This has been a very popular LEGO set, and considered to be the best in the Monster Fighters theme. Many people love the design and have done wonders with it on their own. When I got mine, I took a while to build it, but was I satisfied?

Box/Instructions

The box is appropriately large, and shows off the set quite nicely. The instructions are clear enough, but color distinction was difficult.

Parts

If you like Sand Green, this set is a gold mine. There are some other nice pieces, like the tall black slopes used on the roofs and the window shutters, and the brick-textured bricks in dark tan. A brown neck bracket and some pearl silver 1x1 tiles also come to mind, as well as the cylindrical heart brick included in the Pirates of the Caribbean theme, and three extra zombie heads used on the house.

Minifigures

There are six minifigures in this set, but two are identical.

Lord Vampyre- The big villain of the theme, Lord Vampyre is essentially a darker version of the Series 2 Vampire. He has two faces, an annoyed scowl, and an angry yell with fangs fully exposed. His torso is very useful for any higher-class character, which is nicely detailed with Edwardian-era attire.

Vampyre's Bride (Lady Vampyre):

Lady Vampyre (what LEGO should have called her) is a very nice figure. She uses Elizabeth Swann's hair in black, which really adds to her look. Like her husband, she has two faces, but her more neutral face is a wicked grin instead. She has a dark red tattered dress and a blood-drop shaped pendant. Under her dress, the fabric has a disturbingly brain-like pattern.

Monster Butler: In an odd cross between a Zombie and Frankenstein's Monster, the Zombie Butler is nonetheless a good figure. He uses the F. Monster headpiece in grey with black hair and a row of stitches across his forehead. He has a gloomy facial expression and he wears a simple black suit. He has a small serving tray.

Ghosts: The two ghosts are identical. They use the new wailing shroud, which looks appropriately spooky and sheet-like. Their bodies and heads are completely blank. In this set, they use a brick-and-plate stack in the place of legs.

Zombie Chef: What an...interesting figure. He looks like a classic chef, but his coat is torn and splattered with red. Yes, LEGO just made an all-but-explicit bloody outfit, though one hopes it's just tomato juice! His face is shared with the Zombie Driver's.

The build

The build took quite a while for me, and I paced myself. The first bag starts off by building the furniture, which is added to the house throughout the rest of the build. Nothing was very difficult or complex...except for the pillars on the front. This section is rather fragile, and aligning the posts/heads with the bricks on top and the plates above is a nightmare I didn't expect to have.

The completed model

Wow. This is a perfect classic HH. It uses the common Victorian style with the central roof tower overlooking the house. The whole exterior is made to look shabby and neglected, with broken shutters, peeling paint, broken and boarded-up windows, spiked railings, and broken stone. The gate section is small and rather insubstantial. I didn't keep it for long. The creepiest detail of the house is the zombie heads topping the pillars in front. That's just wrong! The entire house opens like a doll house (the hinges are concealed in the chimney), and that's where it becomes less interesting.

The interior pales in comparison to the exterior. Given the detail on the outside, it's forgivable, but the house is rather bare and there isn't enough that says "creepy" inside. In the entranceway, there is a fireplace that's attached to the chimney with a ship-in-a-bottle, which can hinge along the "wall" created by the unfolded chimney. The kitchen contains a simple stove and oven for the Zombie Chef to cook at. A table with a few bottles and a cauldron is next to the side door, and there's a spider web to the left of the stove. Upstairs, the room that the stairs lead to is fairly empty, containing only a writing desk for Vampyre and a small railing.

The bedroom opposite is better, with a spooky wardrobe (containing a bell jar with a heart in it) and a bed with no mattress. Above are some trophy antlers and some gas lamps. There is also a house plant, but the best part of the room is the spooky portraits (stickered) that depict the Monster, Zombie Bride, Werewolf, and Vampyre himself in a limited color palette.

The attic upstairs contains the only action feature in the set. Pull out a hard-to-reach pin on the outside, and a tradoor with a folding ladder drops down. This is a decent feature, and a good way to explain passage to the next floor, but the ladder's reach means that a minifigure would only be able to access it from the other half of the floor, as it comes to the edge of the unfolded room. In the attic is a collection of old things, like a knight's helmet, a rifle, a bone in a jar. There's also a stack of old monster newspapers, which I like. The best interior item is the gramophone, which uses a simple build (a pith helmet is its amplifier!) and there are a few different records to choose from.

Overall opinion

While I don't feel impressed by the interior of the set, that's easily solved, and the exterior is absolutely fantastic. This set is perfect for any LEGO city, and it's a great home for all of your monster minifigures. If you can still find it, I highly recommend it.

What I like about this set is that it appears to be modeled after the scary house on the hill in Alfred Hitchcock's movie "Psycho".  With over 2000 pieces, I believe it is priced right. The feature that allow you to open the house and see the inside is spectacular.  The minifigs are cool.  I have no complaints.  If you want a Lego set of one of the greatest scary houses of all time, this is it  

The Monster Fighters theme is a joy for kids and adults alike and is shaping in my family's books as the crown jewel of the LEGO 2012 lineup. While The Vampyre Castle (9468) is easily a worthy flagship set for the theme, to everyone's surprise LEGO one-upped it with the Haunted House taking us on a ride through the most iconic set of the monster fiction genre. We enjoyed very much the build and the resulting product which is both an impressive display set as well as a great toy house play set.

Pros

• Epic build - it's a lot of fun to see the house take shape floor by floor
• Rich interior and exterior design capture very well the feel of a monster-inhabited Victorian house in disrepair
• The doll house hinge system allows the house to maintain realistic look from all angles while still being highly playable on the inside as well
• Imaginative use of relatively standard bricks in unusual colors tones
• Nice display set for Halloween
  

Cons

• Price - LEGO has firmly positioned this set in the realm of luxury toys
  
• Some minor quality issues, which luckily don't detract from the overall experience (occasional variation in the color shades of bricks of the same color; a slightly bent thin beam; flasks included are cheaper versions of the ones shown on the box)
  

The highly detailed and massive house is brilliant and captures well the feel the look and feel of a classic haunted mansion. While the set is a on the high end price-wise, it more than delivers with its deluxe treatment of the beloved monster house scene. Highly recommended, if you can afford it.

LEGO has most certainly done themselves proud with a set of this calibre, it is an excellent piece to have and clearly shows a lot of effort has gone into the layout and design of the house itself. They have clearly wanted to appeal to a greater audience here, as well as general lego enthusiasts they have opened the door to fans of the old TV series (Munsters, Addams Family), and coincidentally in enough time for it to be bought as a Hallow'een decoration (which I have seen a few reviews mention).

The house itself is constructed over the course of 3 manuals, with 1 dealing with figures, accessories and the ground floor, manual 2 covering the first floor, and manual 3 the second floor, roof and front gate. This is certainly a good set to own, and is likely to be a collector's piece in the future.

Pros

• Very similar to the haunted houses seen in the old films and series, such as the Munsters.
• Reasonable size Haunted House.
• Good selection of figures, especially the butler and chef.

Cons

• Sneaky price jack when LEGO knew they were on to a winner.
• Perhaps a bit too small inside, needed widening so more custom parts can be utilized

Overall, it is a good set to build, taking about 8 hours at a steady pace to construct, and you are well rewarded with a detailed and accurate looking house. Would have been much better value if it had stayed at the original £120 price tag, but greed won in the end when LEGO knew it was likely to be a big success. Unfortunately, the Zombie car offer has now expired, so there is nothing there to soften the blow on your wallet, however the set itself is impressive enough that it should be bearable. Go buy it, you won't regret it.

It's a bit hard to justify the $180 price tag on LEGO's first Haunted House, as cool as it is. The piececount is no greater than that of a $150 modular building, so I suppose there is a certain greater desierability as far as the included Minifigs are concerned. Fortunately, LEGO decided to soften the blow a little with the concurrent release and bundling of the Zombie Car (40076), which has such a great symbiosis with the Haunted House that it almost negates the extra cost.

The Haunted House sort of masquerades as a run-down version of a modular building, though it is clearly meant to stand alone. Certainly, it compares favourably in terms of size to, say, the Grand Emporium (10211), but lack of Technic pegs or anywhere to attach them to means that this building stays separate - after all, who wants to live next to a Haunted House anyway?

The other difference between this set and the town modular buildings is the fact that the floors are not constructed as removable layers. In lieu of this, the Haunted House opts for a more traditional "dollhouse" design, as pictured, and there are pros and cons to this. The pro would be that all of the floors and furniture are accessible for purposes of actually playing with the house, while the con, I guess, is that realism suffers somewhat in this configuration. I wouldn't have opposed to the house being both of a dollhouse design and with removable layers, but I guess that might be asking too much.

The instructions make the somewhat curious choice of telling you to build all of the furniture first and then place it inside the house as the build goes on, which means that you can start on bag 2 first if you want to get right into building the house and keep bag 1 separate, using them for furniture as necessary. I suppose there are certain continuity advantages to this, but it did make the build seem a little boring, particularly the second level. The builds also demand a fair amount of trust from the builder, in that windows and pillars are left hanging precariously on one- or two-stud blocks until long "reinforcers" are placed much later. Be advised - it is highly recommended that you build on a hard surface for this reason.

There are some stickers, though not too many as to be annoying. Strangely, my sticker page came without one of the portrait stickers, which kind of stinks, but it's not a tragedy. I didn't both to apply the window stickers, and I don't feel that the overall look suffered any because of it.

I won't go into any of the details regarding the Minifigs or the play features, since those are all depicted quite clearly in the promotional images right on this site. I don't own any of the Monster Fighters sets, nor do I own any of the previous "horror" Minifigs from previous Collectable Minifig collections, so all of them were a novelty to me; I've been saying for years that the ghost needs to come back, and I'm so happy to see him make a triumphant return. I have a lot of leftover Undead from Fantasy Era sets, too, so now they have a house to live in.

The final display looks great, and the front gate is a very welcome addition to the set as a whole. The house does a very good job at communicating texture and decay from shiny new LEGO bricks, which I think is a great achievement, and it looks suitably macabre and will therefore get a smile out of anyone with tastes leaning in that direction. I guess you could say that it's creepy and it's kooky, mysterious and spooky...