The acting is so so, the special fx are actually pretty good for what they are, and there are a few places that were actually scary. My biggest problem is the little girl. Annie, I think her name is. The constant crying "mommy, daddy". Seriously? The girl that played this kid is 13 when this movie is made. No 13 year old child calls their parents "mommy" and "daddy". Its mom and dad. She sounded like a 6 year old. Especially in 2009.As for the house, I doubt they were able to film there even though the outside shots showed it. The pictures were kind of cool. Wish it had explained more of the history and stuff thats supposed to happen there.

Please for the love of god never take the time to watch this movie. Its really not hard to make a good movie from low budget that will ACTUALLY scare you, take Paranormal Activity for example.The house is the only thing true about the story, which is cheesy to mislead people into watching it when they expect something totally different. Whats worse is the portrayal of the Winchester house from the outside totally looks like a scaled down version dollhouse with horrible blue screen special effects behind it. To think the movie starts with, like many horror movies of this genre, that it is based on true events is a shame.My opinion - this movie should of gone straight to DVD, and someone should have used those DVD's for shot-put practice.=============Please Read This Part If Anything=====================I only watched it because it was on netflix, and when i looked up the trailer on youtube, the reviews there were good. However, i noticed all of the reviews talked about a scam site, which luckily i never visited. The site is known as sitemoovis.co.cc and i STRONGLY advise you do not visit it. I was smart enough not to do so, i went ahead and did some research to see if anyone got any malware or bugs from it and apparently some did. I should of been more suspicious when every review with that sites name in it was VERY good, and i realized something was off when the movie was VERY BAD. I just thought the IMDb community should know of this scam and stay away from it.

Apart from getting the history of The Winchester House completely wrong, there is no substance in the story, the characters are not well developed, so you don't really care what happens to them, and the trite horror movie set-ups are the very definition of campy. It isn't scary and you can't even laugh at it as a suitable schlock flick. A complete waste of an hour and a half.For those of us who are familiar with the actual Winchester House in San Jose, CA, the house portrayed is not the actual house, nor is it in its actual location. How hard would it have been for the makers of this film to have done even a little bit of research to get the content in the ballpark? I love the genre, so this comes from someone who can appreciate a good horror movie. Unfortunately, this isn't one!

Browsing my video store and finding nothing but the usual cheap,low budget jobs and copious tacky remakes,I stumbled across a pretty old school scary looking cover,boasting to offer "a terrifying true story" ooh goodie! I grabbed it rushed home to watch it excitedly as I love a good horror.Sadly though, all I can say to that now is this-if only they had put the same amount of effort made on producing the front cover as they did the actual movie, it may well have been a lot better-by that I mean actually worth the £3.95 I paid and an hour or so of my life wasted on viewing time.From just after the opening title,the movie comes over quite over the top and predictable,introducing what you could pretty much guess to be a ghost within about 5 seconds followed by some truly scary acting (and by scary,I mean scary bad!) And Pan to the modern day...A family staring woefully from each other to the "good will" pile of children's items, then back to each other with silent yet over emphasized pain was just unnecessarily drawn out-to some even more painful attempt at a backing score. Not only that,but after watching the whole film, seemed utterly irrelevant and was not even mentioned again.All three lead actor's performances were pretty cringe worthy and awkward to watch throughout and the token "paranormal investigator" only served to make viewing all the more slow and disjointed.I really couldn't feel anything for the characters at all emotion wise,(Yes,I know it's a horror which never has been a genre where you get massively developed characters with huge background stories etc taking up chunks of plot that's saved for the scares)but to actually get into the horror feel,you have to at least give kind of a dam what happens to the characters surely? All I could see was actors painfully droning through a script half trying to be somewhat convincing.The special effects,while not bad as such,were not really what you would expect these days given technological advances of today either- but maybe that was the whole point?? I won't go too into the plot, I will let people see for themselves, but I will comment however lastly, on the ending. Now I have seen this twist executed pretty well in films before over the years and originally it was a fall of you chair, hand over mouth shocker.But not this time. The voice over and flash backs at the end explaining that blah blah blah and blahhh have all been done before by now to the point that it was tediously predictable.They didn't even try and make it slightly different or mix things up a bit.The same tired formula strikes again! In short, I would love to be able to actually say some good things about this movie, but honestly I think the best part was when I returned it to the store and drove back home vowing to never watch it again!!