The Uninvited is a 1944 American supernatural horror film that was directed by Lewis Allen and stars Ray Milland, Ruth Hussey, and Donald Crisp.

The film is based on Dorothy Macardle's novel Uneasy Freehold (1941), which was published in the United States as The Uninvited (1942) and deals with a brother and sister who purchase a house in Cornwall, England, that is plagued by paranormal events.

Dodie Smith began writing the film, and Frank Partos was brought in by his friend, associate producer Charles Brackett.

The song "Stella by Starlight", which was created for the film, became a popular jazz standard that was performed by Frank Sinatra, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis.

In 1937, during a holiday to the coast of Cornwall, London music critic and composer Roderick "Rick" Fitzgerald and his sister Pamela fall in love with Windward House, an abandoned seaside home, and buy it from Commander Beech at the unusually low price of GB£1200 (equivalent to £97,806 in 2023).

Stella is deeply attached to the house, and its sale upsets her, despite its being where her mother Mary Meredith fell to her death from a nearby cliff seventeen years earlier.

The Fitzgeralds and the town physician Dr. Scott investigate and learn Stella's father, a painter, had had an affair with his model, a Spanish gypsy named Carmel.

Carmel subsequently returned to England, abducted the infant Stella from Windward House, and during a confrontation, pushed Mary off the cliff to her death.

Beech is distressed by Stella's renewed involvement with Windward and sends her to a sanatorium run by Miss Holloway, Mary's friend and confidante.

The Fitzgeralds visit the sanatorium, unaware Stella is there; they question Holloway, who says after Mary's death, she took care of Carmel, who had contracted pneumonia and eventually died of it.

[4] Associate producer Charles Brackett wrote about working with Dodie Smith on The Uninvited on September 29, 1942, noting in his journal the two had "the opening of the pictured doped out with her.

[6][8] On October 20, Brackett met with Erik Charell, who suggested including "the sound of heart-beats, a fire that goes out, petals that fall from roses and ectoplasm climbing the stairs".

Brackett commented Smith was "afraid of the job of writing out scenes skeletonized by Frank [Partos], but is going over our first sequences seeing if she can approve them and if so going to work".

Allen felt the only person who reacted poorly to Russell was Donald Crisp, who did not like working with people whom he deemed to be non-professional actors.

[29] William Hays received a letter from Father Brendan Larson, one of the executives of the National Legion of Decency regarding The Uninvited, which noted:[30] "In certain theaters large audiences of questionable type attend this film at unusual hours.

[33] On November 18, 1946, Milland performed in a radio broadcast of The Uninvited, which Allen hosted for The Lady Esther Screen Guild Theater.

[37][38] Criterion's release was a new digital 2K resolution transfer from a 35 mm safety duplicate negative made from a nitrate composite, fine-grain print.

Its characters are intelligent adult human beings, but there is no earthly explanation offered for the ghosts that haunt the house", and commented that audiences should not "look for the conventional 'horror' yarn, all tricked up with the sleight of hand gadgets that usually accompany such stuff in the movies.

"[40] These statements were echoed by other reviewers, including Boyd Martin of The Courier-Journal, who commented that he generally loathed "these so-called shocker films" and that The Uninvited is "a most intelligent thriller".

[41] Outside the United States, Herbert Whittaker of The Gazette Montreal said: "The movie-goer who gazes stoney-eyed at the usual type of screen thriller should be able to achieve genuine goose-pimples as this one unravels", noting that the film does not set itself in a "cardboard grave yard, knee-deep in that animated whipped cream that Hollywood technicals like to imagine resembles fog" and that the film "will have you clutching the arms of your theatre-seat".

[42] James Agee, writing for The Nation, said, The Uninvited makes "a mediocre story and a lot of slabby cliches into an unusually good scare-picture.

"[43] Clyde Rowen of The Nebraska State Journal and Star said the film "easily rates as the best mystery movie of recent months ... not too scary, but exciting enough to hold an audience".

[44] Martin noted "fine direction by Lewis Allen" and praised the cast – specifically Crisp, Milland, Hussey, Skinner, Napier and Russell – who make the film "a drama rich in suspense".

[45] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times also commented on the cast, saying that Milland and Hussey "do nicely as the couple who get themselves involved, being sufficiently humorous in spots to seem plausibly real" and that Russell is "wistful and gracious as a curiously moonstruck girl".

[46] Crowther commented on some plot elements, noting that the intellectual aspects of the story "had better be left unquestioned" because of "glaring confusion in the wherefore and why of what goes on" and that the back-stories of the ghosts are not explained.

An adult, polite ghost tale, lacking the disquieting undertow of The Turn of the Screw, the movie had a pleasantly chilling feminine touch ... 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 sombre concerto.

"[47] Phil Edwards wrote in a 1982 article in Starburst that The Uninvited is "one of the few genuinely creepy and one hundred per cent supernatural films that Hollywood has turned out, successfully in all departments", which is "at its best when merely suggesting the horrible, a point which the over-rated and non-ghostly Poltergeist made only too clear".

[49][50] Phil Hardy's work The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986) calls The Uninvited a "superior ghost story" that is "too mechanically constructed to be genuinely chilling", but noted that "the film's ghostly manifestations – a flower that wilts in seconds, a dog that refuses to go upstairs and a pair of doors opening for no reason – nonetheless have a real frisson about them".

Marriott found Milland's character a "boorishly rational man" and critiqued the plot because the villains are women who are not in relationships with men or who refuse to bear children.