10 Horrifying Haunted House Films

Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a job as caretaker of The Overlook Hotel during the winter off-season. His main motivation for taking the job (besides the short-term cash) is so he can enjoy some solitude and focus on overcoming his writer’s block, kickstarting his career as a novelist.

However, The Overlook is a place with a long history of violence and murder and is infested with ghosts - most notoriously in room 237 where Jack's son, Danny, is traumatised by an encounter with a ghost which has taken the form of a ghastly decomposed woman.

These apparitions begin to torment Jack and his family with growing frequency, and when a blizzard rolls in and cuts them off from the outside world they realize they are trapped with no way to escape. It's this feeling of isolation that makes the family's predicament seem so bleak.

But, it's the corrupting influence The Overlook has over Jack himself that is the film's crowning horror.

We see Jack's transformation from loving father and husband into bloodthirsty killer by small degrees; he gets gradually meaner and more abusive over the course of the film. It's a terrifying performance you can scarcely imagine anyone other than Nicholson delivering quite so well.