Brooklyn brownstone faster than cockroaches, as in “The Sentinel” (1977)? These are all signs that one should take a good, hard second look before signing on the dotted line. A history of scandal, murder and insanity (like those found in “The Haunting” or “The Shining”) is probably a red flag as well.
Stephen King himself wrote in “Danse Macabre,” his 1981 study of the horror genre, that the movie “The Amityville Horror” was a tale of “economic unease” dressed up as a ghost story, adding that he wondered not so much if the tortured Lutz family would get out alive, but whether they had “adequate homeowner’s insurance.” With the market in the dumps these days, it might be prudent to know that not every cheap property is available because of a desperate developer or a grim foreclosure. Click on the first thumbnail below for some deals that the occupants should have avoided.