echo The following article discusses media and ideas which seek to horrify and unnerve their audiences, and as such may not be suitable for all audiences. Reader discretion is advised.
Haunted houses have become quite a mainstay in horror fiction.
I’m sure all of us can think of several examples off the top of our heads– if you’re my age, you probably have fond and terrified memories of the 2006 kids’ horror film Monster House, which of course focuses on a scary, monstrous house, or perhaps you’re a fan of video games and enjoy the Luigi’s Mansion series, which has its titular scaredycat protagonist traipse through spooky ghost-filled mansions armed with an exorcist vacuum cleaner. Even in reality, there are plenty of stories– whether sombre, humorous, or horrific– about homes which host spirits of the dead. Storytellers around the world have long been enamoured with tales of haunted homes.
These examples, although fun in their own way, are not the kind of haunted houses that are to be discussed in this article.
Let me explain.
The term ‘haunted house’ is usually a bluntly descriptive one. When you hear the term, you might conjure in your mind the image of a crumbling, centuries-old Victorian house that hosts a spirit. You imagine a house, and that house is haunted by something. Who or what that something is is where the horror usually comes from. They’re probably the victim of a murder. They rattle the doorknobs of characters as they try to sleep, snuff out candles, and stand menacingly in open doorways silhouetted by moonlight.
This is the cliched pop-cultural shorthand that’s developed across centuries of tall tales and books and films. This type of house is indeed haunted, and is often fun to explore.
But I’d like for you to consider that seemingly simple phrase closely for a moment.
Haunted house.
A home that hosts something it shouldn’t. A place built for warmth and shelter and comfort that has, by the intervention of some malicious force, become unclean. Haunted. Infested with evil. Its doors slam shut by themselves, its walls drip with foul condensation, its every room cold and unwelcoming. Hold that image in your mind.
Consider the long years that pass. It bears the curse of the haunting for decades, spends years rotting, stewing in its loneliness. Tenants come and go like mayflies. Maybe the ghost is aggressive, warding off all inhabitants, and rumours of the house’s evil spread. The steady inflow of people slows to a trickle. Perhaps an exorcist or priest is called to the place by the absent and terrified landowner. Perhaps his attempts at banishing the ghost fail. Perhaps something bad happens to him, and the rumours spread with even greater fervour. The house remains alone. Denied the purpose it was built for.
Now, take away the ghost.
Exorcise the ghoul, the infection, whatever rot has attached itself to the house’s foundations. Pluck out the being doing the haunting and consider what might remain. Think of how the house would cope, how its haunting might have changed it.
Would a place that has spent so long as a host to evil willingly welcome people back into its walls? Houses are– far more than any graveyard, haunted pizzeria, or other horror setting– meant to be lived in, after all. But they, like the soft, fleshy humans who reside within their walls, bear scars too. Their memory, baked into wood planks and wall plaster, is long. They experience lifetimes of pain and hardship on a scale none of us could or should ever hope to.
A human being may be brought into life and leave it under the same roof. We laugh and sing, dance and play in the rooms of our homes. Our homes see us in our most vulnerable moments, our shouting matches and our petty acts of cruelty. We cry and yell and dream and nourish ourselves under the watchful, unflinching gaze of our homes. They watch us grow. They watch us bicker. They watch both sinners and saints alike. If we acknowledge that our houses know us, can we really be so sure that they’d like us?
I told you to imagine a ghost in a house, and then to dispel that ghost. That’s not exactly right. That’s not the exact image I want you to have.
The haunted houses I think about as I write this didn’t require a ghost or demonic infestation to turn against their owners. These houses do slam their doors shut on their inhabitants, and interrupt their sleep with ominous omens, but they don’t do it at the behest of ghosts or demons. These are places that know humans on an intimate level, as all houses do, and they hate us. They have morphed themselves in their bitterness, twisted themselves into hostile forms for the sole reason of messing with the panicky, hairless apes that built them.
Put simply, I’m not interested in the monsters and spirits that stalk the halls of haunted houses.
I’m interested in the houses who themselves are monsters.
The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. Even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
Those are the opening lines to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. The 1959 novel has been widely regarded as an absolute classic of horror fiction in the decades since its release, a reputation that I feel is thoroughly earned.
Setting aside the love for haunted houses I’ve already spent roughly a thousand words espousing, the book is just plain good. It has the slow pace and deliciously wrought atmosphere a gothic horror story of its sort demands. Jackson’s writing is precise and measured, her characters well realised. The slow, excruciating, yet inevitable way the characters crack under the pressure of the plot is heartbreaking to witness. I found myself incredibly emotionally affected by a book that I thought would aim only to scare.
And of course, the book just so happens to contain one of the most influential depictions of a haunted house ever.
Hill House, as described so well in the paragraph above, is a lonely house. Surrounded by hills which themselves are surrounded by a forest, it stands by itself a good distance away from the nearest town. That town is small, full of superstitious and distrustful people who do everything they can to stay well away from the place. The central characters of the book are people from out of town, people who hope to be convinced of the truth of Hill House’s supposed hauntedness. Although it sits in one place and makes no move towards luring stray travellers into its halls, Hill House’s reputation precedes it. Its notoriety is what draws the cast to it, and it oversees all the tragedy that follows.
Four people arrive at Hill House on one Summer afternoon. The oldest of them, Dr. John Montague, organiser of the whole affair, is an ambitious man. He had heard the horror stories surrounding Hill House and set himself to the task of renting it out for a few weeks, in order to research ‘the causes and effects of psychic disturbances in a house commonly known as “haunted”’; the man is a paranormal scientist. For this task of detecting and recording paranormal activities, he brings along with him more than just a scientist’s array of tools. He invites a dozen guests. Of those, only three accept his invitation.
Luke Sanderson, charming and good-looking, is the somewhat lazy nephew of the landlady of Hill House. Theodora is an artist, one who apparently has psychic abilities. More importantly, she recently got into a horrendous argument with her roommate and needed someplace to cool off for a week or two while emotions settled.
Last, but certainly not the least, is one Eleanor Vance. Eleanor is in her thirties. She is the book’s main point-of-view character, and was chosen by Dr. Montague for having witnessed what most people think was a paranormal event in her childhood.
She has spent nearly all of her adult life looking after her ill mother, and now after her death shares a household with her sister and her sister’s husband. She is blandly miserable at home, held financially hostage by her sister and subject to constant nagging from her and her unlikeable husband. Eleanor seized upon Dr. Montague’s invitation with the desperation of someone trapped in a life she didn’t want, didn’t enjoy, and couldn’t see a way out of. As the text itself puts it after detailing Eleanor’s meagre and joyless life, Eleanor, in short, would have gone anywhere.
Unfortunately for her, fate delivers her to the imposing structure of Hill House.
Upon arrival, it is immediately clear to every visitor that there is simply something off about the place– some inexpressible, indelible wrongness in the bones of it. Eleanor, after she arrives, gets out of her car and spends a long moment just staring at it, at its black roof and shuttered windows and overwhelmingly hostile energy.
The house was vile. [Eleanor] shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.
She enters, after a minute. She does so reluctantly, and with a firm self-reminder that her expenses for her weeks-long stay at the place has already been paid for by Dr. Montague. Inside, she finds that the house is no more welcoming than it had seemed on the outside. The place is severe, dark, well-built but for some inexplicable reason unnerving to look at, and even more disquieting to stand inside of. No poltergeists jump out at her or her fellow guests, no banshees wail in the shadowed corners, but still, there is some irreconcilable, irrational badness that pervades the place.
Jackson makes full use of her skills as a writer as Eleanor meets the other characters and gets more acquainted with Hill House. There are lavish, truly unnerving descriptions of the layout of the house, its eccentricities and non-paranormal quirks. Due to an architectural mistake, each of the house’s heavy doors slip shut unless deliberately held open by someone. The rooms connect to each other in a circuitous, maze-like manner. The place is dark, hard to navigate, and dusty, despite the hired cleaners who fastidiously take care of it. It is the platonic ideal of a creepy house. Still, in the light of day, with the company of interesting strangers, the characters manage to relax and spend their first evening together getting to know each other. Bonds are formed, characters are further fleshed out, and the reader may be fooled into thinking that perhaps Hill House isn’t so hostile after all.
When things escalate into proper horror, they of course do so at night.
Despite all I’ve related here, I still think you should read the book for yourself, so I won’t go into the gritty details of the horror. What I will tell you is that when Hill House decides to act against its guests, it does so by driving wedges between them.
Each character is separated, in their own rooms at night. Some lock their doors and others attempt to sleep with the lights on. It doesn’t matter. The terror finds them anyway. In theory, they can call down the hallway for help, but in the isolation of fear, they collapse in on themselves.
Eleanor in particular is hit the worst by it all. As days pass, the tenuous bonds she’s formed– and in particular the romantic-subtext-laden relationship she sparks up with Theodora– fray. Everyone’s seen stuff at night, but no one has seen the same thing. Where there should be evidence, there is only paranoia. Eleanor, not used to defending herself, not used to any situation this stressful and this antagonistic towards her, draws in on herself.
Hill House is full of horrors, but in gothic horror tradition, it’s at its most dangerous when exposing the vulnerabilities of the people who witness those horrors. Suspicion, distrust, hysteria and paranoia. Those are the chief tools Hill House employs to wreak havoc among its guests. As Dr. Montague’s investigation progresses, the questions the house raises multiply, and answers seem in short supply.
The reader learns many things about Hill House over the course of the novel’s hundreds of pages– its sordid history; who built it, lived in it, died in it; the horrible acts committed within its dark halls– but none of the information gleaned ever dispels its air of mystery. There is no inciting incident that caused Hill House to turn bad; it simply was that way from the start. Its malice is inextricable from its existence, its hunger not roused by any one incident. Any effort made to cleanse Hill House of its wrongness would fall laughably, inevitably short. Short of dismantling the place brick by brick, it’s difficult to imagine what, if any, effect mere humans could have on it.
Four people arrive at Hill House looking to detect and record paranormal phenomena. Four of them leave, only having half accomplished their goal. They know what they witnessed, but have no evidence to present to the wider world. The house lured them in, isolated them, and digested their fears with relish.
Four entered Hill House. Four leave, but not all of them do so with their sanity.
And not all of them do so with their lives intact.
House of Leaves (2000)
In Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves, we follow a man as he moves into a new home with his wife and kids.
The man’s name is Will Navidson, and the house he moves into appears at first to be absolutely, immaculately normal. Lacking the outward malice of Hill House, the house simply sits where it has been built. It’s somewhat isolated, standing by itself in an empty patch of wilderness, but that suits Navidson and his wife just fine. Navidson used to work as a war journalist, photographing atrocities in wars around the world. He’s spent too much time away from his family and means to make it up to them by settling down and being more present.
So he relocates to the quiet little house in Virginia. For a time, they live a quiet little life there.
Then one day, as Navidson is measuring the dimensions of his house for possible renovations, he finds something strange.
His new house is half an inch larger on the inside than it is on the outside.
He measures again, double and triple-checks it. The truth of the measurements is impossible to deny. The disparity of size between the inside of the house and the outside is real, and seems to grow alongside Navidson’s interest. Forgoing his relationship with his wife and children, he finds himself devoting more and more time to exploring the changing contours of his house. Searching for the truth is what he’s done for years as a journalist, after all. It’s certainly more interesting than maintaining domestic relationships with his family.
The house sees his slowly growing obsession– his desire to get away from the mundanity of regular life and explore undocumented occurrences like he used to– and grants his wish.
A door appears. On a once blank wall, a fully functional door appears and opens onto a flight of stairs. Dark, unwelcoming, and absolutely not a logical part of the house’s architecture. Navidson can’t help himself. He ventures down into the depths.
After his initial explorations, Navidson– like Dr. Montague decades before– hires a crew to assist him in his findings. Ignoring his wife’s protests and his family’s needs, he throws himself willingly into the dark, impossible depths under his house.
One staircase leads into a hallway which branches off into several also-dark paths. It soon becomes clear that the space beneath Navidson’s house is far vaster than any single basement could or should be. Groaning sounds issue from spaces they can’t see or find their way to– the house is reshaping itself as they explore it. Navidson and the other explorers begin to refer to it as a labyrinth, lending the space mythic significance. Danielewski’s writing works hard to effectively sell the claustrophobia of these explorations.
If you’ve heard anything about House of Leaves before this article, you’ll know that it is far from a traditional novel. The plot I’ve described so far exists under layers of additional context. There are several narrators, none of whom are reliable, and they scrawl footnotes and citations across Navidson’s story as if analysing it in an academic setting. They comment on the themes of Navidson’s tale, the meaning behind the house and his obsession.
It is in the vast, dark maze beneath Navidson’s house the purpose of all that scaffolding becomes clear.
Because as Navidson and his crew fumble their way through the darkness, the format and layout of the book itself morphs, becoming as hostile and labyrinthine to the reader as the House is to him. All that extraneous text shifts into being actively obstructive.
The page layouts twist, fonts clashing, seemingly random words cryptically highlighted in red and blue. Text flashes across pages at wild angles like hallways growing in the bowels of Navidson’s hungry house. Some of this desecration of stable formatting emulates Navidson’s experience as he fumbles through the dark– small clusters of words sit isolated at the centre of a page, surrounded by blankness like a lone explorer caught in the dark; letters descend diagonally across another like echoing footsteps down a flight of stairs– but the majority of it feels utterly inexplicable.
As with Hill House, the reader never gets a full answer to the why, what or how of Navidson’s house. Every bit of info only serves to draw Navidson– and you, the reader– deeper into its depths, beckoning obsessed explorers with a trail of breadcrumbs that lead only into further darkness.
The audience’s reading experience mirrors Navidson’s exploration in a way. Picking their way through the unreliable narration, wrestling with the book to read all its sideways text, fighting against each setback to find answers.
I wonder, after spending many of my own hours attempting to decipher the book, if any answers exist. In all likelihood, getting lost and obsessed was the intended experience. If any of what I’ve written about this strange book sounds interesting, then I highly recommend that you pick up a copy and find out for yourself how Navidson’s journey ends.
The House (2022)
The House is a 2022 British stop-motion animated film written and directed by Emma de Swaef, Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, Johannes Nyholm, and Paloma Baeza. The film is, as you may guess, about a haunted house.
Unlike the other two pieces of media covered in this article, The House doesn’t present just one group of characters to be swallowed whole by its titular house of horrors. It presents three! The film is in fact three separate half-hour long short films, all taking place in the eponymous House.
The stories of the three groups of tenants vary wildly; in look, in tone, and vibe. The film swings from bed-wetting horror to gross tragicomedy to gentle melancholy. The first section stars regular humans– well, as regular as humans can be when brought to life in eerie stop motion. The second has an anthropomorphic rat as the protagonist, surrounded by also-sapient insects. The third focuses entirely on walking, talking cats. (Yes. If you haven’t clocked it already, this is a strange, strange film.) These disparate sets of characters never interact with each other, separated by vast gulfs of time passing.
The only thing linking all these vignettes together is, of course, the House.
The first short, taking place in what looks to be the 1800s, shows a poor family getting sucked into the dream of luxury promised by the house. The parents of the family, bitter at their much richer, posher relatives, seize upon a chance invite from a passing architect to move into a brand-new countryside manor. They soon get lost in the allure of the place, lavish and large, with many more rooms than they know what to do with. As the clearly villainous and clearly creepy architect Van Schoonbeek pours poison in their ears, only the children, young Mabel and her infant sister Isobel, remain in control of their wits.
But wits aren’t enough to keep the hunger of their new home at bay.
The House, much in the same way as Navidson’s, morphs. You’d imagine that perhaps a newborn building would take some time before engaging in the same drastic actions as an older house, but you’d be wrong. The house is never so alive– and never so malevolent– than in these first few weeks of life, growing hallways and cutting off doors to encase its very first tenants.
The second story takes place much, much later.
The house is no longer alone by itself in the countryside. Industrialisation has come and gone, and a bustling city now thrives around it. It is merely one home in a street of other buildings that look familiarly modern. Clearly, many other architects have had a crack at the place since Mr. Van Schoonbeek all those years ago. Also, as previously mentioned, the protagonist of this section of the movie is a rat.
And this rat has big plans, for the house and himself. See, he’s a not-so-successful developer of homes, and he needs a big win on this next project. He’s already fired his construction crew and is sleeping in the basement of the house– the house, of course– that he’s renovating. Things aren’t going well for him but he hopes that with enough hard work, the place will sell for a large amount and secure him for the near future.
As you might guess, things don’t go quite according to plan.
Although the house is less outwardly malevolent in this age, its wall static and unmoving, it presides over the proceedings of this section of the film with glee. It watches as the rat fails in his renovation, thwarted by insects that skitter within its walls. He descends into a pest-fuelled mania, and in the end surrenders to the possibly-hallucinated walking beetles that arrive for the showcasing of the house. This section of the film ends with new, horrid tenants settling into the house.
In the third short, the whole world seems to be flooded.
The house once again stands alone. Around it is an ocean, the streets and modern buildings gone without a trace. Yet people– cat people, but people nonetheless– remain, still living in the old husk that used to be the proud house in the countryside.
There will be no more renovations at this point in the lifespan of the house, though the landlady Rosa still clings to the house. She dreads the water beyond its walls, which keeps rising at a slow yet inevitable rate. Her tenants each complain about the state of the place– its waterlogged walls and crumbling structure, so diminished from the initial proud form we saw in the first short– and each make their plans to leave, to seek firmer land elsewhere.
This short is the least plot-focused of the three. Where the first went for straight horror and the second aimed for a gross sort of black comedy, this last one is much less definitive. It’s quiet. Contemplative. We sit in the atmosphere of the house, whose malice seems to have eroded with the water seeping into its foundations, and watch Rosa and the other characters interact with each other. Despite all the characters being cats, they are at their most human here than at any other point in the film.
This short belongs not to the house and its enduring horrors, but to Rosa and her journey as a character. She, unlike any other important character in the film, realises the irrationality of her obsession with the house, and works to change it. Whether she succeeds in letting go of the past is a matter I will leave to you to find out. In any case, she’s the most complex and compelling character in the whole film, and makes her section of it delightfully distinct.
But put aside the characters and their struggles for a moment. What, in the end, is left?
The House remains while everything else drifts on into obscurity. We see it at the start of its life, driving its architect and first tenants to madness. We see it later in the modern era, inviting parasites to infest its walls and burrow into it like a disease. We see it in the aftermath of some far-future environmental catastrophe, a lone island in a flooded world. People come and go like insects, insignificant and fleeting.
Hill House stood for eighty years and might have stood for eighty more. This film shows us what that might have looked like.
still here, after all this time.
In each of these tales, there’s a common thread of people choosing to explore these houses, despite their hostility and the horrors they’re so eager to inflict on humanity.
Eleanor couldn’t bear to be separated from Hill House, and its influence closed in on her like the jaws of a beast. Navidson willingly lost himself to his house, throwing himself into an obsession that could never be sated, an addiction that couldn’t be denied, letting himself be swallowed up by endlessly twisting hallways and unbroken darkness. Our final nameless house consumed architects, tenants, and landlords alike. It whetted its appetite on the willing souls who foolishly thought they could bend it to their wills. Time and time again, throughout centuries, people kept coming back.
And here I am. Just another obsessed explorer, coming to you with more questions than answers.
If I’ve managed to pass even the barest spark of my interest in these places on to you, dear reader, then perhaps you ought to go out and seek your own answers. There are more than enough questions to keep one occupied for a while, after all.
I’ve already given you three places to start. I can’t imagine all the ones you might find yourself.
Author’s Note: This article was deeply inspired by this video essay, created by the wonderful Jacob Geller, whose brilliant video essays all deserve attention regardless of if they’re about haunted houses. Also, shoutout to the video game Anatomy, and the novel We Have Always Lived In The Castle, two great pieces of haunted house art which I couldn’t quite fit into this article. Like the rest of the stuff mentioned in this article, I think they’re fascinating and worth your time!
Written By: Ryan Kong
