Monster House (2006)

At one time, I was actually a little afraid to watch this PG animation, because I worried about the poor dog from the trailer. Then I looked up a synopsis, confirmed the dog's lack of injury (necessary for the PG rating, it turns out)...and worried that I now knew too much to enjoy watching. Fortunately, I had forgotten most of what I read, or else I'd skimmed more than I realized.

In '80s suburban Wisconsin, 12-year-old outcast D.J. (Mitchel Musso) obsessively spies on the decrepit house across the street, where cranky old recluse Horace Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi), the subject of uxoricide rumors, scares away any kid who drops something on his yard. When Nebbercracker has a heart attack right before Halloween, the house continues to show signs of activity -- and not just the kind you expect with living inhabitants. People and animals who come too close tend to get swallowed up. With no authorities believing in a threat, D.J. teams up with friend "Chowder" (Sam Lerner) and newly acquainted candy salesgirl Jenny (Spencer Locke) to try to end the haunting with their own ingenuity.

Contact (1997)

Having quickly lost interest in Cosmos, I'm sure I didn't put this movie on my list for Carl Sagan's writing. Instead, I must have noticed how frequently it came up in discussions -- not to mention IMDb searches. Robert Zemeckis directs, and the cast includes Jodie Foster, Tom Skerritt, Matthew McConaughey (who would go on to the similar Interstellar), David Morse, Angela Bassett, John Hurt, James Woods, and Rob Lowe. We also get a lot of public figures as themselves, including controversially altered footage of Bill Clinton. So I went in, knowing little else of what it would offer.

Ellie (Foster) works for the SETI Institute with unstable funding, because too few people have confidence that we'll connect with aliens. Fortunately, a creepily influential yet reclusive billionaire (Hurt) sponsors her. Finally, she discovers a suspicious space noise. You can imagine many of the various reactions, including legitimate fears of a new Heaven's Gate cult. The next hard part is decoding the message, followed by deciding how much trust to put in it. Just about every step of the way is a struggle for our heroine.