A Haunted Room in a Regular House

A haunted room in a regular house isn’t all that scary, really. You just stay out of that room.

But what if the haunted room is where all the saltines are?

Here’s the thing, though: humans do not need saltines. Saltines are wants, not needs. Oftentimes they are not even wants.

Childress, that little scamp, liked to spread peanut butter on saltines. The pantry where the peanut butter was kept was not haunted, but if it were, Childress would just find another place to store the peanut butter and other nonperishables. This is an easy solution to the problem of haunted pantry.

When a haunting affects a whole house, you have what is commonly called a haunted house.

That is like opening up a can of worms and discovering that not only is the can itself haunted, but all the worms are little individual poltergeists.

No, it is not like that at all. That’s stupid. Childress knows. Just look at him.

A movie in which characters spend the night in a regular house with a single haunted room is a tough nut to crack, writing-wise. The screenwriter has to come up with a reason for one or more characters to enter a room that they could easily stay out of.

The reason needs to be something other than saltines.

Maybe the room that is haunted is the bathroom, and the house has only one bathroom, and the characters have been drinking so much ginger ale all night.

That is one way.

Another way might be that the foyer is haunted, and characters don’t notice the haunted foyer when they enter because the ghosts want them to enter on account of spectral loneliness, the agony of eternity. The characters only notice that the foyer is haunted when they try to leave.

But wouldn’t there be a back door? Couldn’t they just climb out a window?

Yes, but maybe the back door is broken and all the windows are also haunted.

No, that’s stupid.

There’s another big obstacle that the haunted-room-in-a-regular-house screenwriter would have to overcome, and that is the fact that many ideas are stupid.

Actually, most ideas are stupid. There are way more stupid ideas than good ideas.

Sitting down to write a story about a haunted room in a regular house is a pretty stupid idea.

But sometimes we have to wade through lots of stupid ideas to get to that one good one.

That’s a best-case scenario.

In most cases, though, stupid ideas are merely stupid and lead us nowhere. They have no redeeming qualities. They are stupid all the way down.

They are stupid for a while and then they just stop without so much as a