The film opens with a shot of a dog bed and food bowl in a trash can at the curb. Inside the house, the man and woman who live there discuss how they had to have their jack russell terrier put down after he bit the child who lives across the street. The woman believes the dog went crazy and attacked because the girl is "abnormal". The incident is later shown in a flashback.
A collegiate department head and his lackey student reporter track the movements of the professor leading the party with the aim of discrediting her. They sneak into her lessons and meetings, take and publish photographs without her consent, and even obtain a set of keys to the haunted Rose Red in order to follow her group there. The house, itself, and the ghosts inhabiting it also stalk the characters throughout the film, killing a number of them.
One character's overbearing mother seizes him by the neck and chokes him. It's unclear at the time whether she is already dead. In another scene, a woman strikes her boyfriend/the man she has been dating across the face.
There is one scene in which a character who is clearly losing her mind tells tries to convince another character that he is the crazy one. However, he aggressively pushes back, asserting that he is not crazy and regaining control of the situation. Unsuccessful attempt at gaslighting - use your discretion.
This may be a matter of opinion, so use your discretion. In a flashback scene, a man hangs himself while his young niece and nephew watch. They appear to be alone and he is fully aware that they are present, gifting his hat to his nephew and a rose to his niece before cinching the noose.
In a flashback, one of the characters recalls his mother taking him to the house while most probably drunk. She is shown entering the house a bit unsteadily. Moderate social drinking is depicted in other scenes.
In a flashback scene, the lecherous man who owns Rose Red is attempting to sexually coerce his wife's companion/maid. When his wife walks in, the maid turns the tables on him, seizing and kissing him, creating an opening for the two women to shove him out a window. In another scene, a lump is seen moving along beneath the carpet. It makes its way up under the covers of a bed and approaches between the legs of one of the characters, who is frozen in fear. However, at the last minute, she whips back the blankets to find nothing there at all. Near the beginning of the film, one of the characters is forcibly kissed on the lips by his overbearing mother in front of the rest of the party, humiliating him.
A man hangs himself in a flashback. It's a relatively lengthy scene depicting the entirety of the act and its results. We see a different character hanged by the neck in two different scenes, although it is not clear whether this was his actual cause of death.
An innocent woman is aggressively interrogated by the police for ten hours, including physical abuse resulting in broken bones and other injuries. She is shown being questioned and struck across the face; other abuse and its results are only described.
Unclear. In a flashback, a young girl disappears, supposedly never to be seen again. Throughout the film, her ghost appears both as a young girl and later as a grown woman. The characters wonder aloud how she could have kept alive "all this time" and muse that she must have kept hidden in the house. The dialogue is very unclear and her death is never explained any further.
One of the character's has an overbearing mother who, having lost contact with him, attempts to go to the house and find him. She perishes. This does not seem to be particularly traumatizing for him.
No one is kidnapped in the traditional sense, but the house has a reputation for making "men turn up dead and women disappear". Various characters vanish and are never seen again or appear as ghosts. Other characters are led away by the house and become lost and terrorized, sometimes surviving, sometimes not.
The man who originally owned the house was a known cheater and is shown with other women in multiple flashback scenes. His wife is also said to have nearly died of an STD that he passed on to her.
Ghosts appear in many forms throughout the film - as ordinary-looking people who are seemingly alive and well, decaying bodies, swirling light, reflected faces, whispering voices, and objects moving and behaving in ways they should not be able to.
Most people will probably not view it as possession, but I would advise caution if possession is triggering for you. The house causes people to go mad and those who have died in the house become vengeful spirits. Most of the characters are psychics who exhibit various forms of channeling. One woman touches objects and then speaks in the voices of folks who touched them before. Another woman is an automatic writer who, on at least one occasion, seems to go into a trance and write something communicated to her by a ghost. Another character speaks in the voices of the ghosts on a few occasions and uses her telekenetic power to do their bidding, though it is unclear why.
No, but it’s worth noting that just because a film is from the 2000s or based on a Stephen King novel doesn’t mean there won’t be LGBTQIA+ representation. LGBTQIA+ characters were appearing in films as early as the 1990s (and that’s just to some degree of frequency) and King had a gay couple in It, which was written in the 1980s.
An autistic teenage girl is a prominent figure. Throughout the film, characters make prejudiced statements about her, in front of her, or directly to her face. One character pulls her hands forcibly away from her face, then grabs her face and attempts to force her to look at them. One character goes on a prolonged stint of threatening to knock her unconscious or kill her in order to get her to release her hold on the house's doors, arguing that since she cannot be reasoned with, they should simply eliminate her.
Multiple characters have anxiety attacks, including hyperventilation, frantic running around, closing of the eyes and repeating mantras, and in a couple of cases inability to distinguish reality from psychic visions.
A man hangs himself in a flashback. Another man is shown hanged on two different occasions, but it's unclear whether this was actually the means of his death.
There are a few scenes with rapid, inexplicable electrical flashes - think Star Trek. They are very bright and take up most of the screen for at least a good ten seconds each time. Additionally, there is at least one scene with a straight strobe effect.
One character is a vicious momma's boy with unhealthy eating habits. Another character who regularly patronizes him puts his arm around his shoulders and tells the others that the two of them can share a room and will raid the fridge together in the night. It's a subtle joke, comparing their overnight stay in the haunted house with a children's sleep-over and implying that the momma's boy will want to eat in the middle of the night because he is overweight.
Two characters are shown in bed together near the start of the film (presumably post sex). In a dream sequence, one character asks another to go to bed with him. In a later scene, he wakes to find a ghost in bed with him and potentially attempting to seduce him.
In one line of dialogue, as part of a metaphor, a character rhetorically asks who puts a coin under the Tooth Fairy's pillow. In another scene, a character suggests to an autistic teenaged character that she hold her breath until she "finds herself at the North Pole with Santa".
The ending might be considered a bit bittersweet. Not all of the characters survive and ultimately, their original goals for entering the house are not fulfilled, although some of them are better off at the end for various other reasons.
Two characters drive recklessly up to the house. The lead vehicle slams its brakes and is rear-ended by the following vehicle. Mild injuries or no injuries. Some damage to the cars.
A door slams on a character's hand, severing all four fingers. We see the bloodied hand and it is covered for the rest of the movie, but with a white handkerchief that remains very bloody. A character falls and hits their head on the floor, causing a bloody head wound. This is clearly visible in a couple of scenes and is then bandaged, but some blood remains visible through the gauze. A crazed woman gets a nose bleed. A crazed man emerges from the garden with a bloody split lip.