This week I’m beginning to share some of the films that shape my dissertation, just a glimpse of what I’m exploring. The Uninvited is the film that opens our ghostly door.

There’s something wonderfully unique about this film. Released in 1944 and directed by Lewis Allen, it stands as one of the first Hollywood ghost stories to treat a haunting as something real, something serious. Here, the supernatural isn’t a trick or a fright, but a presence asking to be recognised. The dead return because something in their history has been left unresolved, and only acknowledgement by the living can help them find peace.

The story begins with a beautiful cliff-top house overlooking the sea, bought on a whim by a brother and sister who quickly realise they’re not the only ones living there. A coldness settles in the rooms. A woman’s sobbing drifts through the night air. There is no violent spectacle, no monstrous apparition — just grief, lingering and unclaimed.

What I love about The Uninvited is the way it treats the haunting with sincerity. The ghost is a witness, a presence that aches. The living characters don’t fight the haunting so much as learn to understand it, and that’s where the film quietly becomes something more than horror. The resolution doesn’t exorcise the spirit — it listens, acknowledges the pain carried, and in doing so offers a release to both the ghost and the people she has been reaching toward.

In the landscape of ghost cinema, The Uninvited is a foundational landmark. It shows that haunting doesn’t have to be something to fear. Haunting can be an invitation to remember, to reckon, to heal. Watching it now, I’m struck again by how quietly revolutionary it is. Beneath its gothic shadows lies a gentle truth: the dead come back not to terrify us, but because something in their story still needs to be heard.

In the months to come, we’ll look deeper into The Uninvited and explore why the film lingers — not as a chill down the spine, but as a soft knock on a closed door, waiting for someone to open.