Influenced, or perhaps haunted, by the horror-noirs of Val Lewton, The Uninvited sets its eerie tale in a sunshiny English village, where brother and sister Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey are able to purchase a house for a suspiciously low price. Of course, their new abode, although empty, is still occupied.... The late Carlos Clarens, in his book Horror Movies, finds The Uninvited "the best and most unusual" of the seventeen horror films released in the U.S. in 1944. It had, he notes, "a pleasantly chilling feminine touch (it derived from a best-selling novel by Dorothy Macardle) most evident in the deft dosage of its well-calculated shivers: a flower that wilts in seconds, a dog that refuses to climb the stairs, a scent of mimosa that impregnates a room, a moonlit romantic piano piece that develops into a somber concerto." And James Agee, writing in The Nation in 1944, said, "The Uninvited, through an adroit counterpointing, syncopating, and cumulation of the natural and the supernatural, turns a mediocre story and a lot of shabby clichés into an unusually good scare-picture. It seems to me harder to get a fright than a laugh, and I experienced thirty-five first-class jolts, not to mention a well-calculated texture of minor frissons."