Winchester

I don't wanna sound to negative I mean the movie wasn't good but it had interesting idea that the souls of dead people killed by the Winchester guns are haunting Sarah Winchester house as she build rooms that represents the rooms they died on it and she try to apologize and make them leave and so on and so on.

Well that's indeed interesting idea but it's done very poorly so predictable in so many ways, I wish there were like a twist or something even stealing "The sixth sense" twist it doesn't matter make something interesting happen.

The acting was so ordinary nothing special from anyone I expected Sarah Snook will have a major role in the movie cause I loved so much in "Predestination" but it didn't appear as much and it was okay..The Winchester house the main focus of the movie looked very good from the inside made the movie looked great but the outside shots of the house looked like cheap CGI from an old game and the monster in the movie I think they didn't troubled themselves with adding makeup to make the monsters believable they just made it all CGI and just make the shot very dark no one will know..And the movie really so much in cheap jump scares if you took them out of the movie we can say it's comedy not horror and that's in my opinion is like the thing was most of the horror movies of the last decade they lack creativity despite the horror genre is one of the genres that you can invent no ways to scare people and it will work..STOP USING CHEAP JUMP SCARES!

I saw this during matinee it was worth the $8... Some of the spooky parts were indeed spooky. Not amazing, but not horrendous

While it is clear that The Spierig Brothers are familiar with all the haunted house horror story conventions, they, like Rob Zombie before them, do not seem to be able to effectively use them. A fondness for the genre does not translate into the ability to engage and frighten an audience.

Before anyone dismisses my review as being from someone who doesn't enjoy deliberately paced, creepy stories without a plethora of pyrotechnics, let me state that The Haunting (the original not the crappy remake) and 1944's The Uninvited are two of my favorite films. You don't need a large budget or special effects to make a scary film on the subject of a haunted house. Both Insidious and Sinister demonstrated that with good direction and a decent story you can scare the hell out of an audience.

While Winchester boasts some good actors and a wonderful setting that is fraught with possibilities, it squanders both on a tired story of ghosts looking for revenge, which completely ignores the real facts of the Winchester House. A couple jump scares accompanied by sudden music stings work to a degree, but there is no genuine feeling of suspense generated by the script, no growing sense of escalating dread. Instead we get acceptable performances and some nice looking sets as the actors go through their paces to little effect.

It's not a terrible film, but one which fails to raise the hackles and which you will quickly forget after leaving the theater.

For those who want factual history, "Captive of the Labyrinth" by Mary Jo Ignoffo is an excellent biography of Sarah Winchester, who probably was not interested in ghosts, but rather in architecture, a field that did not invite professional participation by women. Sarah Winchester's father manufactured decorative architectural features for Victorian houses, and his factory was right next door to her childhood home -- so Sarah grew up intimately exposed to the physical details of building houses. As an educated rich woman, building her house was an expensive hobby she loved and could afford to pursue. She also incorporated the newest technology - elevators, showers, etc. - into the house, and managed a productive fruit orchards and a dried fruit business, and . I thought the movie did a good job of including some factual information based on the real Sarah Winchester, and accurately portrayed her as responsible, not crazy, and deeply caring for her family, As for the lurid sensational haunted house story, this was concocted by those who bought the house after Sarah Winchester died, and turned it into a money-making tourist trap. That said, I enjoyed this fictional ghost story, which explored deeper themes than I would normally expect from a supernatural horror genre flick. There does seem to be a heavy handed message about gun violence -- however, I agree with that message; it's more than timely..

This film has nothing to do with the cathedral city in Hampshire. When William Winchester, the owner of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, died in 1881 he left his vast fortune to his widow Sarah, making her one of the wealthiest women in America. Soon afterwards Sarah Winchester left her home in New Haven, Connecticut and moved to San Jose, California where she began building a vast, sprawling mansion. Work on the house continued until Sarah's own death in 1922. The building, today known as the Winchester Mystery House, still exists and is a popular tourist attraction; it is noted for oddities such as staircases and passageways which lead nowhere. It is said to have been left unfinished at Sarah Winchester's death, but it lacks any coherent plan and probably never would have been "finished" even if its owner had lived for many more years.

That much is fact. For many people, however, the main interest of the Winchester Mystery House lies in the legends which have grown up around it (and, indeed, had started to grow up even during Sarah's lifetime). It was said that the house was haunted by the ghosts of all those who had been killed by guns manufactured by the Winchester company and that Sarah's obsessive compulsion to add yet more rooms to her ever-growing house was in fact an attempt to placate them. The mansion still has the reputation of being one of the most haunted buildings in America.

The film, which is set in 1902 and has Sarah Winchester as its main character, assumes that the legends are true. (A supernatural horror film based around the assumption that ghost stories are all a load of superstitious nonsense would not, I suspect, be a great success). The officers of the Winchester company, still based in Connecticut, have heard rumours that Mrs Winchester, who still holds a controlling interest in the company even though she lives on the other side of the country, has gone mad and that she believes herself to be haunted by evil spirits. They therefore appoint Eric Price, a psychiatrist, to examine her, hoping that he will declare her to be insane which will allow them to remove her from any position of control in the company. (Was Price's surname chosen in homage to the late Vincent Price, a noted actor in horror films?)

Price is that familiar figure from horror films, the sceptic who is proved wrong. He initially believes that ghost stories are all a load of superstitious nonsense, but his acquaintance with Sarah Winchester and her extraordinary home soon persuades him to change his mind, and it becomes clear that he and Sarah are indeed threatened by vengeful spirits. Particularly malevolent is the ghost of a young man who, to avenge the deaths of his brothers, Confederate soldiers cut down by the rifles of the Union army, killed several employees of the Winchester Company at their headquarters and was in his turn shot dead by the police.

The film received largely negative reviews from the critics, but I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I was going to. The cinematic ghost story can be a predictable, cliché-ridden genre, but "Winchester" brings a certain originality to it. Whereas the likes to "The Haunting in Connecticut" and the recent rehash of "The Amityville Horror" tried (very dubiously) to pass themselves off as "true" stories, "Winchester" builds upon an intriguing blend of true history, legend and outright fiction to produce something of much greater interest, a story which does not leave the viewer with a "seen-it-all-before" feeling. The film-makers were greatly assisted by their coup in persuading an actress as distinguished as Dame Helen Mirren, an actress you wouldn't normally associate with haunted-house horror movies, to star in the leading role. She invests Sarah with a good deal of dignity, making her a woman who is eminently sane, even if much of the world believes her to be mad. Dame Helen receives good support from Jason Clarke, an actor I had not previously come across, as Price, a man haunted by a personal tragedy, and one which he shares with Sarah. "Winchester" does have its share of horror clichés, including the normal spooky music and camera tricks, but overall it is one of the better recent examples of the genre. 6/10