Ah, grey days, long dark nights, the decay of the year towards impending winter – there is nothing more delicious than a good ghost story in the autumn. Some cultures possess a long tradition of excellence in the genre, and Britain is one. The British Isles also hold a blue ribbon for excellence in murder mysteries; with all those dead bodies populating the whodunits, maybe it’s only natural for great ghost stories to follow. After all, the poor dead murder victims’ souls have to go somewhere and do something.

Or maybe it’s just the crappy weather. All that damp, dim grayness ten months of the year lends itself to spooky tales and dark stories. Add in the feudal-derived manor house system of landownership, with giant (largely unheated) mansions moldering on isolated moors, and the setting alone writes much of the atmosphere and half the story. The houses themselves have their own spirit and constitute creepy characters themselves, not to mention the disembodied specters they contain.

Old houses are always moving. They shift and settle, and shudder with the wind. One such country outpost provides the locus for the anthology of great ghost stories collected in Dead of Night, a British production from 1945. Dead of Night is rightly considered a classic, one of the earliest and best in the horror genre. Each story has a distinct flavor, yet the enveloping narrative which ties them together is just as good a creeper as the constituent chapters. A London architect drives out to the country to see about a renovation job on an old house. You might expect grim grey stone, a forbidding façade, and visible mold everywhere, but instead it’s a beautiful, timbered farmhouse set in peaceful bucolic countryside, on a bright and sundrenched day. Nothing suggests death and fear, though they are on the way.

That’s a brilliant bit of anti-cliché filmmaking, one of many such touches throughout the film. The architect, upon being welcomed by his hosts and their guests, walks around in a befuddled fog. It turns out that he has seen this house – and the people – before, in a dream. In fact, he’s seen them many times in many dreams; he suffers from a recurring dream in which all that day’s (and night’s) events play out the way they actually happen. He can even predict what is going to happen next. At first all seems innocuous and pleasant but then . . . things change, the dream turns into a nightmare, and our inoffensive, mild-mannered architect commits at least one murder.

The five segments, interspersed with the architect’s narrative, are reenactments of strange occurrences experienced and recounted by the host and four of his guests. These are adapted from stories by H.G. Wells, John Baines, E.F. Benson, and Angus MacPhail, and each segment was shot by a different director. One of the problems of anthology films is that they can be disjointed in narrative and uneven in quality. However, despite the use of disparate source materials and directors, Dead of Night hangs together well, due to the device of the architect’s dream, which connects and ultimately blends with the other stories.

The first story concerns a young race car driver’s precognition of his own death. While recuperating from a crash in the hospital, he experiences a dream? a waking vision? of a funeral procession, which, it turns out, may have been his own. Unlike the architect, the driver is able to heed the warning hidden in his dream; however, he cannot save others from meeting their fates, either then or later at the hands of the architect.

All haunted houses must have a haunted mirror. It’s a rule. Much of Dead of Night acts as a set of warnings: don’t invite strange people to your house; don’t play hide and seek in centuries-old buildings (more on that next); and whatever you do, don’t ever buy antique (i.e., pre-owned) furniture. Who knows what malevolence might have attached itself to that beautiful rococo piece – or how it might affect you. For all you know, that lovely vintage whatsit might act as a portal to some deep evil that can move about from place to place and person to person, carried by the mirror.

Never, never play hide and seek in an old, old house. You might find someone you didn’t expect. You might even find someone who shouldn’t be there – at least, not anymore. You may find something you wish you’d never seen. Do not play games with old houses. You might be swallowed whole.

Hide and seek is a really dangerous game. My all-time favorite ghost story (written, not filmed) is “‘Smee”, by A. M. Burrage. In “’Smee”, a group of people gathered at a large country house for the holidays pull together a game of ‘Smee, which is a variation of hide and seek. Part of the story concerns a member of the party who does not know the house at all. Running to find a hiding place, she opens a door to what she thinks is a room and runs in fill tilt – only it’s not a room but a dark stairwell, and she falls to her death.

Around the time I first read “’Smee”, I bought a calendar featuring the work of a photographer known for his spooky, ethereal, infrared work. He photographed a grand English house with a sad history: on the day of his wedding, the son of the household and his new bride started a game of hide and seek with their guests. The bride, unfamiliar with the place, went up to an attic and hid in a trunk. The trunk latch caught and locked her in. The attic was in an unused part of the house, so no one heard her screaming (she must have screamed). Though the house was searched exhaustively, she was not found, and her disappearance on her wedding day remained a great mystery. Thirty years later, the attic was thoroughly cleaned – and her body was finally found.

Falling into the department of “Things You Didn’t Know Existed”, Dead of Night actually features a golf-themed ghost story. Men in plaid pants and otherworldly beings go together like peanut butter and mint mouthwash, and lighthearted, humorous ghost stories can be hard to carry off, but this one succeeds. The host tells it to try and diffuse the increasing distress and agitation of the architect as more and more of his dream plays out in reality, but the effect is only temporary for both the architect and the viewer. That’s because the golf-ghost story is followed by hands down, the creepiest moment ever filmed.

That moment involves a ventriloquist’s dummy. Need I say more? Isn’t that enough?

(Yes. Yes, it does, in fact, come “alive”.)

If Stephen King killed clowns and clowning once and for all with It, and many say he did, then Dead of Night should have massacred the use of freaky little wooden alter-egos forever. If you look at the timeline of the rise and fall of ventriloquism, perhaps it did.

Apparently it was a “thing” for a while to make dolls. A really nice relative of my husband, whom we both adore, took up this pastime. She made us a doll. She sent it to us. It was so real! So lifelike! As in, it looked like it would come alive! At night. In our house. While we were sleeping.

I cut it in half with a shovel and buried it in the yard, held down with an old barbell. Later this really nice relative told us she made it look exactly like my husband looked when he was a baby. How sweet! I told him if I had known he was a former goddamned maniacal doll, I never would have married him.

Sometimes I swear I can hear the little bastard clawing at the dirt.

Or there was the lovely house in the mountains the maniacal doll and I rented for a long weekend, which contained a room – an entire room – filled with dolls. Filled. With. Dolls. The room was noticeably colder than the rest of the house, and my dog wouldn’t enter it. I am not making this up. Until that moment I never included tacky faux ski chalet ‘70’s architecture on my list of Supernatural Houses Not to Visit, but I do now. That just shows that haunted country houses can take many forms.

Speaking of things – or people – who shouldn’t be creeping around old houses at night, picture yourself living in a cavernous, echoing place designed to house a hundred people luxuriously. Only, in this huge space of endless empty rooms, there are only you and four other people, taking up very little of this otherwise unoccupied complex.

Or is it truly unoccupied? How would you know for sure? Maybe there are more people there than you expect, holdovers from an earlier time. Of course, it could just be your imagination, running wild and out of control in the vast, empty corridors.

That is the question facing the governess played by Deborah Kerr in 1961’s The Innocents. Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen the movie at least once, read no further. Once you read the following paragraphs, you will no longer be an innocent, able to approach the film with a clean mind free of preconceived notions and whispered possibilities.

A green young woman is hired by a rich man to look after his orphaned niece and nephew. Of course it’s her first real job, and of course the house is huge and isolated. At first, it’s a dream come true – the place is spectacular, the children are lovable, and it’s summer, bright summer, in the beautiful English countryside. But then things start – happening. Maybe the children aren’t as childlike and innocent as they should be; it’s almost as if they’ve been under a bad influence – and still are. They seem haunted. Could the evil influence be that the shadow of the former valet and governess, now dead, still hang over the children? Or perhaps it is the dead couple reaching out to reclaim those who were theirs in life?

Either that or the governess is barking mad, and the only evil influence in the children’s lives is her, and the only danger comes from her descent into total paranoia. The novella on which the film is based, “The Turn of the Screw”, is deliberately, defiantly ambiguous as to what is actually happening. It can go either way. The story has been filmed several times, each version leaning either slightly or heavily in one direction or the other. This 1961 interpretation leans supernatural – at least on the first viewing. A case can be made for either opinion. That creates the brilliance of the film: either it’s a really great ghost story, or a really great tale of psychological horror. Whatever way you vote, it’s a smashing film.

As in The Shining, the question arises: did the isolation drive the governess mad, or was the place inherently evil, corrupted even further by its shady former inhabitants? Author Stephen King vehemently disliked director Stanley Kubrick’s film of his book, because the film made it seem that Jack, the caretaker, was evil from the beginning, whereas in the book, it was the place that darkened his soul. Regardless, The Innocents should win the Academy Award for “Most Effective Use of Statuary in a Horror Film”, just as “The Shining” (the novel) should win the Pulitzer for “Most Effective Use of Topiary in a Scary Book”.

The Innocents shares that sense of ambiguity with The Others (2001) and The Other (1972), more recent rural ghost stories, both of which seem straightforward enough until the big reveal. In The Other as with The Innocents, everything that “happens” can also be explained by suggestion and susceptibility. Each viewer must decide which take on The Innocents they accept. I’m not sure I’m sorry if I have made that task more difficult.

As in The Innocents, not everything is always as it seems in The Uninvited from 1944 (not to be confused with the 2009 film of the same name, which is a different story, not a remake). If something appears to be too good to be true – the dream job on the palatial estate, the dream house by the sea – it probably is.

The dream house which turns into a nightmare sounds like a tried and true formula, but The Uninvited puts enough spin on the theme to keep it enticing. A brother and sister stumble upon the perfect country house – which just happens to sit on top of a cliff and possesses a tragic history. The house is haunted, by the jealousy and hatred of its former residents. It’s difficult to discuss the plot without giving away the twist, but that twist is what raises The Uninvited above some of its well-used elements. The cold spots, the sounds of ghostly sobbing, the freaked out pets who won’t go upstairs, the fatal love triangle of the former owners– however familiar, these features create a wonderful, romantic eerie atmosphere. That alone would almost be enough, but throw in the all-female super creepy psychiatric hospital decorated in Early Monstrosity and headed by an obsessed, sadistic, closet lesbian with a wardrobe by Igor the Satanist who goes completely bat shit, and the story goes way over the top of standard expectations. There are multiple bitchfiends (or so it seems) in The Uninvited; in addition to being a great ghost story, it turns into something of an estrogen-laced whodunit.

Taken together, Dead of Night, The Innocents, and The Uninvited should just about kill any plans you’ve ever made to vacation in a country house B and B. They form a trilogy of cautionary tales about the supernatural and psychological dangers of old English (or American, or Canadian, or Chinese, or Lebanese, or whatever) country houses. The dangers might come from humans, ghosts, the effects of an isolated location on a weak mind, or a ventriloquist’s dummy – or even from the house itself. There won’t be any way to tell until it’s too late. At least check the rental ads carefully for “no dolls” listings.