Martin Scorsese Called This 80-Year-Old Horror Film ”The Best Ghost Story Ever Made” (2024)

Martin Scorsese is not just one of the world's greatest cinematic talents. He is also one of cinema's great champions; a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of film history and a deep appreciation for the oft-maligned horror genre. When Scorsese calls something an all-time great ghost story in not one but two lists of personal favorites, film lovers should pay attention. Case in point: The Uninvited, a 1944 haunted house drama about not one, but two unsettling specters.

The Uninvited is a slow-burning supernatural thriller about siblings who take over a seaside manor, only to discover that it is plagued by a presence that has unfinished business with its former tenant. This Gothic drama may feel subdued and restrained to modern viewers, but it cast an enduring spell over many moviegoers, and parts of it scandalized conservative society at the time. As Scorsese suggests, The Uninvited is worth a fresh look.

Martin Scorsese Has Praised This Movie for Decades

The Uninvited came out when Martin Scorsese was around two years old, but it has held him in its thrall for a lifetime. First-time director Lewis Allen's extraordinary film about the misadventure of Rick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey), whose new home is haunted by a doomed lady and her romantic rival, received special notice in Scorsese's 1978 "Guilty Pleasures" list in Film Comment.

Contemporary critic Jack Cartwright wrote that the classic film was part of a wave of "higher bracket horror pictures" — sort of an "elevated horror" trend of the 1940s that included more elegant and genteel tales of the supernatural. In The Uninvited, the Fitzgeralds discover that strange disturbances in their new cliff-side mansion have something to do with Stella (Gail Russell), the doomed damsel who grew up there. Stella believes that the ghost of her sainted mother roams the halls, but Rick and Pamela soon uncover a grim conspiracy involving the poor girl's origins.

Though The Uninvited is still widely revered, modern horror fans may find it to be a bit on the soft side. It isn't that it lacks flashy FX so much as that the film is largely occupied with cheerful play dates between the Fitzgeralds and Stella, and Rick's wisecracking attempts to keep everyone in high spirits. The scares only unspool in earnest after an hour or so, but in the meantime, it benefits from Oscar-nominated cinematography by Charles Lang Jr., and an engrossingly twisty script by Frank Partos and Dodie Smith. Notably, Smith wrote the original book The One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

The Uninvited Was Controversial When It First Came Out

While this film may seem rather quaint to some modern viewers, Martin Scorsese still found it electrifying in 2015. In his list of the eleven scariest movies of all time, published by The Daily Beast, he praised The Uninvited's refined and reserved execution.

Ironically, where Scorsese praised the film's restraint, some contemporary viewers were scandalized by its main villain. The Fitzgeralds discover that Stella's mother was actually a cold and ambitious individual who planned a future with the like-minded Miss Holloway (Cornelia Otis Skinner), a sinister psychiatrist. In his book Screened Out: Playing Gay In Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall, Richard Barrios recounted complaints by The Catholic Legion of Decency that the film attracted questionable audiences at late-night screenings. Their implication was that The Uninvited had developed a lesbian following.

Today's discourse around queer-coded villains is usually dominated by Disney baddies and Universal monsters, but The Uninvited should be remembered for its subversive depiction of female intimacy. The classic film obviously has a lot to offer the modern viewer, from its social impact to its high regard among filmmakers to its simple beauty and splendor.