To really miss traditional ghost story movies?

[Dockerty]

Im a fan of horror but to me, the best films don’t rely on OTT monsters, demons, explosions and special effects - they rely on a good story and clever writing.

Why don’t they do proper ghost stories anymore? Horror films these days are shite - the conjuring etc 😴 all the same.

Give me The Sixth Sense or The Others any day.

AIBU to think the horror genre is missing clever writing? No special effects needed if you can actually tell a good spooky story

Oh blimey, I tried to watch that once on a plane, and it was so stressful I had to switch it off as soon as the first ghost appeared! Even on a tiny screen with people crammed in all around me. I might have to give it another go though; I’m outside the UK and can’t access iplayer, so it will have to be on YouTube and the cheesy ads every 10 minutes should break up the tension.

Don’t think I can watch ghost stories any more, having children seemed to have altered my emotional state so I just can’t take them now, but coming here to celebrate the 15 years or so of my life when The Others was my favourite film. Even the memory of jumping watching the trailer in the cinema makes me smile.

I got DS13 to watch the Sixth Sense recently (part of my “90s education” for him ;)) and he got the twist really early.

agree with @HRTQueen- the original Woman in Black remains the program that completely terrified me. I still have to sleep with an eye mask because of that particular scene where the ghost is above the bed!!!!!

Big ghost story fan here , this one of the creepiest films I have ever watched !! The autopsy of Jane Doe .

OMG Afterlife! No one ever remembers it but it had some terrifying moments.

I love a proper tension based ghost story too - I want a story, not just random gore. I enjoyed Ghost Stories too and I loved the Haunting of Hill House.
Some of the Blumhouse ones are quite good. Night Swim was good and so was The Visit.

I also loved The Black Phone and Sinister. Sinister was one of the scariest I have seen.

I’m the same, love a good ghost story but can’t stomach overdone splattery gore! Crimson Peak was a great one, visually stunning and well…Tom Hiddelston 😁

I also like a good ghost story, Paranormal Activity really frightened me

The Orphanage is good as a simple ghost story, as is The Awakening.

i wasn't very good at spotting those ghosts either! Of course, Blye Manor! I thought it was Hill House 😄

The christmas ghost story this year is EF Benson, The room in the Tower, I think it will be good.

There's an old BBC adaptation of a Charles Dickens story called The Signalman with Denholm Elliot. Required watching in this house around Halloween.

Found my people. More recently I watched Presence which was something different, not groundbreakingly good but different, you see things from the view of the ghost.

I know exactly where my love for ghost stories comes from - I was about ten when Ghostwatch aired on TV with Sarah Greene and Parky. I nearly wet myself but I loved the feeling of being scared!

I watched it all the way through to the end and it does get silly with the studio lights going off and stuff. I've never watched it since that first time it was on, not sure how it'd hold up, but at the time it was a great experience to watch it.

Whistle and I'll Come to You.

😱

This is the problem with trying to give your kids a bit of the magic from your own youth - they’ve grown up differently…

I remember going to the cinema to watch Sixth Sense when it first came out and I know everyone likes to be cool and say they saw the ending but I was lucky, and didn’t. It hit me like a brick and was so brilliant.

That was groundbreaking at the time but it’s been done to death since then (forgive the pun) and “I see dead people” is now a line on t-shirts so I’m not surprised your son got the twist. These kids have grown up with a post modern pastiche so there is nothing new under the sun for them sadly.

My Dad harped on about this for months and how terrifying it was so we found the original version from the 70’s. It was utterly dire!! Some geezer sitting on a sand dune looking at a man grumbling a lot. We were all 🫤

The new version of the Mezzotint (one of the Ghost Stories for Christmas by Mark Gatiss) was excellent though.

Your Dad oversold it... 😄 The atmosphere! The tension! The sense of approaching menace... And lovely Michael Hordern...

Mezzotint was good but I can't remember it clearly, whereas Whistle... is unforgettable to me...

Horses for courses, innit?

I agree about Sixth Sense @Screamingabdabz - the twist was huge and unexpected at the time and I think people were less dicks about revealing it - but since then there have been copycats, and people trying to anticipate the twists, and people trying to be the first to tell you like it's some sort of competition... that's why 'spoilers!' has become a saying...

Isn't there an episode of IT Crowd where someone says 'I won't tell you the twist' and then Roy spends the whole episode trying to guess/avoid the twist? The German cooking episode, I think? Yeah, it's gone like that.

That's so annoying! I read Tom's Midnight Garden* to my kids and one of them guessed the ending. I'd found it really moving when I first read it.

• The best children's fiction ever.

Uncanny the TV version is great too, all on Iplayer and excellent Halloween viewing.. The podcast is especially great though. All 96 episodes! Especially Luibelt and The Evil in Room 611. The fact they are ‘real’ stories is the best bit. Much like the ‘woo’ threads on here.
Definitely listen in broad daylight though. NOT when you are in a premenopausal awakening at 3am and decide you need a podcast to listen to! I listen while cooking dinner and I kept a load for an ultra long distance flight for when the lights went out. I figured you can’t really get scared of ghosts on a dark A380 with 500 people somewhere over the Indian Ocean. It was very cosy listening to them snuggled under a blanket!

Danny Robins also did the Witch Farm podcast and the Battersea Poltergeist which I listened to on the trip back. A bit hammy but very listenable and proper old school ghost stories.

Bless him I think he did! Slightly ruined by the fact we watched at Xmas but it’s summer here then. The atmosphere was lost on us! He loved it though.

Gatiss’ Ghost Stories for Xmas on BBC using MR James’ tales are awesome. Always look forward to them and I love the tradition of a Xmas ghost story!

Really enjoyed Black Phone (and the Joe Hill story) but just saw Black Phone 2 and it's absolutely terrible. Crap acting, rubbish story that sounds like they made it up as they were going along, and gore. Really disappointed.

Really enjoyed Black Phone (and the Joe Hill story) but just saw Black Phone 2 and it's absolutely terrible. Crap acting, rubbish story that sounds like they made it up as they were going along, and gore. Really disappointed.

Thanks for the recommendations everyone, I’ve been wanting to see the orphanage for a while but when I search for it there are a million films of the same name, is it Spanish?

I think with The Others and The Sixth Sense it was the fact that the truth was actually heartbreaking - especially The Others. That emotion that hits you when you realise …

It takes a lot to get to me but these films did it, that’s how you know the writing was on another level.