The Spierig Brothers’ Winchester is a fascinating movie that somehow manages to take the genuinely uncanny life of Sarah Winchester (the wife of William Winchester and heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company) and make it boring.

It’s surprising because even a cursory examination of her life shows how fascinating it is. As I mentioned, besides being the inheritor of a fortune, her child died of marasmus (Marasmus is a wasting disease due to protein deficiency typically seen in children though that’s not the unusual part. What is is that Sarah Winchester was rich. How is it her child died of a disease typically caused not only by malnutrition, but more commonly seen among the very poor?)

William Winchester died in 1881 and supposedly at some point Sarah Winchester went to a medium and was told–by her dead husband–that she was supposed to build the house in such a way as to confuse the spirits of the people killed by Winchester rifles.

Now, I don’t claim to know what motivates ghosts, but I’d be more concerned with the person who ACTUALLY killed me as opposed to the arms company that made the weapon that did the act, but that’s just me.

Now, there’s no evidence that any of that stuff with the media is actually true BUT the Winchester Mystery House is so unusual that as far as explanations go a supernatural-based one makes more sense as opposed to Sarah Winchester made a house straight out of Escher or Dr. Seuss for reasons?

But back to the movie, which takes all that interesting history, adds a few jump scares and much to my surprise, managed to syphon all the weirdness from what should be a really creepy story.

It’s a feat in and of itself and can’t be as easy as The Spierig Brothers make it seem.