A few weeks back I was home alone. I watched a movie, said goodnight to the gerbils, and went to my bed.

Just as I was dropping off, I heard a key in the front door. This is fine, I have flat mates, so someone coming in late at night isn’t an odd occurrence. Except…. Both my flat mates were in New York.

Clearly one or both of them had been murdered, the murderer had stolen their housekeys, flown to London, travelled on the underground for an hour, found my apartment and was coming to kill me.

Or I could just have been hearing things in my half-asleep state.

Given that I was now wide awake and had enough adrenaline coursing round my body to mobilise a comatose rhino,

I started to see danger everywhere in my bedroom. On went all the lights and I went prowling round the house to inventory all the ways my house could conspire to kill me.

Front door. People in horror movies (I’m looking at you, Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween) have an inherent aversion the using the front door. “What’s that? A murderer is on the loose in my house?

Better not use the front door to escape, I’m going to run upstairs to hide in a closet instead!!”  So I can only conclude that front doors are terrifying.

The one in Beetlejuice is a good case in point – go out of that sucker and you end up getting chased by sand worms on Saturn.

Living room. So the obvious culprit here is the TV: Poltergeist (things getting sucked in) The Ring (things crawling out) and Vampire in Brooklyn (so bad I can’t believe it wasn’t

made to torture people) There are bad things happening in and on your telly, and I don’t just mean Eddie Murphy’s ‘acting’.

 

But take a further look around. Look at the bookshelf. There are some books that everyone has: The complete HP Lovecraft, a couple of Stephen Kings, Naturom Demonto, the Necronomicon… maybe I should go back to reading John Grisham…

Moving onwards to the kitchen… Ooh it’s a veritable minefield of danger.  First of all, all those knives. Knives are dangerous, just ask Margaret .

And don’t get me started on the fridge- I live in fear that one day I’ll open it to get some milk and there’ll be a scary doglike creature in there banging on about Zuul….

However also to be found in the kitchen are tools to save you should you ever find yourself in trouble. The microwave is an effective Gremlin killer;

If you don’t have at least 2 cloves of garlic hanging around you deserve to get drained by vampires, and I don’t know about you but my bin could probably be classed as some kind of toxic avenger anti-hero…

Onwards, to the stairs. Actually, should probably backtrack to something far scarier. The cupboard under the stairs.

This is the stuff of horror legend. I mean, there’s even a horror movie *called* The People Under The Stairs (yes,

I know they don’t live in the stinky shoe cupboard in that movie but still. The cupboard under the stairs man! It’s terrifying!).

So onwards – up the stairs and to the bathroom. The bathroom is right up there with the kitchen in terms of ‘places where bad things can happen to you’. Let’s examine all the movies where people die in the shower or in the bath, shall we?

Psycho (stabbed in the shower); Pulse (boiled in the shower); Fatal Attraction (didn’t drown the nutjob properly the first time); The Lost Boys (Brooke McCarter in a frightwig… terrifying)…. I could mention Shivers, the old lady in The Shining and of course, A Nightmare on Elm Street as well but I worry that none of you will wash again if I do.

And what else do we have in the bathroom? The humble loo. Yes indeedy, the can, the john, the crapper. Can a toilet be dangerous, scary? You bet your ass it can…

And so to the bedroom. By all rights this should be your safe place, your haven.

The bedroom isn’t safe!

Exhibit A: The Bed. Your bed wants to eat you alive (Elm Street again).

Exhibit B: Under the Bed. Monsters. Monsters everywhere.

Exhibit C: Closet . As mentioned before, the least effective hiding place known to man, woman or Michael Myers, and surely we don’t talk about ‘skeletons in the closet’ for nothing…?

Exhibit D: Mirror. Go on, say Candyman. I dare you.

And that’s not all. That trinket box, sitting so prettily on your shelf?

I’m sleeping with the lights on tonight.

Luckily, the place I live in has neither an attic nor basement, because let’s face it, these are possibly the scariest places to ever exist.

Scary things that live in the attic: ghosts, weird spellbooks, mad first wives.

Scary things that live in the basement:  rats, torture chambers, spiders, Shia LeBeouf (probably).

What’s your favourite house of horror movie? Let us know in the comments below!