Please see "Haunted" (1995) (spoiler at very end)

Rating: 2/10 (18 September 2001)

The Others is a slow, autmospheric movie that builds off of minute details, which may be missed, and ultimately Alejandro Amenábar explains everything with an ending that seems predestined for a huge payoff.
Yet, instead of a payoff, you should feal ripped off.
In the era where most trailers give the movie away, The Others has a great trailer that in truth does what a trailer is supposed to do. Basically, it gets you hooked, without giving away key elements of the story.
However, in the era of media, The Others falls flat. It was hyped as "The Sixth Sense of 2001" or "with a twist ending that will make you want more.", etc...
In truth The Others is an interesting movie because instead of being a total horror movie, thriller, detective story, or period piece, it instead borrows elements from spine-tingling horror thrillers and constructs a fable about a lapse/period of time where familial strength and the elements that can pull them apart are in the shadows for us, the detectives, to dicipher.
Yet, Alejandro Amenábar does not just borrow the "surprise ending" from elements of past thrillers and chillers, instead it is a blatent rip-off of the theme of the 1995 movie "Haunted".
The Others is destined to get more press than "Haunted" ever did (except for Kate Beckensale fans)and "Hauted" is probably a movie that will sit dormant at rental stores for 90% of the year. "Haunted" really isn't a better movie, but it had the original shock of finding out that the people you thought were real, were really the ghosts and that the others were actually real people invading the ghost world in varying degrees.
While The Others does not take the entire ending of "Haunted" (i.e. there is no fire and no living to dead marriage proposal), the thematic elements are there and for me at-least the media droped the hint of the ending.
After hearing that there was a huge "twist ending", I thought, there is no way that then ending of "Haunted" would be used, that would be a cool idea, but a cop-out. After seeing the ending see The Others, there was disappointment.