When I was a kid, the gateway drugs into the horror genre for me were ghost stories and haunted house tales. This came about by my visiting Disneyland for the first time and going on the Haunted Mansion ride. I became enthralled by it, and every time I went to one of the parks, I would ride it over and over again.
This, in turn, led me to read up on ghosts and haunted houses. Every month at school, the teacher would pass out these Scholastic fliers, which would feature a host of books for young readers. Among them was a book I purchased about said subject, which featured a chapter on "The House That Was Never Finished." That was the Winchester Mystery House.
Ever since then, I've been fascinated by it. The story goes as follows: a woman who married into the famous Winchester family- aka the ones who invented the famous Winchester rifles- felt that her family was cursed by the spirits of all those lives that had been taken over the years by her husband's ancestor's invention. This was because both her husband and newborn daughter died in short order, leaving her a widow.
Visiting a local medium, the woman told her to move West, where she should start building a house for all the spirits of the people lost to her family's rifles over the years. As long as she kept building, she could appease them and the "curse" would be kept at bay.
Obviously, this tale was a big influence on the Haunted Mansion, which was also built to house spirits that were ill at ease- 999, to be exact... but there's always room for one more. 👻
Such was the case with the Winchester house, which the widow kept adding onto until her death. The really interesting thing about it was the oddball design of the place. Stairs led up to the ceiling. Doors opened on walls, or open air. Hallways led to dead ends. The place was like a maze one could easily get lost in, stretching over a mile and a half by the time the widow died.
The idea was for the ghosts to have a place to endlessly wander, keeping them engaged so that they couldn't cause harm to those in the outside world. Legend had it that, once a particular room was occupied by a restless spirit, the widow would seal it off, so that the ghost would be trapped. It is indeed a real place, and you can visit it in San Jose, California.
I always thought the tale would make for a hell of a movie, and with Winchester, we finally have that movie. But does the film live up to the legend? As you might guess, certain liberties have been taken with the story, though much of what I detailed above remains intact. The writers are Tom Vaughan (Unstoppable, Playing House) and the Spierig Brothers, Michael and Peter (Daybreakers, Jigsaw), who also directed.
While I quite enjoyed everything I've seen of the Aussie-German brothers' output to date, which also includes the comedic zombie flick Undead and the sci-fi thriller Predestination (based on a short story by Robert A. Heinlein), you'd almost never guess they were the ones behind this film, which is very staid and conventional.
I mean, don't get me wrong- it's a handsomely mounted affair, with the Australian production going to lengths to faithfully replicate the infamous abode, which is indeed impressively brought to life.
The cast is also top-notch, including the legendary, Oscar-winning Helen Mirren (who will always be Morgana from Excalibur to me- to say nothing of her turn in the insane porn-adjacent biopic epic Caligula), Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) and Sarah Snook (also in Predestination and the okay horror flick Jessabelle).
The plot-line involves a doctor, Eric Price (Clarke), who is dependent on drugs and in debt after the untimely death of his wife- and thus can easily be bought for the right price. To that end, a representative of the Winchester company hires him to evaluate the widowed Sarah Winchester (Mirren), who has inherited the controlling half of her family business. Price's mission is to prove her mentally unstable, and thus, unfit to run her husband's company.
(IRL, this wasn't the case- Sarah simply inherited a portion of her husband's fortune, which she was free to do with as she chose. Though I don't doubt some questioned her sanity at the time, as long as workers were getting paid, they didn't complain, and her husband's family's company was successful enough to keep that money coming until her death.)
Price travels to the estate, where he finds a host of construction workers working nearly round the clock to add on to the house, which the widow believes is haunted by the spirits of those killed by her late husband's invention, the famed Winchester rifle. As related above, as long as she keeps building, she can keep the spirits at bay- but there's a wrinkle in her plan at the moment: a particularly unruly spirit that is wreaking havoc all through the house.
This is especially unfortunate, as her also-widowed niece, Marion (Snook) is living in the house with her young son, Henry (Finn Scicluna-O'Prey), and thus, their lives could be in danger. Indeed, no sooner than he arrives than Henry almost falls to his doom off the roof, only saved by Price's quick reflexes, who catches him in the nick of time. Needless to say, things only get weirder from there.
Naturally, Price is at first skeptical, but as unexplained things keep happening, he eventually comes around to the widow Winchester's line of thinking and teams up with her to stop the particular ghost that is causing so much trouble. Things go from there about how you'd expect them to, but I won't go into further detail for those who haven't seen it yet.
The end result is perfectly fine, I guess, but fairly predictable and nothing avid fans of ghost stories and haunted houses haven't seen before, aside from the unique setting. There's no denying that the house itself is the real star here, with the cast just going through the motions of doing what they're supposed to do, as called for by the plot. Contrary to what you might have heard, it's not that bad of a movie, just nothing special.
If anything, it reminds me the most of one of those old-school TV movies from the 70's or early 80's- perfectly adequate, but nowhere near as scary as one of its big-screen counterparts. The Shining or The Legend of Hell House this is not. (Well, okay, it probably is better than the TV remake of the former, but you know the one I meant.) Actually, it kind of vaguely reminds me of something like another Stephen King TV adaptation: Rose Red.
As tends to be the case with a lot of modern horror, there's a heavy reliance on jump scares and CGI effects, which rarely works for me. As much as I loved, say, slasher movies, growing up, I can't say many of them scared me because you get used to the formula pretty quick and know what to look for- the same goes for haunted house movies. I can't say I was much unnerved by any of this movie.
To be fair, it is a tricky bit of business to make a good ghost story these days. For every, say, Hereditary, there's at least a dozen by-the-numbers efforts that are dreary and predictable. Sadly, Winchester falls into the latter category, despite the best efforts of the cast to liven things up. If it's impressive set design you're looking for, you're in luck. If it's genuine thrills, not so much.
Winchester is watchable, to be sure, it's just hard to recommend to anyone who knows the ghost story/haunted house sub-genre well enough to not fall for the hoary tropes at hand here. I didn't hate it, but I feel like I'll have forgotten it by next week, you know what I mean?
And yet, the Winchester legend itself has stuck with me over the course of my entire life. It's too bad the film isn't as memorable, as there was a good movie to be made from the source material. This, I'm afraid, just isn't it. 😞
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