2. Houses Are Evil And Will Try To Kill You (The Amityville Horror: 1979 / House: 2006)
Like scarecrows, houses aren't really scary. They're not cool, unless you're on
Grand Designs and your hallway features a glass staircase fashioned out of discarded parts from the large hadron collider. If you're not from the UK,
Grand Designs is a pretentious program with pretentious people who happen to have bucket loads of cash building a pretentious house, all fronted by the most pretentious man on TV, Kevin McCloud. My point is, like scarecrows, horror movies take something ordinary and makes them utterly terrifying. And In Halloween-based films, 'HOUSES OF DEATH!!!!' go one of two ways... The old 'this house was built on an ancient burial ground and there might possibly also be a doorway to Hell in the basement'. I'm talking of course of
The Amityville Horror. Enter poor Kathy and George who purchased the most evil house on the planet for their family. Darkness ensues. George slowly turns more and more evil as the force in the house takes hold of him. The daughter meets an 'imaginary friend'. Black ooze pours out of the toilets that may or may not by the alien force from
The X-Files, making a canny introduction 14 years before the series first aired. And some evil red yes outside the window. Yes, this is not a good place to be. Fortunately they manage to get out alive. Which is much better than the poor family who lived there before them. (See the very underrated sequel
Amityville II: The Possession) Of course,
Monster House goers one further. There's isn't evil in that house. The house itself is evil and will try to kill you! Literally. The door is a kind of cavernous mouth, the top windows, filled with glowing yellow light; two demonic eyes. No this isn't an episode of
Grand Designs: Halloween Edition. Kevin McCloud wouldn't stand for any of that nonsense. No, this is an animated children's film (currently sitting in my kid's DVD collection). Hence the sequence where the house breaks free from its foundations and chases the group of children around a construction site. Yes. You read that right. So the moral of this story...a story that went slightly off point... That banging in the walls in the middle of the night? It's just bad plumbing. That retro jukebox in your living room? It's not cool. Your house isn't cool unless it is literally trying to kill you!