Scooby Doo Day! Horror Movies With Paranormal Gaslighting

On September 13, 1969, they debuted "Scooby Doo" and changed the course of many future middle-agers' lives. We would be forever obsessed with the unexplained. I'd like to celebrate this 47th anniversary with a list of movies that seem to be about the paranormal but end up being explained....

Gaslighting: Manipulating a person to make him think that he is going mad. 

Let's look at some movies with the Scooby Doo theme of having a "man behind the curtain" faking folks out or some explainable situation in something that was thought to be paranormal initially. 


The Ghost and Mr. Chicken 
This delightful Don Knotts movie is a classic favorite from the 60s. He plays a reporter wannabe in a quiet midwestern town who is forced to sleep in a murder house and report about it. This knee knocking delight seems to be about ghosts playing an organ, but becomes something different in the end. This is perhaps the most "Scooby Doo'ish" of the choices.




House on Haunted Hill
A group of strangers are invited to a scary house on the hill to spend the night for $10,000. The host and hostess seem to be at odds and the house is notoriously haunted. 





When Michael Calls (aka "Shattered Silence")
A woman begins getting calls from her dead nephew who doesn't seem to know he's dead. 





Half Light
A writer loses her son in a tragic accident and goes away to the Scottish shores to write and heal, but is haunted by a ghost on a lighthouse island.






Let's Scare Jessica To Death
A woman leaves a mental institution and moves to a quiet estate where those around her fear her mind, as does she when she begins to wonder if she's going crazy again. 





The Boy
An American woman hoping to escape a bad relationship takes a job as a nanny in England. She goes to a remote estate where a woman and her husband attend to their son, a doll. She isn't sure what to make of it when they leave her alone with the doll and special instructions. Over time, she finds it moves on is own and she's certain it's possessed by their dead son's soul. 





To honor the day, enjoy this - I made a playlist on YouTube of Scooby Doo Episodes - LINK !!!