10 Scariest Movie Ghosts EVER

The Others is a brilliant riff on the gothic novella The Turn of the Screw (more on that later), with Nicole Kidman looking after her two children in a haunted manor house.

For most of the movie all we know about the hauntings is that there are unseen “Others” in the house, and director Alejandro Amenábar's restraint builds up the tension before any ghouls are shown.

In the movie’s most famous scene, Kidman notices something wrong with her daughter, Anne. Anne is playing on the floor with a marionette puppet (already seriously creepy behaviour) wearing a flowing white veil and dress which literally makes her look like a ghost. Kidman notices that the hand protruding from the veil looks suspiciously old and veiny, then we see that beneath the veil is not the face of a little girl, but of something Other - something with corpse-like skin and dead, milky eyes.

Whereas a modern horror movie may resort here to a jump scare, a loud musical sting, or the notorious Mouth-Becomes-Wide-And-Shrieks tactic, instead this creepy apparition simply talks to Kidman with the voice of her child, sending Kidman into a violent rage.