Yes! Here is the first teaser trailer for Winchester, Helen Mirren’s “haunted house drama” based on the very real Winchester Mystery House. It looks quite spooky, as befits its real estate source material, which is basically a big beautiful pile of creepy features like stairways to nowhere.
“It’s a gargantuan 7-story structure with no apparent rhyme or reason, each maze of halls more confusing than the next,” announces the voiceover.
According to a feature in Smithsonian magazine, writing about the real house:
An American Penelope, working in wood rather than yarn, Winchester wove and unwove eternally. She built, demolished and rebuilt. Winchester hastily sketched designs on napkins or brown paper for carpenters to build additions, towers, cupolas or rooms that made no sense and had no purpose, sometimes only to be plastered over the next day. In 1975, workers discovered a new room. It had two chairs, an early 1900s speaker that fit into an old phonograph, and a door latched by a 1910 lock. She had apparently forgotten about it and built over it.
Was Winchester a troubled woman? Was she plagued by very real spirits? Was she simply a terrible architect with a boatload of money? It doesn’t look like Winchester plans to entertain the third theory! Deadline explains the plot, emphasis mine:
Written by Tom Vaughan and the Spierig brothers, the pic centers what appears to be only a monstrous monument to a disturbed woman’s madness. But Sarah Winchester is not building it for herself, for her niece (Sarah Snook) or for the brilliant Dr. Eric Price (Jason Clarke) whom she has summoned to the house. She is building a prison, an asylum for hundreds of vengeful ghosts, and the most terrifying among them have a score to settle with the family.
Nevertheless, if this trailer were a Trulia listing, I would at least attend an open house. The movie hits theaters February 2—just in time for Valentine’s Day counter-programming.