There’s some other good stuff up and down the dial (the original Carrie, Road Warrior, etc.), but nothing quite as nice as three truly classic haunted house movies on TCM

First: The Haunting. Three are a couple of absolutely classic performances in this flawless rendition of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House: Julie Harris and Claire Bloom just eat the place up, and even Russ Tamblyn of West Side Story does a creditable job. It makes you forget – or want to forget – that horrible remake with Catherine Zeta Jones. You can’t forget the opening words in both the book and the film: “Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” 

Then: the easy-to-confuse-because-of-the-damn-title Legend of Hell House at 7:00 pm. A bunch of eccentrics are hired ot spend a weekend in “the most haunted house in America,” including Clive Revill the Scientist, Pamela Frankly the timid psychic, and Roddy McDowell as the only survivor of the last deadly attempt to spend the night in Hell House. Hey! Roddy friggn’ McDowell, and none of them have ever been better. From a screenplay by master macabre-ist Richard Matheson from his own novel, directed by the guy who directed DIsney’s underrated original Escape to Witch Mountain, LoHH possesses with one of the giddiest, greatest reveals in haunted house history. Just damn near perfect.

And then to top it all off, Poltergeist, the movie responsible for bringing about the modern haunted house story, without all the Gothic trappings (along with Amityville Horror, of course): complete, with Craig T. Nelson before Coach or Parenthood and JoBeth Wilson fresh out of Guiding Light, at the beginning of her career (yes, hard to believe, Fish Police was still ten years in the future). Amazing: this film is more than thirty years old – 1982, to be precise – and there are still images from it that haunt, you should pardon the expression, supernatural film-making and common language. The static TV set. “Go into the light!” “They’re heeere,” soon to be followed by the sequel’s slogan, “They’re baaaack.”

Every singe on of ’em worth watching, and all free of charge on basic cable. Clearly, there is a God, and he likes spooky movies.