Ghosts! Murder! Cats and dogs living together! A charismatic lead who doesn't take life too seriously!
The Uninvited was the Ghostbusters of its age, a film that - on paper - could have been quite scary, but is delivered with a lightness of touch and naturalistic humour that makes it more palatable to a wider audience.
I suspect when it was released, in the mid 1940s (at the height of the Second World War) it might have been seen as quite the chiller, but to modern sensibilities it's more a supernatural mystery, tame even by the standards of the Ghost Whisperer and the original Charmed.
Both Martin Scorsese and Guillermo Del Toro have described The Uninvited as one of the most affecting horror films they have ever seen, although I suspect nostalgia plays a role in those proclamations.
Carefree composer-turned-music-critic Roderick Fitzgerald (Ray Milland) and his sister, Pamela (Ruth Hussey), fall in love with an unoccupied house they come across on the Devonshire coastline while on holiday in 1937.
Finding it belongs to Commander Beech (Donald Crisp) they agree to purchase it for the princely sum of £1,200, much to the chagrin of Beech's pretty, 20-year-old granddaughter, Stella Meredith (Gail Russell).
Although her grandfather hasn't let her back in the house since her mother died when she was only three, Stella feels an attachment to the house, Windward, and wants to keep it in the family.
However, she soon finds herself attracted to the charming Roderick, and he invites her into the house.
And that's when things start to get a bit weird for everyone.
Based on Dorothy Macardle's 1941 novel, Uneasy Freehold, The Uninvited is steadily paced, with a great balance between humour (mostly from Roderick's flippant attitude) and mystery.
By today's standards the special effects for the ghost are quite primitive, but they're still effective, and the paranormal manifestations run the gamut from scared animals and howling cries, through messages from beyond and channelling, to cold spots and strange smells, before serving up actual sightings of an apparition.
In just an hour-and-a-half, the film does a good job of covering all the bases of paranormal investigations.
Roderick, as the audience's POV character for the most part, begins with the plucky, aspirational, grin-and-bear it attitude of the wartime (even though the film is set pre-war) but through his experiences his cynicism is worn away so that he starts to take the matter of ghosts and hauntings seriously.
Amid the emotional turmoil that forms the motivational core of The Uninvited, there's even a very overt suggestion of a lesbian relationship (or at least attraction) between two of the key players in the narrative, which was surprising discovery in a 1940's movie.
A delightful period piece, The Uninvited is a product of its time, but a very imaginative and creative one nonetheless.