The Uninvited – 1944

Review: The Uninvited – 1944: Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey as a brother and sister on vacation in Cornwall, UK (actually it's the coast around Elk, California) and they come across an apparently abandoned home along the shore near a high cliff over the sea. Smitten with the gorgeous old house and the dramatic view of the ocean, the siblings find out the owner is ready to sell it off for a very low price. They gather up all the money they can, buy it, and move in. There's no electricity and come evening (and there are a lot of evening scenes in this film) they're using candlelight to move around and lay in bed and read. But then overnight comes a woman's voice weeping and moaning throughout the home...

Milland and Hussey gives this Gothic ghost story a kind of light humor that isn't reflected very much elsewhere in the tale, and that separates it wholly from the similar, in its own way, 1940 Rebecca which has several overlapping elements. The intimidating and dangerous Miss Holloway (played by Cornelia Otis Skinner) in this film is from the same school of psychopathy as Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) was in Rebecca, but the meaning in the mystery of The Uninvited has a nice twist that goes in its own unique direction, and there are "horror" film elements that Hitchcock's Rebecca doesn't go near.

An 18 year old Gail Russell appears in The Uninvited as a 22 year old love interest for Milland's character and she is central to the story as an endangered orphan who has a tragic past and plenty of unanswered questions swirling around her. The coastal photography is gorgeous and dramatic, and so is the house where most of the ghostly goings-on will go-on. Russell's character is drawn to the house and location with a personal connection that gets exploited and explained as the minutes pass. Also, the melancholy nature of the tale gets nursed a little by the joking cracks from Milland, which not only suits Millands acting style but leavens what's afoot in the various substories.

There's no explanation given in The Uninvited how it is that ghosts exist and how such a tenuous being could flip pages in a book, emerge as a ghostly light, verbalize some of the time but not other times, and so on. The war years of the 1940s brought an outpouring of films on mortality, and ghost visitations in a variety of ways were brought to the screen, feeding an audience effected and impacted by the lists of dead that were coming in from the theaters of combat around the world. This film has a simple story nugget of "what happens to people after they die?" and "what are the attitudes of dead people toward the living?" which in The Uninvited takes a little explaining and investigation, but it is mostly seen through a glass darkly.

Original page June 2016 | Updated July 24, 2026