Here’s a quick story about where I live. So, the house I’ve lived in for many years is located on a war battleground. The War of 1812 was a major war in the history of both Canada and the United States. Technically, it was the British against the Americans, since Canada didn’t gain independence until 1867. That’s not important. I live in the Niagara Region of Ontario, Canada. A bunch of battles from that war were fought in the region. Much of our history is directly tied to that war and how it shaped our region. The Battle of Queenston Heights, The Battle of Beaver Dams, The Battle of Frenchman’s Creek, Fort Erie, Fort George, Cook’s Mills, and The Battle of Chippawa all happened within the region.
The bloodiest of the Niagara battles during the war was The Battle of Lundy’s Lane, which is where we circle back to my home. The Battle of Lundy’s Lane took place in the part of Niagara Falls where I live. In fact, memorials to it are a mere fifteen-minute walk away from me at this moment. There’s also a cemetery partially devoted to the soldiers who died during that skirmish. My house is located on what was the battleground in 1814. Surely, people were injured or killed around the land I live on during that bloody battle.
What does that have to do with movies? Well, you see, I’m pretty sure my house is haunted. It’s nothing major. I haven’t seen ghosts. I haven’t been threatened or anything. But strange things have happened around here. We came home one day and one of the faucets was running. I was watching TV with friends one day and the front door just opened by itself. I awoke one night and one of the pictures from my bedroom wall was now on top of me. It might be easy to explain away most of these things. But I think there are enough little oddities to constitute a light haunting.
And here’s where it ties into movies. Haunted houses are a major source of terror in horror flicks. Some of the biggest horror properties have been about hauntings. The Haunting of Hill House, The House on Haunted Hill, Amityville, and The Conjuring all involved hauntings. People love to watch people be tormented by ghosts and poltergeists and spirits and whatever else you want to call them. As long as they don’t have to experience the hauntings themselves, audiences are happy.
Not all haunted house stories have been good. I wouldn’t be here, writing this post, if they were. There have been some bad ones. There have actually been a bunch of bad ones. Haunted house movies are some of the easiest and cheapest to make because they can involve as little work as simply banging pots, pans, and doors in the kitchen while the camera is in another room. That’s how the Paranormal Activity movies went about things. Many other filmmakers have tried that method to much less success than that hit franchise.
Over the course of Sunday “Bad” Movies, I’ve had the pleasure, and sometimes displeasure, of watching a bunch of haunted house stories. A good deal of them were made in the wake of the popular Paranormal Activity franchise. I did start writing these posts just after Paranormal Activity 4 came out. A bunch of them were completely disconnected from that franchise, though. Some of the other movies were just people wanting to tell a ghost story.
I want to go over some of the haunting movies that I’ve watched for this blog. Consider it a recap of things I’ve seen, inspired by a new entry into the repertoire. The movies will vary in quality. There were different intentions behind them and different levels of success. They all shared one thing in common, though. They involved hauntings.
The Paranormal Activity Parodies
During the first year of Sunday “Bad” Movies, I checked out a couple of spoof movies that followed in the wake of the Paranormal Activity franchise. That franchise had been the start of a shift in horror. Things were moving from remakes and “torture porn” into hauntings and lower budget horror. Paranormal Activity was a little bit of both of the new trends. It was a low budget horror movie about a haunting, which was picked up by a major studio and released to major success. I’ve always described the franchise as being the closest thing to a carnival haunted house in movie form. I stand by that.
As with the popularity of anything, Paranormal Activity got spoofed out the wazoo. Is that still a word people use? The Scary Movie franchise pounced on that in Scary Movie V. I haven’t seen any of the Scary Movie franchise for Sunday “Bad” Movies yet. I have, however, seen A Haunted House, which was spear-headed by Marlon Wayans, a major part of the first two Scary Movie flicks. I also saw a little movie called 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I know, that’s a long name. I’ll be shortening it to 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity from now on.
The two movies tackled the spoof concept in a different way. 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity fell into the same camp as most Friedberg/Seltzer movies where a bunch of the “jokes” were simple references that had nothing to do with what was being spoofed. The story was a blend of Paranormal Activity and The Devil Inside, with a character designed off Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There were references to The Artist and a character who was just Abraham Lincoln. It was a movie that tried to spoof too much, which then took it away from finding the comedy within the movies it initially set out to spoof.
A Haunted House, as well as its sequel (which I also covered), went a different way with spoofing Paranormal Activity. Marlon Wayans decided to take Paranormal Activity, make it a Black movie, and add some comedy. Sure, there were references to other movies. Annabelle was a major point in at least one of them. But the core concept was funny Black version of Paranormal Activity. It was the same idea he would use on Fifty Shades of Grey to make Fifty Shades of Black. Just make the story Black and find some comedy in it.
Now, I wouldn’t say either of the spoofs nailed their execution. It’s tough to find a way to spoof a found footage movie where the entire concept is slow moving cameras capture an odd movement every once in a while during the night. You can’t really pull much from it. Marlon Wayans at least tried to. He found a little bit of success. The guy behind 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity decided to fill most of the holes with other movies, which made things much messier. There are two other spoofs I have yet to see. One of them is Scary Movie V and the other is Paranormal Whacktivity. I don’t know how well either of those did, but if I had to guess, it would be not very.
The Asylum
The natural next place to go would be The Asylum. It’s not because the low budget studio made spoofs of the Paranormal Activity movies. They side-stepped and made mockbusters instead. In case you don’t know what a Mockbuster is (and I don’t know why you wouldn’t if you’ve been keeping up with this blog), it’s a movie made to cash in on the potential success of a bigger studio picture. Back in the video store days, they were the movies that would sit on the shelf next to the bigger budget movies, with strikingly similar and confusing names. Transformers would become Transmorphers. Snakes on a Plane would become Snakes on a Train. Paranormal Activity would become Paranormal Entity.
Paranormal Entity was clearly a cash-in on Paranormal Activity. The name was close enough to make that abundantly clear. The story was different, but only really in so much as adding another family member to the main characters. Instead of a couple, there was a mom and her two adult children. It didn’t succeed in scares as much as Paranormal Activity did, but that wasn’t the point. It was simply meant as a confusion on store shelves to make a quick buck. Paranormal Entity wasn’t the worst movie from The Asylum, but it was far from the best.
The three movies that followed Paranormal Entity, as sort of spiritual sequels, had to put in more effort to find an audience. They weren’t just Paranormal Entity 2, 3, and 4. Instead, the movies took from real life as inspirations to tell new stories. Well, for two of them to tell new stories. One was just an adaptation of real life.
8213: Gacy House had a group of paranormal investigators go to the property where John Wayne Gacy had murdered a bunch of young men and teenage boys. I can’t remember if it was supposed to be the exact house or if the house was supposed to be one that was rebuilt on the property. Either way, it was haunted by the vengeful spirit of John Wayne Gacy and he attacked each of the investigators over the course of the movie. 100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck was pretty much the same idea with a different serial killer. Or mass murderer. Gacy was a serial killer but Speck was a mass murderer. Slightly different crimes that still ended up with a bunch of dead victims.
The odd one out was Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes, which isn’t even a haunting movie. Smack dab in the middle of a pseudo-franchise about a bunch of haunted houses came an exorcism movie. This was the one that was the adaptation of a real-life tale, telling the story of the exorcisms that led to the death of Anneliese Michel. There’s no point in going any more into this movie because, well, it’s not a haunted house movie.
Out of the three haunted house movies from The Asylum’s Paranormal Entity series, the two based on real murderers were the ones that succeeded the most. Part of it, I believe, was due to the movies being based in a sort of reality. John Wayne Gacy and Richard Speck really committed some horrible murders when they were alive. Most people going into these movies would have some sort of knowledge about these men and their actions. That would add a layer of fright. Also factor in that the people behind the movies had to try a little harder to make them good because they didn’t have the Paranormal Entity name to confuse audiences and you get some half decent horror movies. They weren’t the best. Movies from The Asylum rarely are. But they were some of the best horror movies I’ve seen come out of The Asylum. I can’t say the same for the boring slog-fest that was Paranormal Entity. And I hate saying that. Shane Van Dyke was involved.
Amityville Movies
That brings me to the next bunch of haunted house movies I want to bring up. There was one movie, The Amityville Haunting, that was produced by The Asylum. That’s the connective tissue, but it’s going to take me a minute to get to that one. To fully understand it, I need to talk about the Amityville movies that came before it.
I released a bunch of posts about a bunch of Amityville movies about a month ago. I’m not going to go into super depth about them right now because, well, it has only been a month. Here’s a quick recap, though. The Amityville Horror was about the Lutz family. They moved into a house where a mass murder had happened, and soon experienced a haunting. The sequels dealt with the mass murder, and investigation into the validity of the haunting, and a bunch of other houses where haunted objects were relocated. There was a remake after eight movies, and then a bunch of other movies made by people who took the Amityville name and legend and ran with it.
The problem with the Amityville movies, following the first one, was that some of them were about a haunting, but many of them were about possessions. Possessed items, possessed people, that sort of thing. Only a few of the movies truly felt like haunted houses. The Amityville Horror was a haunting with spirits coming through a door to hell that was in the basement and spooking the family. Amityville II was a possession. Amityville 3-D was a demon. Amityville: The Evil Escapes through to Amityville Dollhouse involved cursed objects. It wouldn’t be until the remake of The Amityville Horror and The Amityville Haunting that true hauntings would return to the series.
The Amityville Haunting was interesting in that it combined the Amityville mythos with Paranormal Activity style found footage. A family moved into the Amityville house (which looked nothing like the Amityville house) and experienced the same sort of paranormal phenomena as the DeFeos and the Lutzes. Banging cupboards, sounds from other rooms, mysterious buzzing from an electrical wire. The main difference was that The Amityville Haunting was much more violent. People kept dying in and around the house. If it weren’t for the family being a bunch of irritating characters, it would probably be the best of The Asylum’s haunted house movies. Except they were annoying, and it wasn’t the best. Better than Paranormal Entity, though. Not quite as boring.
After The Amityville Haunting, there were demons and possession and magic and town curses and even one more cursed object in a monkey toy with the cymbals. You know the one. The next true haunting movie was Amityville: No Escape, a dual story movie where there was a woman living in the Amityville house in 1997 and a group of college students investigating fear near the house in the present day. This one could have been an interesting story about history repeating itself. The only problem was how boring it was. There was a woman making video messages for her soldier husband who was away on tour. They were the most mundane video messages. She did yoga. She talked about the town. Nothing much there. Then there were the students talking about what scared them before walking around in the darkness and getting killed off-screen. The stories didn’t even connect with each other. It was a disappointment for sure.
That was where I capped off the Amityville movies, for the time being. The entire series tried to feature stories about haunted houses, but the ways they tried to justify the hauntings led to haunted objects and rituals much more than true haunted houses. I still have a few more haunted houses to explore. Houses that aren’t connected to Amityville in any way. Movies that aren’t playing off Paranormal Activity in any way.
Family-Rated Hauntings
There have been two movies covered in Sunday “Bad” Movies that involved haunted houses, but were made for a family audience. They weren’t horror movies, as the rest of the movies have been so far. These were ostensibly children’s movies. These were movies that the whole family could watch without the little ones going to bed with nightmares for a week. Without kids seeing things they shouldn’t be seeing at a young age.
The first one was Ghosthunters: On Icy Trails. A kid discovered a ghost in his cellar. Another ghost decided to take over the first ghost’s territory and much more. The kid, the ghost, and a government lady teamed up to take down the other ghost. For the most part, this wasn’t a haunted house movie. It counted because the ghost was haunting the kid’s cellar. It was more a new take on the Ghostbusters idea. A group of people teamed up to hunt down a ghost. One of the people just happened to be a ghost that was haunting another character’s cellar. I had a good enough time with it and it was definitely more palatable than the next movie in this category.
Ghost Dad. Bill Cosby “died” and haunted his family to get back into his body, which was on life support at the hospital. I could see why people might have wanted this movie in the 1990s, when it was made. It was Bill Cosby doing his wacky Bill Cosby antics, only now he was a ghost. He could do the wacky antics while phasing through walls, rooves, and floors. The problem was seeing it now, with eyes that have been opened to how terrible a person Mr. Cosby is. It was not a good movie anyway, but that made it even less watchable.
Both movies set out to do something specific and succeeded in their own ways. Ghosthunters: On Icy Trails was a fun enough little ghost hunting adventure story for the whole family. Ghost Dad had its moments. They weren’t your traditional haunted house stories, though. They were focused on different things. One was focused on action and adventure. The other was focused on what Bill Cosby’s antics would be like if he were a ghost. Neither of them dove into the repercussions of the haunting and how it would affect people.
The Selling
Now we have arrived at this week’s movie, The Selling. Richard Scarry (Gabriel Diani) and Dave Ross (Jonathan Klein) were two friends who went in on a house flip together. They bought a house from Mary Best (Janet Varney) that they planned on fixing slightly and selling for a much larger price. If you didn’t already know what house flipping was. The problem they found shortly after getting the house was that it was haunted. Really haunted. Haunted by a serial killer and his victims. How could they possibly resell the house when the ghosts were messing with it all the time?
The Selling was a horror comedy, through and through. It wasn’t a particularly good one, but it had horror elements and comedy elements working together to tell a cohesive story. The haunting was the primary focus, with the two house-flippers trying to hide that the house was haunted. They wanted to sell the house. If people knew it was haunted, they wouldn’t want to buy it. That was the source of most of the jokes through the first half. Richard would pitch the house to potential buyers, denying any claims that things were haunted, only to have the walls start bleeding. Richard and Dave would move furniture into the living area, only for the ghosts to toss the furniture around and make a mess. Toilets would spew black gunk, rocks would fly around the yard, and closets would open to interdimensional portals. All that fun stuff.
The horror of The Selling came in the form of the ghosts. When Richard and Dave first went to the house, they found the ghosts in the attic. They quickly fled the scene in fear. As time went on, the ghosts became more aggressive. The ghost of the murderer possessed Dave for a minute and had him attempt to murder Richard’s new, haunting-curious girlfriend, Ginger (Etta Devine). That was before they managed to sell the house to a couple witches. The selling didn’t stop the ghosts, though, who escaped the house and possessed Richard. They were having fun tormenting him and attempting to open some sort of door to the world. I can’t quite remember. I had lost most of my interest by that point. Anyway, the haunting had moved beyond the house. A haunted house story became something more.
Now, the problem with The Selling was that it didn’t do this stuff well. The spooky stuff was rarely spooky, and the funny stuff was rarely funny. The ideas were there. The execution was not. That’s the case with a lot of crowd-funded stuff, though. Not all crowd funded stuff. There have been some good crowd-funded movies through the years. But a lot of them are from people who have never made movies before and just haven’t built up the experience they need to succeed. The Selling was one of those.
Over the nearly ten years that I’ve been writing about bad movies for this blog, I’ve come across a bunch of hauntings. Many of those involved haunted houses, as we’ve seen through this post. There were horror movies, comedy movies, horror comedy movies, and even some family movies. Some of them were based on real life while others were wholly fictional. They all shared something in common, though. There was at least one ghost, and it was haunting a house. That’s what a haunted house movie needs.
I might live in a haunted house. Those things I described earlier could be easily written off with reasonable explanations. Someone could have left a faucet on when we left the house, and we only noticed when we got back. The front door could have not been closed the whole way and the wind simply pushed it open. The picture could have just fallen off the wall and I didn’t feel it when I was sleeping. Those are all reasonable explanations. There might be something more, though. There might be something in the house doing these things. My life in this house could be its own bad movie.
The thing is, I live on a battlefield. I live on the land that was the site of the bloodiest battle in the War of 1812. People were injured and died all around here. It is possible, in a world where ghosts may exist in some form, that something has stuck around since that time. Sure, this house wasn’t there way back then. But it’s here now. If a spirit was stuck at this point in the land, they would now be stuck in the house. That’s how it would work, isn’t it? I could be living one of these haunted house movies, though on a much smaller scale, with much less excitement.
And here we go with the notes:
- Movies that I mentioned in this post were A Haunted House (week 34), A Haunted House 2 (week 274), 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (week 10), Fifty Shades of Black (week 219), Paranormal Entity (week 60), 8213: Gacy House (week 60), Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes (week 60), 100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck (week 60), Transmorphers (week 130), Snakes on a Train (week 29), The Amityville Horror (week 500), Amityville II: The Possession (week 500), Amityville 3-D (week 500), Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (week 500), Amityville Dollhouse (week 500), The Amityville Horror remake (week 500), The Amityville Haunting (week 500), Amityville Death House (week 500), Amityville: No Escape (week 500), Ghosthunters: On Icy Trails (week 324), and Ghost Dad (week 435).
- The Selling featured actor Phil Proctor, who was previously in Bio-Dome (week 124) and Theodore Rex (week 223).
- Janet Varney was also in The Selling. She could be seen in Catwoman (week 174) and Nic and Tristan Go Mega Dega (week 272).
- Christian Baha was in The Selling and 7 Below (week 137).
- Alina Phelan returned from Free Birds (week 209) to appear in The Selling.
- You may have noticed Braxton Davis in The Selling. You might have also noticed him in Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance (week 241).
- Finally, The Selling featured an appearance by Barry Bostwick. He was in The Scorpion King 4: Quest for Power (week 380).
- Have you seen The Selling? Have you even heard of it? What did you think of it? Let me know in the comments or find me on Twitter to share your thoughts.
- If there’s a movie you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know. You could leave a comment or hit me up on Twitter with any suggestions.
- Sunday “Bad” Movies is on Instagram to keep the bad movie fun going all week long. Join me there.
- And that brings this post to a close. Aside from the look forward, that is. Next week, I’ll have an all new movie to write about. Okay. Maybe the movie isn’t new. It’s new to the blog. I’ll be checking out a movie from the 1930s, I think. It’s called Sex Madness. I hope to see you back here in a week for a post all about that one. See you then!
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