OMFG: The Winchester Mystery House Movie Starring Helen Mirren Finally Gets a Trailer
I’ve been in love with the Winchester Mystery House for many years so you can imagine my excitement over Helen Mirren playing Sarah Winchester in a new film. Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built has a first trailer today.
The film, which I reported on last year, also stars Jason Clarke, Sarah Snook, Angus Sampson, and Finn Scicluna-O’Prey. Directed by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig (The Spierig Brothers) with a script by them and Tom Vaughan, Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built is being distributed by CBS Films and Lionsgate. Here’s the summary:
Inspired by true events. On an isolated stretch of land 50 miles outside of San Francisco sits the most haunted house in the world. Built by Sarah Winchester, (Academy Award®-winner Helen Mirren) heiress to the Winchester fortune, it is a house that knows no end.
Constructed in an incessant twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week mania for decades, it stands seven stories tall and contains hundreds of rooms. To the outsider it looks like a monstrous monument to a disturbed woman’s madness. But Sarah is not building for herself, for her niece (Sarah Snook) or for the brilliant Doctor Eric Price (Jason Clarke) whom she has summoned to the house.
She is building a prison, an asylum for hundreds of vengeful ghosts, and the most terrifying among them have a score to settle with the Winchesters…
Of course this is less a biopic, more a supernatural thriller, but Winchester’s story is truly interesting. Here’s part of an old documentary on her and the house:
Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built will be in theaters February 2, 2018.
As a San Jose native, I think this looks pretty silly, but at the same time, I’m bursting with pride. Helen Mirren!
During our honeymoon, we drove by the Winchester House and couldn’t help ourselves…and not to poop on anyone’s supernatural parade, but we mostly found it jarring how commercial it had become (the arcade was out of order, but you could order chicken fingers in the cafe still), nestled directly across from several hotels and a movie theater, and incredibly sad how obvious it was, as you move through it, that the house was the byproduct of an addled mind taken advantage of by unscrupulous contractors. All of the stairs have been replaced with zig-zagging rows of “low-riser” stairs, so that the elderly Sarah Winchester could make her way through, windows that once faced the sun now face drawing rooms (or hallways, depending on what side you’re on), and it’s not zany so much as it is depressing. She must have been awfully lonely.
Edited to add lip service, because it would be crappy not to mention the movie, but I’m sure the movie’s fine, for what it is (hanging as much of a tapestry of fiction on this story as on The Conjuring). Helen Mirren is amazing, obviously.
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