Dark Places

The Haunted House in Film

Barry Curtis

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781861893895
• eBook ISBN:
  9781861895752
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Horror films revel in taking viewers into shadowy places where evil resides, whether it is a house, a graveyard or a dark forest. With Dark Places, Barry Curtis leads us deep inside these haunted spaces to explore them – and the monstrous antagonists who dwell there.

In this wide-ranging and compelling study, Curtis demonstrates how the claustrophobic interiors of haunted spaces in films connect to the ‘dark places’ of the human psyche. He examines diverse topics such as the special effects – ranging from crude to state-of-the-art – used in movies to evoke supernatural creatures; the structures, projections and architecture of horror movie sets; and ghosts as symbols of loss, amnesia, injustice and vengeance. Dark Places also examines the reconfiguration of the haunted house in film as a motel, an apartment, a road or a spaceship, and how these re-imagined spaces thematically connect to Gothic fictions.

Curtis draws his examples from numerous iconic films – including Nosferatu, Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Shining – as well as lesser-known international works. Japanese horror films and their Hollywood remakes – such as Ringu and The Ring, or Juon and The Grudge – come under particular scrutiny, as he explores Japanese cinema’s preoccupation with malevolent forces from the past.

Whether you love the splatter of blood or prefer to hide under the couch, Dark Places cuts to the heart of why we are drawn to carnage.

1 the haunted house

A thing which cannot be understood inevitably re-appears like an unlaid ghost.

Sigmund Freud¹

The haunted house is instantly recognizable – seen from behind trees, from a moving car, from the road that leads to its gate or from its own garden path. The approaching camera tracks or zooms tentatively, configuring a timid, anticipatory and often disempowered childlike encounter. There is something unsettling about the house’s brooding self-possession, its visual complexity and its anthropomorphic facade. It is identified as a troubled place, marked by neglect, strange habits and failed rituals of order and maintenance. It is an established scenario for childhood fears, tentative new beginnings, dramas of inheritance and the return of the repressed. The frozen time of the ‘haunted house’ continues to fascinate in an age of more fragmented and varied experiences of dwelling. Exploring an old, unfamiliar house is an activity that involves engaging with the ‘strangely familiar’. It is often its ‘character’, its anthropomorphism and idiosyncrasy, that tempts its new owners or investigators up the drive, or path, to its door. There is a conspiracy between the grandeur and narrative complexity of the house and the aspirational susceptibilities of those who are attracted to it. The capital and hereditary rights represented by property are rooted deep in the ground and the past. The haunted house brings its occupants into confrontation with older and usually crueller times as the latent signs of life that are coded into its structure manifest themselves.

Halloween: the haunted house in the suburban street.

The house, according to Gaston Bachelard, is partly built in an imagination often at odds with the structural fabric:

the imagination builds ‘walls’ of impalpable shadows, comfort[s] itself with the illusion of protection – or, just the contrary, tremble[s] behind thick walls, mistrust[s] the staunchest ramparts. In short in the most interminable of dialectics, the sheltered being gives perceptible limits to his shelter.²

Houses are constructed of dreams and anxieties. Bachelard was preoccupied with the ways in which, ‘in its countless alveoli’, the spaces within the house contain compressed time.³ The house mediates between geological time and human time and this slippage from the contemporary to the timeless encounter with danger is a feature of haunted house films. Archaeological investigations of prehistoric houses suggest that dwelling was intimately associated with entombment and the persisting presence of ancestors. Burial rituals in the ancient city of Catal Huyuk positioned the dead under the sleeping quarters in order to assure a continued resting place. Robert Pogue Harrison suggests an intimate relationship between the idea of interiors and death:

The ‘in’ that the dead abide in – whether it be in the earth, in our memory, in our institutions, in our genes, in our words, in our books, in our dreams, in our hearts, in our prayers, or in our thoughts, this ‘in’ of the dead’s indwelling defines the human interiority which our houses build walls around and render inhabitable.⁴

All explorations of the haunted house involve a kind of archaeology, the uncovering of an occluded narrative that constitutes the exorcism in much the way that Freud or Marx understood the substructure as providing the key to understanding and remediation.

The safety and familiarity of houses invites a contemplation of grim compensatory scenarios of penetration and threat. There have always been places – graveyards, battlefields – that are associated with the return of dead people. The earliest account of a haunted house deemed to be cursed is found in a letter by Pliny the Younger in 1BC and in the same year Plutarch wrote of the Chaeronian baths, which were said to have been haunted by the spirit of a murdered man.⁵ Ghosts in ancient times were associated with restless victims and with unresolved issues of inheritance, often appearing to enforce law or intimidate those who sought to interfere with the legal transmission of property. Popular fiction and cinema create numerous scenarios in which fictional ghosts are mobilized to deter buyers or developers of property. Examples of simulated ghosts are cited in Keith Thomas’s study, Religion and the Decline of Magic.⁶ Since the mid-eighteenth century the haunted house has incorporated elements of the feudal castle, the ruined monastery and the remote cottage and sustained fictions of illicit ownership and the ghostly resilience of rightful inheritance. Within the framework of the conventional haunted house narrative there is a trans-dimensional archetype that incorporates these themes.

All houses are haunted – by memories, by the history of their sites, by their owners’ fantasies and projections or by the significance they acquire for agents or strangers. Houses inscribe themselves within their dwellers, they socialize and structure the relations within families, and provide spaces for expression and self-realization in a complex interactive relationship. ‘The Ideal Home’ is a complex ecology of past and present, interior and exterior, configuring a resolved relationship between structure and inhabitant. The haunted house is a scenario of confrontation between the narrative of the inhabitants and the house. What haunts it is the symptom of a loss – something excessive and unresolved in the past that requires an intervention in the present. Haunting implies a temporal disruption that has a de-structuring effect on perceptions and alters the significance and often the shape of familiar spaces. The haunted house must be explored in order to trace and locate the source of the disturbance – but the exploration is an entry into other than purely spatial dimensions. In films this process of exploration is undertaken by way of the camera, the edit and the design of the often discontinuous set. The journey through the house too is characterized by visual incoherence and emotional disorientation. In order for the house to become liveable again, the ghost must be exorcized through a process of discovery and understanding.

Houses are paradigms of everyday self-construction, involving decisions about how to arrange relationships between what is already in place – the ‘original features’, the traces of previous inhabitants, and the changing demands of everyday existence. The idea that objects and places can retain the memory of traumatic events is an ancient one. In 1842 the growing interest in spirit presence led to a coining of the term ‘psychometry’ from the Greek ‘psyche’, soul, and ‘metron’, measure. Heirlooms and objects appropriated from other contexts and cultures have always been regarded as potentially ‘possessed’, bearing anxieties relating to what may be imported with them into the home. The suggestion that a house might be haunted is often confirmed by slight alterations in sound levels, temperature or the displacement of objects. The heightened sensitivity produced by change is rendered in film by the soundtrack, by signs and disturbances and by an acute anxiety regarding what can be seen and what is concealed from view. John Ruskin, whose admiration for the accumulated and irregular had a major impact on Western ideas of the ‘home’, suggested that a mysterious incoherence was an essential attribute: ‘it must not even be seen all at once, and he who sees one end should feel that, from the given data, he can arrive at no conclusion respecting the other.’⁷

Rudolph Arnheim in his exploration of visual perception suggests that an economy of safety and visibility is an important factor in constructing a pleasurable point of view in landscape paintings.⁸ The embodied location of the viewer provides scope of vision and a sense of containment. In the haunted house film, this comforting position is consistently denied. The uneasy process of searching and the fear of being ‘found out’ are dramatized by the elements of the structure that serve and obstruct vision. The carefully ordered perceptions offered by the camera invest tension and suspense in these treacherous perspectives. The Bogeyman (Ulli Lommel, 1980) is an exploration of the childhood fears of a man who returns to the home from which his father was seized by a demonic presence that emerged from a bedroom closet. In the film, doors function as portals to other spaces and times. This acute anxiety about thresholds and the opening of doors becomes a complex cinematic event; we witness the inner life of lock mechanisms and the opening of doors seen from unfamiliar points of view, in one case looking down from, or through, a ceiling.⁹ Georges Perec has written compellingly on the mystery of thresholds: ‘Doors stop and separate. The Door breaks space in two, splits it, prevents osmosis, imposes a partition.’¹⁰ But in haunted houses doors refuse to open or close and register a fundamental spatial anxiety that portends the sequestration or return of something hitherto feared and partially forgotten.

Bogeyman: opening the door. Bogeyman: inside the closet. Hide and Seek: point of view from inside the closet.

The closet or cupboard is a particular instance of interstitial domestic space that figures prominently in the scenarios of haunting. The closet was, from the late fourteenth to the nineteenth century, a place to withdraw to and to display precious objects. It was only in the 1840s, contemporary with the invention of photography and spiritualism, and with the growing accumulation of industrially produced domestic objects that overflowed the traditional free-standing furniture of storage, that the closet became a space within the wall. Closets were inconspicuous, places of interior exclusion that made it possible to maintain order by absorbing disorder. However the door to the closet dissolved the wall and served as a reminder of what might lie behind the appearance of domestic order and harmony. These spaces within walls constituted one element in a ‘secret’ architecture of maintenance and storage that sustained the ‘conscious’ uses of the house by finding places for objects occasionally deployed or dismissed but not eliminated. Inevitably the space is both claustrophobic and a potential portal into other subliminal realms.

House: the facade.

The complexity of the haunted house compounds anxieties about the inscrutable hierarchies of opening and closed spaces and the sense of congealed lives embedded in the ornament and décor. In the film House (Steve Miner, 1986) still images of details of a nineteenth-century house provide the back-ground for the title sequence. There is a montage of balustrades and porches – a ‘gingerbread’ ornamentalism, incorporating systems of decoration that are no longer comprehensible other than as a sign of ‘past times’. Their intricacy is a reminder of lost craft skills and a testimony to the passage of time and the complex regimes of maintenance that the house is a monument to. The density of old interiors is menacing because of the fractal demands they make on the eyes and understanding. Design reformers of the nineteenth century complained of the confusing illusionistic nature of pattern and the way it dissolved planes and boundaries.

In the opening sequence of House the point of view ominously skirts the side elevation to follow a delivery boy as he walks up the path, finds an open door and proceeds up the stairs. An opened door reveals the hanging corpse of its elderly female owner. After the boy rushes from the building, the shot lingers on the house, which has now fulfilled an expectation that it harbours a secret. The house passes to a grandchild, Roger, who spent his childhood there. He is warned that ‘the house knows everything about you – leave while you can’ and discovers that its animated interior is a dimensional doorway to his memories and nightmares. Its status as a childhood home and its complexly coded past is what enables it to function as a portal into other places and times. The archetype of the haunted house is a place where the past is still alive and capable of making temporal connections that appear as spatial coordinates.

the interior

In the domestic interiors of the nineteenth century secluded inner spaces that in previous times were reserved for intimacy with God were increasingly secularized as locales for self-reflection, leading to an excess of inner life. Walter Benjamin explains the strange imbricated appearance of the bourgeois interior of that period as a manipulation of interior space and décor responsive to a massively extended and contingently mastered world of trade and exploration. He proposes that the ‘phantasmagoria of the interior’ was capable, through a system of souve...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• contents
• introduction
• 1 the haunted house
• 2 gothic and the uncanny
• 3 film: ‘a fragile semblance’
• 4 unreal estate
• conclusion
• references
• select bibliography
• acknowledgements
• photo acknowledgements
• index