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Image by Federico Napoli
Sweeping statements should generally be avoided, but not at all costs, because saying something like “Pretty much everyone loves a good ghost story” feels as close to a universal truth as things can get. Different cultures have told a variety of stories dealing with supernatural beings since well before cinema was a thing. Once cinema was a thing, of course, these stories were retold within films, with some movies also forging their own path and creating new supernatural-themed narratives.
Movies about ghosts often fall into the horror genre, but then there are also fantastical comedies and dramas that lack horror elements, but retain a focus on ghostly presences. Some of the best of these are ranked below, including films both old and (relatively) new, and from all around the world, emphasizing the inherent universal appeal of such tales.
25 'Ju-on: The Grudge' (2002)
Director: Takashi Shimizu
There are a bunch of Ju-On/Grudge movies, with the originals being made in Japan and then a handful that were made in the U.S. Of the whole lot of them, 2002’s Ju-on: The Grudge is probably the best, though they can bleed together a little, what with haunted places, demonic possession, and paranoia surrounding ghostly figures all being common recurring elements.
Ju-on: The Grudge unfolds slowly but confidently, being small-scale but all the better for it. There’s an intimacy to the settings and the scope here that keeps things believable and genuinely creepy throughout. As a film that aims to get under the skin of the view, Ju-on: The Grudge is a pretty significant success, showcasing increasingly unsettling sights that all appear within locations that, at least initially, feel utterly mundane.
24 'The Frighteners' (1996)
Director: Peter Jackson
Image via Universal Pictures The Frighteners is super underrated as far as Peter Jackson movies go, lacking the full cult classic status his earlier movies (like Bad Taste and Dead Alive) have, while also not being as popular as his later blockbusters, like the films in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Fittingly, though, it belongs quite snugly between these two stages of the director’s career, delivering some B-movie-ish quality thrills and wacky humor alongside having strong production values and impressive (for their time) special effects.
It also utilizes Michael J. Fox excellently, being perhaps his best lead performance of any movie that doesn’t belong to the Back to the Future trilogy. There’s more humor than genuine horror to the ghostly story at the center of The Frighteners, but it’s a fun time, and any chance that comes about to give it a shoutout is worth taking.
Release Date July 19, 1996
Runtime 110 minutes
23 'Sleepy Hollow' (1999)
Director: Tim Burton
Image via Paramount Pictures A film that's an interesting blend of genres, visually striking, and benefitting from a great cast, Sleepy Hollow is very Tim Burton in just about every way, right down to the lead actor being – you guessed it – Johnny Depp. He plays Ichabod Crane, a detective who has to look into three grisly murders, all of which were seemingly committed by the same serial killer.
Things get complicated and more ghostly, however, when the possibility arises that the culprit might be some sort of supernatural entity. Sleepy Hollow is the sort of movie that ends up being pretty much exactly what you'd expect it to be, but thankfully, what it is remains pretty good nonetheless. For the atmosphere and wild performances (Christopher Walken, in particular, really goes for it), it’s an engaging watch.
Release Date November 19, 1999
Runtime 106 Minutes
22 'Ring' (1998)
Director: Hideo Nakata
Image via Toho Predating Ju-on: The Grudge by a few years and delivering similar scares, Ring is another legendary Japanese horror movie that found international success, not to mention a well-received U.S. remake. The original can’t be topped, though, with its simpler approach and owing to the fact that it feels just a little more authentic. It’s grounded in a way that adds to the horror immensely.
And Ring has an undoubtedly great central premise, too, revolving around a cursed video that purportedly brings death in a matter of days to anyone unfortunate enough to view its contents. Videotapes might be a thing of the past, sure, but the story being told here is still effectively creepy and potentially timeless in the emotions it evokes. Ring is quite slow and straightforward, but it leaves a mark regardless.
Ring (1998)
Release Date January 31, 1998
Director Hideo Nakata
Runtime 95 Minutes
21 'The Others' (2001)
Director: Alejandro Amenábar
Image via StudioCanal While the 2000s was a decade that is now scarily far back in the past, certain horror movies from that time hold up quite well, The Others being one such film. It has a good set-up for a movie about paranormal occurrences and accompanying paranoia, being about a mother and her two children, and the way they're impacted by the growing feelings that the house they live in might be haunted.
The Others is a slow-burn sort of ghost story, and it has some surprising revelations that are best left unspoiled, in the interest of keeping things impactful for anyone who hasn’t seen it. It feels quite old-fashioned pacing-wise and stylistically, but also modern enough to hit hard by the standards of 21st-century horror, being heavy on suspenseful dread and psychological horror.
The Others
Release Date August 10, 2001
Director Alejandro Amenábar
Runtime 104
20 'Poltergeist' (1982)
Director: Tobe Hooper
Image via MGM Steven Spielberg seemed to love traumatizing younger viewers for a good while there in the early 1980s, as he was involved with several movies that were sort of approachable for all ages, so far as not being R-rated. The second Indiana Jones movie was one example, as was Gremlins, and Poltergeist, too, which predated those other two movies by a couple of years.
Spielberg co-produced and co-wrote the movie, while Tobe Hooper (otherwise best known for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) was the director. A series of hauntings inside a family home in the suburbs grow in intensity throughout the duration of Poltergeist, with ghosts, dead bodies, and even a clown playing a role in all the creepiness. It’s fun and quite explosive, though younger viewers (and potentially some slighter older ones) might well be mortified by the whole thing.
Poltergeist
Release Date June 4, 1982
19 'Tigers Are Not Afraid' (2017)
Director: Issa López
Image via Shudder Tigers Are Not Afraid puts a bit of an arthouse spin on the fantasy genre, all the while also being a horror movie and a gut-wrenching drama. It plays out against the backdrop of a drug war, specifically focusing on the experiences of several children who are all trying to survive in trying circumstances. All the while, fantastical occurrences – perhaps imagined, or perhaps real – keep occurring.
That approach does make it feel a little reminiscent of Pan’s Labyrinth, which also contrasted dark fantasy and an escape into it, owing to the horrors of the real world. Tigers Are Not Afraid feels more supernatural than that 2006 film, though, and manages to carve out its own distinct identity, all the while being appropriately grim and rather hard to forget, once seen.
Tigers Are Not Afraid
Release Date November 2, 2017
Director Issa López
Runtime 83 minutes
18 'The Ghost and Mrs. Muir' (1947)
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Image via 20th Century Fox An old 1940s movie with a nonetheless ambitious blend of genres, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is a dramedy, a romance film, and a fantasy story about ghosts all at once… obviously, considering the title. The two titular characters both inhabit the same house, clashing at first but then forming a connection and perhaps even falling in love, despite one being alive and the other being dead.
It lays down the sort of movie it’s going to be pretty early, and might lack some surprises as a result, but it’s still pretty fun, lightweight, and effectively quirky stuff in any event. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was a definitive early ghost-themed movie focusing on romance, and its influence on this particular strand of supernatural film is undeniable.
Release Date June 18, 1947
Cast Gene Tierney , Rex Harrison , George Sanders , Edna Best , Vanessa Brown , Anna Lee , Robert Coote , Natalie Wood
Runtime 104 Minutes
17 'The Orphanage' (2007)
Director: J. A. Bayona
Image Via Warner Bros. Of course a movie called The Orphanage is going to be scary; it’s about as ominous as a title with just two words can get. Haunted locations aren’t likely to get much more harrowing, either, given an orphanage is not typically the kind of place anyone wants to be, and their depictions in fiction tend to be extra ghastly and unsettling.
This film specifically follows one woman trying to accomplish the goal of reopening an orphanage where she used to live, but then spirits begin communicating with her and the horror stuff you're probably anticipating starts playing out. It’s fairly creepy overall, but The Orphanage also has a persistent amount of sadness throughout that makes it work as a grim drama alongside being an effective piece of horror.
Release Date December 28, 2007
Cast Belén Rueda , Fernando Cayo , Roger Príncep , Mabel Rivera , Montserrat Carulla , Andrés Gertrúdix , Edgar Vivar , Óscar Casas , Geraldine Chaplin , Carmen López , Óscar Lara , Georgina Avellaneda , Carla Gordillo , Alejandro Camps , Enric Arquimbau , Blanca Martínez , Isabel Friera , Jordi Cardus
Runtime 105 Minutes
16 'Pulse' (2001)
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Image via Toho Pulse is about as slow-burn as slow-burn thrillers get, but it’s also pretty great and succeeds in being gradually more and more captivating as it plays out. It’s also undeniably modern/digital for a movie that’s at least partly about ghosts, eschewing a period setting or an overall feeling of things being old to instead explore the idea that ghosts, in the 21st century, might well choose to haunt digital spaces.
It does this in a way that doesn’t feel too dated. Like Ring, technology might've marched on to some extent, but the core idea is still impactful and appropriately scary. Pulse stays creepier the less it explains, and dread is the main emotion focused on here, with the atmosphere being oppressive throughout and certain images proving extremely bold and hard to shake.
Pulse
Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Cast Haruhiko Katô , Kumiko Asô , Koyuki , Kurume Arisaka , Masatoshi Matsuo
Runtime 119 Minutes
15 'The Muppet Christmas Carol' (1992)
Director: Brian Henson
Image via Buena Vista Pictures Distribution There are so many movies based on the stories of Charles Dickens, and a particularly large number that adapt – or were inspired by – A Christmas Carol. One of the best of these is The Muppet Christmas Carol, which is a more comedic take on the story of Ebenezer Scrooge being visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, and the way such visits change his outlook on life, and featuring – naturally – Muppets.
Well, it’s The Muppets plus Michael Caine, who gives a surprisingly great performance here as Scrooge. It retains the heart and some of the drama of the original story, all the while also being colorful, funny, and packed with memorable musical numbers. The Muppet Christmas Carol is a hard movie not to be charmed by in some way, and is one of the more light-hearted and family-friendly ghost story movies out there, too.
Release Date December 10, 1992
Runtime 85 minutes
Main Genre Comedy
14 'Lake Mungo' (2008)
Director: Joel Anderson
Image via Arclight Films. Sure, Lake Mungo is an excellent supernatural/psychological horror/thriller film, but what ends up being most striking about it is how upsetting and heavy-going it is. In that sense, it might well be most effective as a family drama about grief, all told with a mockumentary style that never feels forced or gimmicky, instead enhancing the realism of the fictional story being told.
Lake Mungo revolves around the strange disappearance of a teenage girl, covering how the members of her family struggle with the vanishing and what they ultimately uncover in their search for her. It’s not a consistently flashy or spectacular horror movie, but it’s inevitably successful in getting under one’s skin and simultaneously being upsetting, too. Also, when it wants to hit you with a scare, it really doesn’t hold back.
Lake Mungo
Release Date July 30, 2009
Cast Talia Zucker , Rosie Traynor , David Pledger , Martin Sharpe , Steve Jodrell , Tamara Donnellan
Runtime 89
13 'A Ghost Story' (2017)
Director: David Lowery
Image via A24 The bluntness of a title like A Ghost Story is reflected in the presentation of the titular ghost within this movie, because it’s effectively a guy with a white sheet over him. The story follows him mostly as he looks over his loved one who he’s left behind, witnessing her grief and her attempts to move on without him, a process that’s tough at first, but gets easier as time progresses.
This leads to things getting tougher for the ghost, though, given he’s powerless to change much about the whole thing. So, essentially, A Ghost Story is strange, slow, sad, and all a bit tragically inevitable. But it’s an interesting take on this kind of supernatural-themed story, and there’s a great deal that can be gained from the film, depending on how much you want to engage with it intellectually or emotionally.
A Ghost Story
Release Date April 24, 2017
Director David Lowery
12 'Beetlejuice' (1988)
Director: Tim Burton
Image via Warner Bros. On the other end of things emotionally entirely to something like A Ghost Story is Beetlejuice, which also revolves around people dealing with their lives as ghosts, but has a good deal more fun with the premise. A recently deceased married couple are unhappy with the people who've moved into the house they used to own, so they get the help of a chaotic demon to effectively scare them off.
Of course, they get more than they bargained for, and various wild things happen to characters both living and dead. Beetlejuice is also very different from the aforementioned Tim Burton movie, Sleepy Hollow, but both are good ghost stories with appropriately bold visuals. Also, Michael Keaton in the (almost) titular role, playing Betelgeuse, is undoubtedly great and proves to be a brutally effective scene-stealer.
Release Date March 30, 1988
Runtime 92 minutes
11 'Ugetsu' (1953)
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Image via Daiei Film One of the greatest international fantasy movies ever made, Ugetsu tells a story set during the 1500s in Japan. It’s about two people and the way their pursuits affect their families, with one of the main characters falling for a spirit, and the other endeavoring to become a samurai at all costs.
It’s a slow drama with some fantastical elements, involving ghosts and spirits at times without necessarily becoming spooky enough to be a full-on horror film. But, as a period drama, it’s very effective and has an undoubtedly strong sense of atmosphere throughout. It’s a beautiful-looking and very restrained film, typical for Kenji Mizoguchi, who specialized in making moving and patiently paced dramas with historical settings (Ugetsu and its fantasy leanings thereby representing something a little different for the filmmaker).
10 'The Haunting' (1963)
Director: Robert Wise
Image via Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer It’s understandable if The Haunting is one of the first movies one thinks of upon hearing the term “haunted house film,” or something along those lines. The title has something to do with that, sure, but so does the fact that this film pretty much perfected the simple and well-worn premise of a group of people exploring some kind of creepy old building that, in all likelihood, is haunted.
It was remade in 1999, but that one can be missed entirely, especially because so much about the original The Haunting still holds up exceptionally well. It’s very well-acted, has some good character-related drama (owing to different people having different beliefs about what’s going on), and it’s also fantastically done from a technical perspective, especially when it comes to the production design.
Release Date August 22, 1963
Director Robert Wise
Cast Julie Harris , Claire Bloom , Richard Johnson , Russ Tamblyn , Fay Compton , Rosalie Crutchley , Lois Maxwell , Valentine Dyall
Runtime 112 Minutes
9 'The Devil's Backbone' (2001)
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Image via Sony Pictures Classics As far as supernatural thrillers go, The Devil’s Backbone is top-tier stuff, having a feel and narrative that can be somewhat compared to aforementioned movies like The Orphanage and Tigers Are Not Afraid. It has a focus on younger characters like the latter, and a comparable setting to the former, given a particularly creepy orphanage is where much of this movie is located, too.
The Devil’s Backbone is generally eerie, unless it wants to be all-out terrifying, with it being surprisingly effective at hitting those alarming emotional highs at all the right times. It’s a film that’s unapologetically heavy at times, so calling it “fun” might not be quite accurate… but it is certainly engaging and dripping with atmosphere throughout, being one of Guillermo del Toro’s greatest films (and that’s really saying something, considering how many good ones he’s made).
The Devil's Backbone
Release Date April 20, 2001
Cast Marisa Paredes , Eduardo Noriega , Federico Luppi
Runtime 108 minutes
8 'The Phantom Carriage' (1921)
Director: Victor Sjöström
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Image via AB Svensk Filmindustri Anyone skeptical about the idea of a supernatural movie more than 100 years old still being scary ought to check out The Phantom Carriage, because it kind of is. Sure, the horror elements aren’t in your face, and anyone who needs a good jump or two to feel scared won’t get that out of a movie that’s, you know, silent… but there’s something to this ghost story that’s timelessly eerie.
The premise of The Phantom Carriage involves the experiences of someone whose death is the final one of the year, leading to him having to collect souls over the next year for Death itself. It’s a visually dazzling movie that’s so creative for something so old that it still genuinely impresses and feels subtly spooky, being effective within its genre despite its age much in the same way that old Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies still hold up as comedies.
The Phantom Carriage
Director Victor Sjöström
Cast Victor Sjöström , Hilda Borgström , Tore Svennberg , Astrid Holm , Concordia Selander , Lisa Lundholm , Tor Weijden , Einar Axelsson , Olof Ås , Nils Aréhn , Simon Lindstrand
Runtime 106 Minutes
7 'Ghostbusters' (1984)
Director: Ivan Reitman
Image via Columbia Pictures An undeniable 1980s classic, there’s little that can be said about Ghostbusters that hasn’t already been said in some capacity. It’s one of the funniest ghost-related movies of all time, that’s for sure, and has a certain amount of novelty for arguably being more of a science fiction movie about the paranormal, as opposed to leaning into the fantasy genre to a greater extent.
It’s sort of science versus fantasy, with the titular squad using advanced technology to battle supernatural forces, finding success in making a business out of doing so. It’s well-loved for the catchy theme song, the iconic performances from the main cast, and the memorable supernatural creatures featured throughout. Ghostbusters is a good time, even 40 years later, and has more or less earned its status as a classic.
Release Date June 8, 1984
Runtime 105 minutes
6 'House' (1977)
Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi
Image via Toho House was one of many memorable horror movies released in 1977, though the emphasis in this particular one is arguably more on surreal comedy and fantasy than anything truly terrifying. The premise is what you'd expect from a supernatural movie featuring a house: people travel to one, stay there for a little while, and find themselves experiencing some strange things while there.
It’s a movie that’s built up a cult following largely due to how unwaveringly strange and out-there it is, with House starting out fairly wild and reaching the realm of fever-dream cinema before long. Surrealism and intentionally bizarre humor are the focuses here, and the resulting film is as entertaining as it is confusing. It’s one of the silliest supernatural movies out there and, when viewed a certain way, also one of the very best.
Release Date July 30, 1977
Director Nobuhiko Obayashi
Cast Kimiko Ikegami , Miki Jinbo , Ai Matubara , Kumiko Oba , Mieko Sato , Eriko Tanaka , Masayo Miyako , Yōko Minamida
Runtime 88 Minutes
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