The Others ending explained: who is dead in the house

Everyone in the house is dead. Grace Stewart smothered her children, Anne and Nicholas, and then shot herself; the three servants who knock at her door died of tuberculosis in 1891; and the “intruders” the family hears upstairs are a living family who have moved in. That is the ending of The Others (2001), written and directed by Alejandro Amenábar and set on Jersey in 1945. It is not a true story. We found no source tying it to a real case, and Amenábar described writing it alone, one summer, starting from the twist.

The clues, in the order the film gives them

Everything up to beat eight is on screen before the séance.

1. The dark house. Grace keeps the house dark because Anne and Nicholas have a severe sensitivity to light. Three servants arrive asking for work: Mrs. Mills, Edmund Tuttle and Lydia, who does not speak. Grace hires them.
2. Victor. Anne says she sees a boy called Victor, his parents and an old blind woman. Grace hears footsteps and voices and has the house searched.
3. The album. In a storage room there is an album of photographs of the dead.
4. The piano. Grace sees a piano play by itself and decides the house is haunted. She sets off to find a priest and asks Tuttle to look for graves in the garden.
5. Charles. In the woods Grace finds her husband, whom she believed had died in the war. He leaves the next morning, after she insists the war is over.
6. The communion dress. Grace attacks a veiled old woman wearing Anne’s communion dress, then realizes the figure she attacked is Anne.
7. The headstones. Grace finds the curtains taken down and dismisses the servants. That night the children come upon headstones carrying the servants’ names.
8. The photograph. Grace finds a postmortem photograph of Mrs. Mills, Tuttle and Lydia. They died in an 1891 tuberculosis outbreak. Mrs. Mills tells her to speak to the intruders.
9. The séance. Grace finds the old blind woman, a medium, holding a séance with Victor’s parents. Automatic writing gives the answer: Grace smothered her children and shot herself after Charles did not come home. The living family are the intruders. Grace, the children and the servants are the ghosts.
10. The house. Grace admits the killings. She had believed that God gives everyone a second chance. Victor’s family moves out, and the children enjoy sunlight for the first time. Mrs. Mills says the house will have to be shared with whoever lives there next. Grace and the children insist it is theirs.

The album and the 1891 photograph come from the century that posed its dead for the camera and paid spirit photographers to double-expose ghosts onto glass plates.

The questions the ending leaves

Is Grace dead in The Others?

Yes. She shot herself after smothering Anne and Nicholas, once Charles did not come back from the war. Every curtain she draws in the film, she draws as a ghost.

Who are “the others”?

The living: Victor, his parents and the blind medium they bring in. Read from the other side, the others are Grace and her children. That double reading is ours, not a line from the film.

Is Charles a ghost?

The film does not say. Grace believed he had died, finds him in the woods, and he leaves the next morning. Whether he is a living soldier or another of the dead is never settled.

Why can Anne see the living when Grace cannot?

The film does not spell it out. Amenábar told Cynthia Fuchs of Nitrate Online in October 2001 that the ending had “a physical level of explanation, and also a spiritual or emotional one,” that he turned down a long speech or a flashback as less “elegant and simple,” and that he “wanted to leave many open questions.” This is one of them.

Why are the curtains always closed?

On screen, it is the children’s sensitivity to light. Off screen, Amenábar described the practical side: the young actors “couldn’t be exposed to sunlight, to keep their skin as white as possible,” so when they went out it was at night, “like little vampires.” The ending gives them the sun, the one thing their mother had kept from them.

Is The Others a true story?

No. The Wikipedia article on the film lists no real case, and JoBlo’s long retrospective on its sources names none either. We found no source claiming one.

What the record does hold is Amenábar’s own account of writing it. He told Jeffrey M. Anderson of Combustible Celluloid on July 20, 2001 that he wrote the script himself, alone, over one summer, “trying to scare myself.” He began with the twist ending, then wrote the beginning, then “all the stuff in the middle.” He named Hitchcock, Spielberg and Kubrick as influences, and said the comparison with The Shining “wasn’t on purpose.”

To Fuchs he described the source as a mood rather than an event: “I wanted to get that sense back, the mystery of those novels,” meaning old suspense fiction. He first wrote the story in Spanish with South America in mind, then moved it to the Channel Islands, which he called “the only British territory occupied by the Nazis.” The occupation of Jersey is real history. The family in the house is invented.

Henry James comes up often. William Skidelsky of The Observer suggested the film was inspired by James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, as Wikipedia records, but neither interview above mentions James, and we found no statement from Amenábar on it. JoBlo goes further and points to a 1970 Armchair Theatre episode also called “The Others,” remade in 1974 as “Voices.” That is the site’s own theory. For films where a real case does sit underneath, see ghost movies based on true stories.

How it was made

The Others is an English-language Spanish film. The story is set on Jersey, but Wikipedia places the filming in Spain, in Madrid and at the Palacio de los Hornillos in Las Fraguas.

Nicole Kidman played Grace. Amenábar told Nitrate Online that she said she played the part “from the inside, from her heart,” and told him, “I bled for this film.”

Wikipedia lists a $17 million budget and a worldwide gross of about $210 million. At the time it was the highest-grossing Spanish film ever made. It won eight Goya Awards from fifteen nominations, among them Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, and it was the first English-language film with no Spanish dialogue to win the Goya for Best Film. It also took the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film.

It is usually filed as a haunted house film, and it keeps that genre’s rule that the ghost was here first. Then it breaks the other rule. Among the three kinds of ghost movie, it is the rare one where the ghost is the lead and the audience has been standing in her shoes from the first scene.

Where to watch The Others in the US

As of October 20, 2026, JustWatch lists The Others (2001) on these services in the US. Re-check before watching; lineups change.

It sits on our list of ghost movies to watch this Halloween, and the rest of the season’s reading is in the Halloween hub. Then there are more gothic ghost films.

The last word in the film belongs to the dead. Victor’s family has gone, the children are in the sunlight, and Mrs. Mills has already said that someone else will come to live there. Grace and the children say the house is theirs. Nobody in the film says who will knock next.