11 haunted objects in film ranked by how dumb you’d have to be to mess with them

For those of us who are smarter than Homer Simpson, horror movies have taught us a very important lesson: If anyone warns you against interacting with something because it’s cursed or haunted, just back away. Doesn’t matter if you believe in it or not. Just play it safe, and you won’t end up at the mercy of an evil puzzle box or a spirit you’ve literally invited into your body via a dismembered hand. But sometimes you don’t get a warning, or the haunted object seems innocuous enough that there’s no reason to suspect it. If we all ran around refusing to touch clothing buttons, none of us would be able to put on our pants in the morning. Then everyone would be constantly living in athleisure, and no one wants that.

Haunted objects are a trope in horror films, but some are easier to spot than others. You could be forgiven for not necessarily suspecting that a bed is going to eat you—but when multiple people have explicitly warned you not to enter that hotel room, Mike, and then you do it anyway, that one’s kinda on you, bud.

To celebrate this trope, we’ve put together a list of haunted objects in horror movies and ranked them according to how dumb you’d have to be to mess with them. And, to keep things organized according to horror logic, you won’t find any explicitly possessed objects on this list, like Chucky. Basically, if there’s a dude in there, it doesn’t count. Everything else is fair game.

11. The button - Drag Me To Hell

Well, it’s … a button, isn’t it? If someone you knew told you that they’d found a really swell button and thought you should have it, the polite thing to do would be to just quizzically accept the unusual gift. Perhaps you could idly consider sewing it onto a shirt, before realizing that wait, you don’t know how to sew, and then casually tossing it in a junk drawer for the next 12 years. Now, if this acquaintance let slip that an old, half-melted Romani woman had been the button’s prior owner, and that she had croaked out an incantation through her rotten teeth as she handed it over, all the lights in the room flickering as demonic energies coalesced into the tiny piece of plastic, you might look at the button with a little bit more trepidation. And right you would be to do so, given that the Lamia is very literal about enforcing the film’s title. On the plus side, this must be one of the easiest of all cinematic curses to circumvent: You just need to successfully give the button away to some other poor sap. Unfortunately for the film’s Christine (Alison Lohman), this plan doesn’t exactly go off without a hitch. [Jim Vorel]