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But last weekend, “Paranormal Activity 4,” the latest in the popular
movie franchise that mines horror from everyday life in a suburban tract
home (a scary enough premise), topped the box office.
Weeks earlier, another horror movie, “House at the End of the Street,”
grabbed the top spot. And in April, “The Cabin in the Woods” opened
strong, proving that four walls and demonic activity within them are all
that is needed to scare the bejesus out of us.
From these recent examples to “House on Haunted Hill” in 1999 and “The
Amityville Horror” 20 years before that, the haunted house has been a
Hollywood mainstay for decades.
In literature, the genre dates from at least the 18th century, with the
publication of “The Castle of Otranto” by Horace Walpole — long before
Edith Wharton published her ghost stories or Stephen King transferred
the ghoulish action to an isolated hotel in “The Shining.”
What accounts for our continuing fascination with “the old dark house,”
as John Tibbetts, a media studies professor at the University of Kansas
and the author of “The Gothic Imagination,” calls it? In both literature
and film, he said, it endures because it plays on our collective notion
of home as a safe space.
“That’s your sanctuary,” Mr. Tibbetts said. “When that barrier is breached, you’ve had it.”
And it doesn’t take much to accomplish that.
Oren Peli, the writer and director who created the “Paranormal”
franchise, said one of his favorite moments in the first film is when
the bedroom door of the couple being harassed by evil spirits moves a
few inches. Audiences always gasp, Mr. Peli said. “Compared to a typical
horror movie, where guts spill out, you’d think it would take a lot to
shock people,” he said. “But the gasping confirms that any kind of
evidence that something is inside your house is a very unsettling
feeling.”
In “House of Leaves,” Mark Z. Danielewski’s intricately creepy 1999
novel, a family’s life begins to unravel after the discovery that the
dimensions of their historic Virginia home are three-quarters of an inch
larger on the inside than on the outside. A carpenter’s nightmare,
surely, but a powerful source of terror?
As Mr. Danielewski explained: “House and home go beyond the material
architecture. As soon as we question the walls, we start questioning how
our family or our larger society is organized.”
Discovering dark energy in a home and being willing to explore it is “a
noble goal,” he continued. “You may discover a darkness in your own
mind, and it’s not so easy to flee. Are you going to outrace it or are
you going to try to deal with it?”
Perhaps the scariest houses aren’t the ones that serve as a mere setting
for horror, as in “The Exorcist” or “The Others,” but those that are
actively malevolent: houses that seem to possess their own sense of
agency. Or, as the trailer voice-over for “The Haunting” put it: “Some
houses are born bad.”
“Burnt Offerings,” a 1976 film in which a house renews itself,
vampire-like, by injuring and killing its inhabitants, perhaps best taps
into our conflicted feelings about homeownership, which represents
something of a Faustian pact, Mr. Tibbetts said. “It’s this idea that
the dream to own a house gets you in trouble,” he said. “You want the
house, but you have to pay the price.”
THERE’S a familiar architecture to a haunted house, creepy Victorian
being the preferred style. Dark basements, creaking attics and strangely
cold rooms abound. Indian burial grounds seem to be a common building
site.
You almost never see a modernist haunted house, no scary movies bearing
the title “The Ghosts of Case Study House No. 22.” Perhaps that’s
because the starkly furnished rooms and the transparency don’t offer the
creepy patina of accumulated history that Mr. Danielewski was referring
to, only a kind of existential dread.
Families in these stories are always escaping to the quiet suburbs or
the countryside, as they do in “The Changeling” and “House of Leaves,”
and scooping up a historic showplace at a bargain price, without ever
asking the real estate agent why it’s a steal.
The owners of these cursed homes are astonishingly flinty, too, refusing
to pack up and leave long after the oven pukes blood and the kitchen
cutlery flies across the room of its own accord. As Ariel Schulman, a
director of “Paranormal 4” with Henry Joost, said: “They never get out
of the house. I’d call my broker. ‘Put it on the market. I’m moving to
Flushing.’ ”
But in recent years, a new kind of haunted house has become increasingly
popular, one whose style could be described as suburban banal.
Mark Tonderai, who directed “House at the End of the Street,” which
centers on a home where a gruesome family murder has occurred, said the
film presents the house as emotionally scarred victim. “You know how you
can go into places and feel that bad stuff has happened there?” Mr.
Tonderai said. “The residue of that bad event has seeped into the
masonry.”
But the director shot the movie in a home in Ottawa that was outwardly
unremarkable, although it hadn’t been fully finished. “Because the guy
who built it wasn’t a great carpenter, it was just a little off,” Mr.
Tonderai said. “It made you feel a slight discomfort.”
Mr. Peli adopted the same approach when designing the set for the first
“Paranormal Activity” film, which was shot in his home, a typical tract
house in San Diego. “I was never tempted to do anything to make the
house look creepy,” he said. “So the audience thinks, ‘If it can happen
in a normal house, maybe it can happen in my house.’ ”
In continuing the “Paranormal” franchise, Mr. Schulman has tried to make
the domestic settings as contemporary as possible, with laptops, Skype
and video-game consoles used in such a way that they take on a
terrifying aspect. “The point is to illustrate the fear in everyday
household scenarios,” he said.
Indeed, the latest “Paranormal” film takes place in Nevada, a state
where property values have dropped over 40 percent since 2008 and nearly
two-thirds of all homeowners are stuck in a home worth less than they
bought it for.
What could be scarier?
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