Rosemary's Baby (1968, Paramount, dir. Roman Polanski, based on the novel by Ira Levin) is a famous claustrophobic thriller about a couple that discovers that the wife’s pregnancy (Mia Farrow) may well have been planned by Satanic forces intending to give birth to the Anti-Christ. This film occurred when the media (especially a Time magazine cover in 1966) was asking 'Is God dead?' Well, no. But the ending of the film and novel is catastrophic. John Cassavetes is the husband, and the evil old couple is played by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer.
The ending of the book is quite graphic in the description of the monsters that gets delivered. The concept of the movie seems quite sinister given the reversal of Roe v Wade by SCOTUS.
Burnt Offerings (1976, United Artists, dir. Dam Curtis, based on the novel by Robert Marasco) is your vacation rental house ghost story. A young couple the Rolfs (Oliver Reed and Karen Black) rent a vacation home with their young son, and weird stuff starts to happen. They are supposed to keep the house up, but it seems organic: it can fix itself. There seems to be a presence upstairs, a matriarch (in the Allardyce family), and—you guessed it—Mrs. Rolf is being groomed to take over as its new sentinel. There is a great line from one of the elderly supporting characters, 'I know what I do!'
The Skeleton Key (2005, Universal, dir. Iain Softley, PG-13, 104 min) is supposed to have a trick ending but the plot is formulaic and no surprise. The movie is timely now because it is set in pre-Katrina New Orleans and Terrebonne Parish, swampland right on the Gulf, and quite spectacular to film. Kate Hudson plays Caroline, a well-intended young woman from the Garden State (pun) who takes a live-in job in an old plantation house caring for Ben Devereaux (John Hurt) who supposedly had a paralyzing stroke. Now a live-in job is no gift—you get a nice place to live but have no freedom. We often depend on live-in home health aides (some of them illegal aliens) to deliver eldercare and allow adult children freedom to work, so this touches a sensitive issue. But this is Louisiana, with all the trappings of voodoo, Santaria, and ghosts. This movie has all of that. It seems that around 1910 an ancestor abused some servants after the servants tried to teach the kids voodoo, and preformed an American lynching, even burning them alive as they hung. Now, Caroline is not allowed to possess mirrors in the house, because they can reflect the ghosts—you get the idea. Peter Sarsgaard plays the lawyer Luke, and seems slightly emasculated until he explodes at the end, and there are reasons for all of this. You see, Caroline will become One of Them—an idea we’ve seen before, as in Burnt Offerings (above).
The film has the concept of a Shyamalan film, but not quite the same subtlety. Lips tied shut?