Haunted houses
Jul. 30th, 2011 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
green_dreamsSo I was thinking of organizing my books on Goodreads, as you do. Was thinking about putting on a "haunted houses" tag. And I've been going through a lot of stuff on TV[1], and now watching Marchlands, and...
I like haunted house stories. And I'm trying to pinpoint exactly what they are. Asked John what he thought the best written and movie ones he'd read or seen were, and he said The Shining and The Others, respectively. Switched the book choice to IT, though, and I cannot dispute.
There's the Haunting of Hill House, of course. And The Shining. Hell House, The Others. Then you get Rose Red, The House Next Door, House of Bones, Apartment 16, the Dionaea House, Ghost Ship, The Overnight, The Dwelling, The House of Lost Souls (which I actually just finished)...
John also suggested Event Horizon. I will agree and add in the town from Uzumaki, in the same "well, yes, but wait?" vein that his selection of IT gave me. Yes, absolutely, but the fact that I'm including them both makes me think that I don't understand my own definition as well as I thought.
So. What makes something a haunted house story, rather than just a ghost story?
Off the top of my head; a haunted house (ship, project, spaceship, town) is a place you could get lost in. (I was going to say tends to be a large place, but think the other phrasing is better.) They tend to sprawl, and to fold back on themselves. The House Next Door is an exception, although there's some indication that it was already there and (to put it in terms the TARDIS recently used) just waiting to steal an architect to draw and build it.
I guess all of this can lump into the idea that the physical objects or events in a haunted house areinfluenced partially sourced in the force of personality of the house. Or in what you'd call its force of personality if it were a person.
A haunted house is not the same as a haunting; it is a place, not a person. It is a bad place; if it's not actively malevolent, it's at the very least mentally and emotionally toxic. It may echo the people that were in it, but the active principle is an inhuman thing. Hill House itself is the not sane thing, not any one (or all) of the individuals who died there. By the end of The Shining, the thing walking around is the Overlook, not Jack Torrance; after having obliterated anything that could be mistaken for Jack it shows itself as a strange, shifting composite, many faces mixed imperfectly into one. Danny saw the woman in 217; the dog-man; the hungry boy-thing that had been in the concrete ring.
The house that Stephen Elliot comes to live in has ghosts, certainly; so does The House With A Clock In Its Walls; so does the one in Sixth Sense. These are not haunted house stories; they just involve houses that happen to have intangible dead people.
(The use of "just" is not meant to denigrate ghost stories that aren't haunted house stories, only differentiate. Although it's suddenly occurring to me that I don't think haunted house stories are ghost stories, exactly. They bring to mind the definition of haunt that catches Mike Hanlon in IT; a noun, a feeding place for animals. The stories don't usually involve the explanation of needing fear as sustenance that's present in IT, but the idea of them being places where if you go in something other will dig into your weak spots and hurt you and bring you down? Yes. That's haunted house stories all over.)
The Others throws me, though. It's about ghosts that are people. And I still consider it a haunted house story. I'm going to set it aside for a moment, because I've been chipping away at this on and off for two and a half hours (if you're still reading, I *do* apologize for the meandering). Maybe I'll watch it over the weekend, try and take a closer look at the setting. It's been a while. Hell, maybe I'll change my mind when I watch it again, I don't know.
(Had quite a bit on the style of Session 9, and a loose attempt to correlate it to Ramsey Campbell, but for the moment I'm just going to go with "I realize the malevolent force is presented as having a personality, but I feel the presentation of the asylum is consistent enough to say that the text (or whatever the term is for movies) is establishing the location as poisonous on enough levels for it to qualify as a haunted house." Because it is past midnight now and I am starting to go in circles.)
---
[1] Okay, Fright Night is pretty much what you'd expect from an 80s horror movie, but that last scene with Peter Vincent (who has awesome eyebrows, FTR) and Evil Ed? That was actually quite beautifully done.
I like haunted house stories. And I'm trying to pinpoint exactly what they are. Asked John what he thought the best written and movie ones he'd read or seen were, and he said The Shining and The Others, respectively. Switched the book choice to IT, though, and I cannot dispute.
There's the Haunting of Hill House, of course. And The Shining. Hell House, The Others. Then you get Rose Red, The House Next Door, House of Bones, Apartment 16, the Dionaea House, Ghost Ship, The Overnight, The Dwelling, The House of Lost Souls (which I actually just finished)...
John also suggested Event Horizon. I will agree and add in the town from Uzumaki, in the same "well, yes, but wait?" vein that his selection of IT gave me. Yes, absolutely, but the fact that I'm including them both makes me think that I don't understand my own definition as well as I thought.
So. What makes something a haunted house story, rather than just a ghost story?
Off the top of my head; a haunted house (ship, project, spaceship, town) is a place you could get lost in. (I was going to say tends to be a large place, but think the other phrasing is better.) They tend to sprawl, and to fold back on themselves. The House Next Door is an exception, although there's some indication that it was already there and (to put it in terms the TARDIS recently used) just waiting to steal an architect to draw and build it.
I guess all of this can lump into the idea that the physical objects or events in a haunted house are
A haunted house is not the same as a haunting; it is a place, not a person. It is a bad place; if it's not actively malevolent, it's at the very least mentally and emotionally toxic. It may echo the people that were in it, but the active principle is an inhuman thing. Hill House itself is the not sane thing, not any one (or all) of the individuals who died there. By the end of The Shining, the thing walking around is the Overlook, not Jack Torrance; after having obliterated anything that could be mistaken for Jack it shows itself as a strange, shifting composite, many faces mixed imperfectly into one. Danny saw the woman in 217; the dog-man; the hungry boy-thing that had been in the concrete ring.
The house that Stephen Elliot comes to live in has ghosts, certainly; so does The House With A Clock In Its Walls; so does the one in Sixth Sense. These are not haunted house stories; they just involve houses that happen to have intangible dead people.
(The use of "just" is not meant to denigrate ghost stories that aren't haunted house stories, only differentiate. Although it's suddenly occurring to me that I don't think haunted house stories are ghost stories, exactly. They bring to mind the definition of haunt that catches Mike Hanlon in IT; a noun, a feeding place for animals. The stories don't usually involve the explanation of needing fear as sustenance that's present in IT, but the idea of them being places where if you go in something other will dig into your weak spots and hurt you and bring you down? Yes. That's haunted house stories all over.)
The Others throws me, though. It's about ghosts that are people. And I still consider it a haunted house story. I'm going to set it aside for a moment, because I've been chipping away at this on and off for two and a half hours (if you're still reading, I *do* apologize for the meandering). Maybe I'll watch it over the weekend, try and take a closer look at the setting. It's been a while. Hell, maybe I'll change my mind when I watch it again, I don't know.
(Had quite a bit on the style of Session 9, and a loose attempt to correlate it to Ramsey Campbell, but for the moment I'm just going to go with "I realize the malevolent force is presented as having a personality, but I feel the presentation of the asylum is consistent enough to say that the text (or whatever the term is for movies) is establishing the location as poisonous on enough levels for it to qualify as a haunted house." Because it is past midnight now and I am starting to go in circles.)
---
[1] Okay, Fright Night is pretty much what you'd expect from an 80s horror movie, but that last scene with Peter Vincent (who has awesome eyebrows, FTR) and Evil Ed? That was actually quite beautifully done.
