Synopsis

Hospice worker Caroline Ellis takes a live-in position at an isolated Louisiana plantation, caring for a stroke victim who cannot speak. After receiving a skeleton key that opens every door, she discovers a hidden attic room filled with evidence of hoodoo rituals and a sinister history. As Caroline investigates the house and its inhabitants, she is drawn into a supernatural struggle where belief itself determines who survives.

Factoids & Trivia

• The film was based on an original screenplay by Ehren Kruger rather than a published novel.

• Principal photography took place in Louisiana, including Felicity Plantation in Vacherie, which served as the exterior of the Devereaux home. The plantation is surrounded by farmland, so the swamp visible around the house was created with computer-generated effects.

• Production was originally scheduled for 2003 but was postponed after Kate Hudson became pregnant. The filmmakers felt that the character's circumstances in the story were incompatible with the pregnancy.

• During a nighttime scene filmed in the rain, Gena Rowlands slipped and broke her hand. She was absent from production for approximately five weeks, and some of her remaining scenes were completed in California.

• John Hurt offered to perform the stunt involving Ben falling from the roof, but the production did not allow him to do it because the stunt was considered too dangerous.

• The movie opens with Caroline reading Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" to a hospice patient. The choice echoes the early part of that novel, in which Jim Hawkins cares for the elderly Billy Bones after he suffers a stroke.

• The production used sepia-toned, speed-manipulated flashbacks to give the scenes involving the plantation's earlier inhabitants a dreamlike, unsettling quality.

• The film's conclusion became one of its most discussed elements. Contemporary reviews noted that its final reversal was deliberately built around the story's central idea that the supernatural ritual works only when the target truly believes in it.