Technically Accurate
A photographer’s weekend with his girlfriend’s family takes a turn after her mom offers to help him quit smoking.
Get Out
Jamie Lee Curtis made her feature film debut as this babysitter in 1978’s “Halloween.”
Laurie Strode
Janet Leigh’s character is killed off less than halfway through this 1960 Hitchcock film, in a motel shower.
Psycho
Rifle heiress Sarah Winchester kept building onto this sprawling San Jose mansion for decades, staircases to nowhere included.
Winchester Mystery House
Pennywise is the stuff of nightmares for anyone with coulrophobia, the fear of these.
Clowns
An actress shooting a film in Washington, D.C., runs through a string of doctors and psychiatrists before trying a less conventional specialist for her 12-year-old.
The Exorcist
On her wedding night in 2019’s “Ready or Not,” Grace must survive her new in-laws’ family tradition: a deadly game of this.
Hide-and-seek
Drew Barrymore, the biggest name on the poster, is killed in the opening scene of this 1996 slasher.
Scream
Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands reportedly fainted when a late-night knock at her guest-room door here turned out to be Abraham Lincoln’s ghost.
The White House
Nyctophobia, which a lot of kids grow out of, is the fear of this.
The dark (accept night or darkness)
A struggling actor’s career finally takes off right as his wife gets pregnant, and the older couple next door couldn’t be more supportive.
Rosemary’s Baby
Dani’s grief-filled trip to Sweden in “Midsommar” ends with her crowned this, after she outlasts the other women in a dance contest.
May Queen
The cast of this 1979 film weren’t told exactly what would happen during one dinner-table death, so their horrified reactions are real.
Alien
In January 1976, a family fled this Long Island house after just 28 days, inspiring a bestselling book and a 1979 movie.
The Amityville house
Taphophobia, the fear of being buried alive, was common enough in the 1800s that “safety coffins” came rigged with one of these so you could signal from below.
A bell
A widowed mom has her hands full with her young son, who becomes fixated on a creepy pop-up book.
The Babadook
Mia Goth plays both the final girl and the elderly woman hunting her in this 2022 slasher set on a rural Texas farm.
X
In this 1980 film, the only person the villain actually kills is the hotel’s head chef, who flew in from Florida to help.
The Shining
Al Capone played banjo in the prison band here, and some visitors swear they still hear it coming from the empty shower room.
Alcatraz
A hit 2020 co-op video game about ghost hunting takes its name from this word for the fear of ghosts.
Phasmophobia
After her mother’s funeral, an artist who builds detailed miniature scenes tries to hold her family together.
Hereditary
In 1974’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” this final girl leaps through a window and finally escapes in the bed of a passing pickup truck.
Sally Hardesty
To film one teen’s death, the crew flipped a bedroom set upside down so about 500 gallons of fake blood could pour out of his bed. The actor, in his film debut, did fine for himself afterward.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Guests at this Fall River, Massachusetts, bed-and-breakfast can book a night in the house where Andrew and Abby were found dead in 1892.
Lizzie Borden’s house
Named for a Celtic festival, this is the fear of Halloween itself.
Samhainophobia