Architectural historian Keith Eggener ponders haunted houses past and present:
When Americans portray haunted houses, they usually look something like Hill House [in 1963’s The Haunting] – old, dark, full of turrets and dead-eyed windows, rambling and eerily picturesque. It’s hard to imagine the cinematic Hill House – in actuality, an ancient English manor rebuilt in the mid-19th century – having ever looked new or welcoming. … Commentators have often noted that haunted house stories appeal to us by subverting our ideals of domestic tranquility and security; they are modern versions of the romantic sublime, where we watch in safety while terrible, thrilling things happen close by.
They also support American myths of egalitarianism, our conjoined attraction and aversion to aristocracy and wealth, our envy of the rich and our suspicions about how their gains were got. The lavish Victorian Gothic, Queen Anne and Second Empire haunts of popular fiction and film present the Janus face of the Gilded Age, whose ruthless corruption and relentless capitalism were excoriated by Mark Twain, Mother Jones, Upton Sinclair and other progressives. They closet the skeletons upon which great fortunes were built and reassure us that crime, though it sometimes pays very well, comes with long, nasty strings attached.
But while the classic haunted house is “hoary, dusty and timeworn, full of shadows and memories,” Eggener believes that “even in our brightly lit and efficient modern houses, we are never entirely safe from our own imaginations”:
In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler describes how modern architects, “formed by futurism,” sought to eradicate traces of the past from their work. Old houses were to prone to manifestations of the uncanny, or unhomely – that unhealthy and “fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream.” To avoid this, Modernists cleaned house. They built glass walls to deny the shadows. They filled their buildings with light and good intentions. They removed the cellars, the attics, the bric-a-brac, “the weight of tradition and the imbrications of generations of family drama.”
The program backfired, however. Erasure of the past only created more ghosts – “the nostalgic shadows of all the houses now condemned.” The skeletal modern houses that replaced them were themselves ghostly – schematics evoking past houses, uninhabitable in the minds of many, rootless, reflective, vulnerable.
(Photo: The Warwickshire mansion that served as Hill House in The Haunting. By Richard Croft.)
