11 haunted objects in film ranked by how dumb you’d have to be to mess with them

Okay, fair enough, you didn't think a random mirror was going to warp your perception of reality, but why would you mess with a book made of human skin?

By Jen Lennon, Saloni Gajjar, Emma Keates, Jim Vorel | May 3, 2024 | 12:00pm

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11 haunted objects in film ranked by how dumb you’d have to be to mess with them

Clockwise from bottom left: The Evil Dead (New Line Cinema), Talk To Me (A24), Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (Cult Epics), The Ring (DreamWorks Pictures) Image: The A.V. Club

For those of us who are smarter than Homer Simpson, horror movies have taught us a very important lesson: If anyone warns you against interacting with something because it’s cursed or haunted, just back away. Doesn’t matter if you believe in it or not. Just play it safe, and you won’t end up at the mercy of an evil puzzle box or a spirit you’ve literally invited into your body via a dismembered hand. But sometimes you don’t get a warning, or the haunted object seems innocuous enough that there’s no reason to suspect it. If we all ran around refusing to touch clothing buttons, none of us would be able to put on our pants in the morning. Then everyone would be constantly living in athleisure, and no one wants that.

Haunted objects are a trope in horror films, but some are easier to spot than others. You could be forgiven for not necessarily suspecting that a bed is going to eat you—but when multiple people have explicitly warned you not to enter that hotel room, Mike, and then you do it anyway, that one’s kinda on you, bud.

To celebrate this trope, we’ve put together a list of haunted objects in horror movies and ranked them according to how dumb you’d have to be to mess with them. And, to keep things organized according to horror logic, you won’t find any explicitly possessed objects on this list, like Chucky. Basically, if there’s a dude in there, it doesn’t count. Everything else is fair game.

11. The button - Drag Me To Hell

Drag Me to Hell (1/9) Movie CLIP - Button Curse (2009) HD

Well, it’s … a button, isn’t it? If someone you knew told you that they’d found a really swell button and thought you should have it, the polite thing to do would be to just quizzically accept the unusual gift. Perhaps you could idly consider sewing it onto a shirt, before realizing that wait, you don’t know how to sew, and then casually tossing it in a junk drawer for the next 12 years. Now, if this acquaintance let slip that an old, half-melted Romani woman had been the button’s prior owner, and that she had croaked out an incantation through her rotten teeth as she handed it over, all the lights in the room flickering as demonic energies coalesced into the tiny piece of plastic, you might look at the button with a little bit more trepidation. And right you would be to do so, given that the Lamia is very literal about enforcing the film’s title. On the plus side, this must be one of the easiest of all cinematic curses to circumvent: You just need to successfully give the button away to some other poor sap. Unfortunately for the film’s Christine (Alison Lohman), this plan doesn’t exactly go off without a hitch. [Jim Vorel]

10. The mirror - Oculus

Oculus (2014) - The Mirror’s Victims Scene (3/10) | Movieclips

Even if nothing overtly supernatural was happening, the floor-length mirror at the heart of director Mike Flanagan’s still-underrated Oculus—it hit theaters before his Netflix miniseries had made him a household horror name—does have an unnerving look to it. Its gnarled, wooden horns give it an oddly organic appearance, like something that grew in a fairytale setting. You could substitute this exact prop into a Snow White adaptation as the Evil Queen’s Magic Mirror without missing a blink. The Magic Mirror would be far less dangerous than The Lasser Glass of Oculus, though. The longer you’re around this thing, the more your sense of reality warps, orchestrated by a cruelly inhuman intelligence that seems to delight in causing misery. Unfortunately, by the time you realize there’s anything wrong with the mirror, you’ve probably already fallen under its state of heightened suggestibility. [Jim Vorel]

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9. The bed - Death Bed: The Bed That Eats

Deathbed: The Bed That Eats (1977) - Deathbed Eats Various Things

It doesn’t really feel like I should have to point out that when you’re prowling around an abandoned, ruined home, and you happen to spot an ancient four-poster bed, the best idea in that moment is rarely to climb inside for a nap. That’s just prowling 101—you don’t know where that bed has been! When were the sheets last cleaned? You don’t know if Grandpa succumbed to his infectious diphtheria there. Why is it that the same people who rigorously go over their hotel beds with fine-toothed combs and black lights are suddenly willing to climb aboard this century-old relic? The pillows are probably full of asbestos. With that said, I will acknowledge that 99 times out of a hundred in these situations, you typically don’t have to worry about said bed then swallowing you up into an internal stomach full of powerful acid. That almost never happens, save for in director George Barry’s surreal 1977 horror passion project, which sat unreleased for decades before finally being rediscovered by bad movie geeks of the 2000s. Suffice to say, once you realize that you’ve been lying on the wrong bed, you’re well on your way to dissolving in a disguised demon’s stomach. [Jim Vorel]

8. Christine the car - Christine

Christine (1983) - Run, Moochie, Run Scene (5/10) | Movieclips

When Arnie (Keith Gordon) first hopped into that beat-to-shit 1958 Plymouth Fury, he had no reason to expect that it was going to try to kill him. Or, at least, he had no reason to think that it was more dangerous than any other car from that era, which wasn’t exactly up to modern standards: seatbelts wouldn’t be mandatory in vehicles in the U.S. until 10 years after it rolled off the assembly line. Given that it was 1978 by the time Arnie found Christine, he should’ve been cautious about its safety features if nothing else. Still, it’s not really his fault that the car turned on him: the former owner didn’t warn him that his brother, his sister-in-law, and his niece all died in the car. If you have to disclose previous crashes when you sell a car, you should have to disclose previous mysterious deaths, too. [Jen Lennon]

7. Ouija board - Ouija

Ouija Official Trailer #1 (2014) - Olivia Cooke Horror Movie HD

If there’s one thing you learn early in life thanks to horror films, it’s this: Do not mess around with a goddamn Ouija board. It might seem like harmless fun and games, but risking being possessed or haunted by evil spirits? No, thank you. It’s a simple lesson that the characters in 2014’s repeatedly ignore (we wouldn’t have a movie otherwise, huh?). Laine (Olivia Cooke) literally uses the same board she saw her BFF burn before seemingly killing herself to try and contact her. Raise your hand if you were also screaming at the stupidity of this choice. Girl, of course things were about to get weird. At least the 2016 prequel, they used and got as its director. [Saloni Gajjar]

6. Tarot deck - Tarot

TAROT – Official Trailer (HD)

According to horror movie logic, anything even remotely connected to the occult should be avoided, even if it’s just a pretty commonplace method of divination. If it has even a small possibility of inviting an unknown entity into your life, just stay away from it. In Tarot, Haley (Harriet Slater) knows better than to do a reading with a deck that doesn’t belong to her. But after caving to peer pressure, she eventually relents and breaks out a creepy deck of tarot cards she found in the attic of a house she and her friends are renting. And when her friends start dying in ways related to their tarot readings, it’s hard to say that she should have seen it coming, but she definitely should have listened to her instincts and left those cards alone. [Jen Lennon]

5. VHS tape - The Ring

Samara Comes to You - The Ring (8/8) Movie CLIP (2002) HD

I’ll confess that when I watched The Ring as a pre-teen, I stayed away from any DVDs for a while. That’s how much fear it instilled in me and probably anyone who watched it at an impressionable age. It proves I would’ve never watched a videotape that comes with cursed lore. But I understand why it’s compelling to challenge fate. Compelling and ridiculous, to be clear. The Ring, based on Koji Suzuki’s novels, is pretty effective in displaying humanity’s need to mess around with things they know can harm them. Rachel (Naomi Watts) can’t be blamed. She isn’t initially aware of the horror she’s inviting when she presses play on a video that is responsible for the death of multiple teens. That changes by the end when she purposely puts others in harm’s—a.k.a. a creepy, ghostly Samara’s—way to save her son. It’s a complex, full-circle story that, again, relies on Rachel placing her bet on other people’s idiocy. [Saloni Gajjar]

4. The hotel room - 1408

1408 (2/12) Movie CLIP - 56 Deaths (2007) HD

How many times do you have to be warned that something is bad news before you accept that, in fact, the thing might actually be bad news? Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a hardcore supernatural skeptic, which is why he ignores all the warnings Gerald (Samuel L. Jackson), the hotel manager, tries to give him. Don’t go into room 1408, 56 people have died in there, Gerald tries to tell him. 56! And Mike is still like, “Nope, I’m good, one ticket to the murder room, please.” Even if you don’t believe in the supernatural, at some point, you have to accept that the world is trying to tell you something, and “56 deaths” translates to, “For the love of God, cut the edgelord bullshit and pick another room.” [Jen Lennon]

3. Lament configuration - Hellraiser

Hellraiser - The box! You opened it, We came!

In the immortal words of Kenny Rogers, you’ve gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run. And when you’re staring down a puzzle box that’ll take you to a new world of pain and pleasure because you’ve exhausted all other earthly delights, that’s when you run. Frank (Sean Chapman) didn’t necessarily know all the details about what would happen when he opened the Lament Configuration, but he couldn’t have been especially surprised when he was transported to another realm where demon-like Cenobites started tearing off his flesh with fish hooks. As he tells Julia (Clare Higgins), the box “opens doors…doors to the pleasures of heaven or hell, I didn’t care which.” Unfortunately for him, he got the bad end of that deal. [Jen Lennon]

2. The hand - Talk To Me

Talk to Me Exclusive Movie Clip - Conjuring the Spirits Montage (2023) | Vudu

There’s a reason the haunted corpse hand that lets your body be possessed by dead people is so high on this list. It’s… a haunted corpse hand that lets your body be possessed by dead people. Need we say more? But Talk To Me does something that few other films are able to pull off so effectively; it makes the haunted corpse hand that lets your body be possessed by dead people look really, really fun. Before everything goes wrong in all the inevitable ways (you know, corpse hand and all), the party where the film’s main characters sing and dance and film each other doing their possession-inspired antics seems like a genuine blast. Is it stupid to mess with the hand? Of course it is! Would I give it a go if everyone else around me was having that much fun and coming out mostly fine on the other side? Honestly… probably. [Emma Keates]