The Advance

Ghost Story (1980)
Four old friends, members of the self named "Chowder Society," meet regularly to scare each other with increasingly disturbing ghost stories. The ghost stories get too disturbing. Secrets can't stay secret forever.
The love scenes are hot. Definitely rewind material.

The Changeling (1980)
Gives new meaning to the term "low budget." But man, it all works.
A man whose family has died in an accident becomes a recluse in a house with issues of it's own. It's not clear if the house is working through its pain through him, or if he is working out his through it.
And the bathtub scene will make you want to stick to showers for a while.

The Entity (1983)
Seriously disturbing. Some ghosts are just plain bad - hostile, predatory and vicious, degrading and abusing the living, preying upon the most vulnerable. This is one of those. Not for the faint of heart, really.

Modern Classics

The Sixth Sense (1999)
Another take on the classic question of who is alive and who is dead, and how can you tell the difference.
Yeah, yeah, everybody knows the twist ending by now, and the concept has been played to death, but this is the movie that started it all, and is still the best of the lot. A young boy can see the dead, and is haunted, not by ghosts, but by his own fear.
The really scary one is Bruce Willis. How can a person be so unaware that he has no clue about his own family, his interactions with others, or even his own self? He is more haunted than the little boy, and more afraid, really.

Sleepy Hollow (1999)
A nonstop Goth orgasm. There are enough headless corpses in this movie to start a bowling league. Johnny Depp is strangely passive, but he does get all the good lines. And it has one of the most supremely malicious revenants ever in a movie, gruesomely mean-spirited in a gleefully over the top sort of way.

What Lies Beneath (2000)
Be careful whom you love. Some mistakes follow you home.
This one has it all. Creepy neighbors, mysterious goings on, deep, dark secrets, a very angry revenant out for revenge, and Michelle Pfeiffer looking drop dead gorgeous. What else can you ask for?

The Others (2001)
One more movie looking at the whole dead/alive/in between thing.
A woman moves to a home with her two highly photosensitive children who must be kept out of the light at all costs. A new set of servants arrives, the rules start to break down, and the consequences are unexpected.
Some of this was so obvious I found myself rolling my eyes. Only complete idiots couldn't figure this out, until you realize the movie suckered you in to looking the wrong way.

The New Era

In days gone by, it was conceded that the English were the kings and queens of the ghost story. Well, no more. The Japanese have taken the crown as the modern ghost masters. Arigato, y'all.

Kwaidan (1965)
The one that started it all. Four separate stories, each depicting a classic Japanese ghost tale. Ghosts make demands upon the living, in increasingly hypnotic ways. After a while, the line between reality and fantasy disappears.
The episodes are somewhat uneven in quality. The first two are the best. Lean, minimalist, almost wordless. Not everyone's cup of sake, to be sure.

Ringu (1998) (American: The Ring)
This movie makes no sense at all. Totally incomprehensible. But dang, is it scary.
Skip The Ring 2. I speet on eet.

Ju-On (2003) (American: The Grudge)
More a haunted house story than a ghost story. The house is really the main character, and the house is vewwy, vewwy angwy. All sorts of mayhem ensues.
Truth to be told, the plot is pretty hazy. Some of that has to do with Asian, non-linear story telling techniques, true. But the rest has to do with the fact that no one can quite explain who the bad guys are, really, and why even the ones you would expect to be good, aren't.

From previews, The Grudge 2 looks pretty bad. Probably avoid.

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