The Skeleton Key...scary stuff!

Kate Hudson plays Caroline, a bit of a wild child from Hoboken, New Jersey, she left home on bad terms with her father, to follow a rock band, and ends up in a New Orleans hospital working as a nurse.

After another patient she is nursing dies, she decides to look for another job and finds an ad in the paper for a private hospice nurse at an old plantation house set in the back of beyond in the eerie swamps of Terrebonne Parish (although it actually wasn't filmed there).

She begins to look after Ben who suffered a stroke and cannot speak but is curious about his old-fashioned busybody wife Violet who claims that she won't understand the house.

Violet gives Caroline a skeleton key to open every room in the house, and Caroline soon finds the mansion has a dark past.

Finding her way into a secret room in the attic, Caroline discovers hoodoo dolls, a book of spells, potion jars, and other macabre instruments of black magic.

Violet tells Caroline that the room belonged to two black servants who had worked at the house in the 1920s.

Mama Cecile (Jeryl Prescott) and her husband, Papa Justify (Ron McCall) were, in their day, renowned practitioners of hoodoo, a form of African-Caribbean folk magic.

But to their white employers, they were nothing more than servants, and Justify and Cecile were lynched when it was discovered that they were performing spells with the children of the house owners.

Caroline dismisses Violet's fear of Justify and Cecile's ghosts dwelling in the house as superstition, but more strange events occur, making her curious about the obscure (to her) swamp religions and their relationship to the physical condition of Ben, whom she has become determined to save and restore to health.

As the story starts to unravel you realise Caroline has become involved in something dark and evil and if you watch carefully you can spot the clues which reveal the truth behind the house and the Skeleton Key...!

An eerie psychlogical thriller which will keep you guessing the whole way through!