The Skeleton Key (PG-13, 2005)

An updated Southern Gothic-type of scary movie, THE SKELETON KEY focuses on a young, self-confident woman, Caroline (Kate Hudson), who takes a job caring for wheelchair-bound, mute stroke victim Ben (John Hurt). She moves into a Terrebone Parish mansion with Ben and his wife Violet (Gena Rowlands). Feeling guilty about the circumstances of her father's death, Caroline begins to feel the need to "save" Ben from Violet, whom she comes to see as dangerous. Violet's estate lawyer (Peter Sarsgaard) describes her petulance as a generational and regional, but this doesn't explain the spooky house. As Caroline grows more suspicious, the house turns creakier, the shadows more sinister, and doors more seductive. When Violet gives her a skeleton key that unlocks every door in the house, you know it's only a matter of time before she opens the wrong one.

According to legend, the mansion was once home to a family who kept a pair of black servants, Papa Justify (Ronald McCall) and Mama Cecile (Jeryl Prescott Sales). Caroline discovers their pictures hidden around the house, along with various conjurations and rings shaped like snakes.

Not surprisingly, especially in a film about a girl who wants so badly to make amends for her personal past, the black couple's story represents (in abruptly edited, sepia-toned flashbacks) the definitive onus of U.S. history, involving white fear of blackness, white property anxieties, and white violence in the form of lynching. "The house is theirs as much as ours," mutters Violet. Everyone knows that white folks meddling in black folks' enchantments never works out in the movies. And so Caroline falls into trouble, not quite knowing whom she's helping and whom she's battling.

Studio: Universal Pictures
Director: Iain Softley
Cast: Gena Rowlands, Kate Hudson, Peter Sarsgaard
Genre: Horror
Run time: 104 minutes
Theatrical release: August 12, 2005
DVD release: November 15, 2005
MPAA Rating: PG-13
MPAA explanation: violence, disturbing images, some partial nudity and thematic material