2. The Haunting of Sarah Hardy (1989)
This is one of the first scary movies I ever saw. I term it a scary movie because even now, ghosts freak me out. But even more than The Craft, this movie strains the credulity of me having ever been frightened of it. Sarah York, as an already-traumatised 11-year-old, sees her mother commit suicide by drowning on the day of her father's funeral. Fifteen years later, she starts hearing her mother's voice, seeing her mother move out of the corner of her eye, etc. She fakes her own death, her husband dies, there's a cliffhanger that I won't go into now because you have to watch and laugh on your own. I only got to see it because they used my house to film part of the movie. Any time Sarah sees the psychiatrist, she's sitting in my dad's home office. The housekeeper makes sinister phone calls from my kitchen table. You can even see a Valentine's Day card addressed to Richard, which is not the name of the psychiatrist, in one shot. This is terrifying in its idea of what was scary back then. It's a movie that would never work in a world with cell phones. I think I have permanent trauma because the ghost's theme music is played badly on a harpsichord; years later, I still hate harpsichords. I also think that anyone who was creeped out by Bill Clinton saw this movie because all of the illicit sex scenes are heralded by saxophone music. And there are perms everywhere.