Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film
Author: Barry Curtis
Date: 2008-09-15 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Performing Arts; General; Film
Description: Horror films revel in taking viewers into shadowy places where the evil resides, whether it is a house, a graveyard or a dark forest. These mysterious spaces foment the terror at the heart of horror movies, empowering the ghastly creatures that emerge to kill and torment. 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 div
Publisher: Reaktion Books

dark
places
the haunted
house in film

LOCA

TIONS

BARRY CURTIS

dark places

LOCATIONS
series editors:

STEPHEN BARBER AND BARRY CURTIS

LOCATIONS examines contemporary genres and hybrids in national and international cinema. Each book contains numerous black and white images and a fresh critical exploration of aspects of film’s relationship with other media, major themes within film, or different aspects of national film cultures.

on release:

projected cities

STEPHEN BARBER
animals in film

JONATHAN BURT
women, islam and cinema

GÖNÜL DÖNMEZ-COLIN

‘injuns!’ native americans in the movies EDWARD BUSCOMBE
war and film

JAMES CHAPMAN
childhood and cinema

VICKY LEBEAU
dark places
the haunted house in film

BARRY CURTIS

REAKTION BOOKS

Published by
reaktion books ltd

33 Great Sutton Street

London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2008

Copyright © Barry Curtis 2008

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Printed and bound in Great Britain
by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: Curtis, Barry

Dark places : the haunted house in film. – (Locations) 1. Haunted house films – History and criticism I. Title

791.4’3675
isbn-13: 978 1 86189 389 5
contents
introduction

7

1
the haunted house

31

2
gothic and the uncanny

76

3 film: ‘a fragile semblance’

123

4 unreal
estate

167
conclusion

205
references

219
select bibliography

228
acknowledgements

233
photo acknowledgements

234
index

235

introduction

If anything holds the scary tradition together, it’s the spooky house, which has stood fast for two hundred and fifty years while the world around it has gone through some unimaginable changes.

Walter Kendrick, The Thrill of Fear 1

The idea of writing this book arose from teaching film and architecture simultaneously while reflecting on the dark places of the psyche, the auditorium and the home. The project of architecture is to create structures, spaces and surfaces in which the past can dwell, while at the same time deploying the aesthetic and functional imperatives of the present. Its attempts to eliminate the past are frequently suggestive of exorcism, a process of root-ing out and banishing the ‘homely’ in all its manifestations – the decorative, the comfortable and the inherited. The dialectic of past and present is a structuring principle of architecture and closely resembles the tensions present in narratives of starting anew and being haunted that have been popular cinematic themes since the earliest public screening of moving pictures. Le Corbusier’s disgust at ‘labyrinths of furniture’ and Arne Jacobsen’s attempt to simplify the ‘forest of legs’ in favour of a slender elegant support reveal a dread of being lost in the complexities of

8

The Haunting: first sight of the house.

interiors and subject to their unruly revenants. More recently the impulse to dwell in an ecologically aware, ‘guilt free future’ has produced plans for living that decisively break with haunted pasts of materiality and waste, although the frequent etherealization of futuristic projects opens the door to new phantasms. A recent project for transparent, high technology domestic living,

‘The Phantom House’, calls attention to the ‘ghostly’ quality of the dematerialized aspirations of ecology.2

The modernist project was vitally aware of the need to rationalize away regressive elements in the home whilst mobilizing a spectral, tracking point of view. Le Corbusier formulated some determined purges of dead concepts and a systematic evacuation of shadow and detail in order to create formally functional and visible space. Another important ideologue of modernist architecture, Sigfried Giedion, sought to eradicate fatal and hereditary monumentality and linked the great cleansing impulse to a return to anterior principles – making an analogy between the ways in which

9
the Renaissance had mobilized Antiquity and a Modernist impulse to invoke the culture of ‘primitive man’.3 Giedion suggests a familiar trope in the fiction of spirits – that exorcizing recent pasts can invoke older revenants. However, even the fantasy of the house as a machine, cleansed of its cluttered associations with the near past, has opened up new potentials for rendering the supernatural, notably in the schematic affectless geometry of anxiogenic spaces in films like Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995) and White Noise (Geoffrey Sax, 2005). New kinds of Modernist haunting appear in the transparency of interiors and the technological ‘connectedness’ of invisible electronic ‘services’ and animated interiors.

Safe: affectless geometry of ambient haunting.

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In recent years films about haunting and its locales have proliferated. ‘Ghosts’ and the dark places where they dwell have served as powerful metaphors for persistent themes of loss, memory, retribution and confrontation with unacknowledged and unresolved histories. The relative modernity of the ghost story and its currency in popular cinema could be attributable to a need to acknowledge what has been consistently repressed in the construction of everyday bourgeois culture and its environments. This is a book as much concerned with architecture and place as with narratives. It is interested in the spaces that harbour ghosts, which need to be explored in order to confront them.

‘Dark places’ abound in films – in some cases ‘real ghosts’ reside there – supernatural revenants which have passed between the worlds of the living and the dead. In others the ‘ghostliness’ is the lingering presence of some repressed social group, or a demonically malevolent individual, possessed by a force that is antagonistic to the protagonist’s present life. In films as diverse as Nosferatu, Rosemary’s Baby, Citizen Kane, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Panic Room, the apprehensive approach to the

‘house’ and the dawning realization that it is already occupied in a variety of disturbing ways, the painful acquisition of necessary historical knowledge, and the final confrontation with the force troubling the place are all orchestrated through points of view, mise en scène and performance to prompt the viewer’s complex realization of the disturbing vitality of spaces and boundaries.

Houses are deeply implicated with humanity, and yet they are not human. The tensions arising from that anomaly stress other borders and distinctions in ways that activate acute

1 1

Nosferatu: the
approach to the
castle.

anxieties. One of the features of the haunted house film is the uncanny animation of the house and its interiors; the flexing of margins and the refusal of objects to stay stored in place or within the limits of their customary significance. The structure itself is prone to metamorphosis and agitation, often in ways that threaten its own integrity as well as the lives of those who explore it. There is a particularly intense relationship between narrative and mise en scène. The house conceals a truth that has to be symptomatically worked out. The mundane domestic details have to be brought into focus by their spectral inflection, made strange in order to reveal what is troubling them. Walter Benjamin implied that architecture and film are comparable, both received by a collectivity in a state of distraction – a perception that cues the ‘uncanny’ speculations of Freud.4 The house is at its most mysterious when it is most familiar. Like film architecture juxtaposes incompatible elements into a fragile but plausible unity that is held together by provisional points of

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view and familiar narratives: an uneasy perspectival reality that is brought into crisis by the onset of a ‘haunting’.

The suggestion that these films constitute a genre is a tenuous one. What I am proposing is that it is possible to make a ‘haunted house’ reading of many films that may not be iden-tifiable as horror films nor indeed involve supernatural events. The

‘dark’ or ‘bad’ place has been noted in a number of books on horror as one of the characteristic settings and concerns of that genre. It is often the lair of something monstrous – werewolf, zombie or vampire. In more recent films, it is an example of what Anthony Vidler has called ‘the architectural uncanny’5 – a structure within which familiarity and extreme anxiety come together, where

‘doubling’ is brought to a crisis through reflections, encounters and repetition, often a place where the passage of time is troubled.

It figures as the antithesis of the ‘dream house’ – it is a structure with ingrained tensions and instabilities; porous, unruly and inhospitable. Shirley Jackson, the author of The Haunting of Hill House, the book that inspired the film The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963), described the house of the title as ‘chillingly wrong in all dimensions’ – a spatial anomaly waiting to be activated by a particular encounter with a troubled subject.

the spirit of the place

Ghosts have been secret sharers of humanity from the most ancient times, present in forms of ancestor worship and as the manifestation of an anxiety about the liminal nature of death itself and the possibility of double-crossing that mortal boundary. Ghosts

1 3
represent a range of threats and fears, and are capable of adaptive alteration of their substance, from the vaporous exhalations associated with breath and the smoky trace of the cremated body to something threateningly material. Ghosts configure the fear of an image, as well as its potential to draw the viewer across the margin of death, by possessing them, destroying them or rendering them less than human.

‘Haunting’ has always been associated with place and it mobilizes the distinction between place and space by introducing unregulated and irrational spatial supplements. Often it is the lingering sign of a disruptive event that has left a dimensional trace. The house, until relatively recently, was the location in which death normally took place. In the last two or three gener -
ations this has been less common in the West. Jean Baudrillard, in his study of the symbolic economy of death, has commented that in the modern world death normally takes place ‘somewhere else’

remote from nearest and dearest. The fascination with haunted places that is evident in many recent films partly relates to a timely unfamiliarity with the connection between death and domesticity.

As any attempt to communicate with the past through exca vation, exegesis or hermeneutics is a form of confronting ghosts, it is not surprising that ‘haunting’ as a metaphor has such an extensive currency, particularly since the fictions of haunting suggest that the search for origins brings with it unex pected rami fications. The new technologies of information storage and retrieval and the increasing bandwidths of communication have created an accessible archive culture capable of constantly recon -
figuring the past. New ways of recording and transmitting

1 4
have always carried with them something of the magical and necrophilic. The incomprehensible complexity of new technol -
ogies has provoked assumptions about the possibility of ‘ghosts in the machine’ and of other forms of life hovering on the interface.

In this book I am particularly interested in how films imagine the relationship between past and present by using the fabric of structures as complex metaphors. These structures don’t have to be literal houses: cars, spacecraft, ships, apartment blocks, sheds, museums, hospitals, even trenches and bunkers have hosted fictional revenants. Haunting is increasingly a reminder that the forces of history and the economy create restless spaces whose uses and meanings are constantly being re-purposed, each time displacing and marginalizing disturbed spirits. Ernest Jones, writing on ‘the nightmare’, points out that haunting bears an essential relationship to a kind of vengeful nostalgia: ‘the wish for reunion is often ascribed to the dead by the mechanism of projection. It is then believed that they feel an overwhelming impulse to return to the loved ones they have left.’6 This suggests that every encounter with the past is a potentially haunting one and that the revenant is likely to be associated with feelings of guilt and potential victimization.

Houses have a particular relationship to memory and the ways that previous generations have lived in them and transformed them . This Happy Breed (David Lean, 1944) opens with an establishing shot of the Pool of London and Noël Coward’s voice announcing the end of the Great War: ‘hundreds of houses are becoming homes once more’; the camera tracks over the roofs of houses, advances through an open window and passes through

1 5
an interior and down the stairs to observe the new tenants’ shadows projected onto the glass of the front door. The spectral outline of furniture is visible on the faded wallpaper. The family express anxieties about the possibility of damp and transmitted illness; at one point of emotional stress during their twenty-year stay, they wonder if their own lives will remain imprinted in some way, if the people who occupy the rooms in which their dramas have unfolded ‘will feel any bits of us hanging round the place’. At the end of the film, on the eve of the Blitz and to the tune of ‘London Pride’, the camera reverses its long zoom as the front door closes behind the departing tenants and we observe the faint traces of their stay. The elements of material culture encountered in the promenade through an unfamiliar house inevitably produce a time-shifting effect in encountering objects and ensembles that have been marked by previous lives.

The encounter with the haunted house often stages a generational conflict. Children play a significant role in mediat-ing between the worlds of the dead and living, and each instance of haunting is a re-acquaintance with a childlike refusal to understand how people can suddenly stop existing. Haunted houses are characteristically confronted and explored by young women, as if they have a particular responsibility for resolving the problems of habitation gone wrong and bring a courageous capacity for entering into a relationship with the troubled past. Female youth and beauty have a complex relevance to themes of monsters, rebirth and empathy and can serve as metaphors for the structure itself.

Edmund Burke, in his seminal enquiry into terror and the sublime, noted that the body of a beautiful woman constitutes ‘a

1 6

The Amityville Horror (2005): approach to the house.

deceitful maze through which the unsteady eye glides giddily’ . 7

The spatially complex and contradictory spaces of haunting are often closely associated and identified with the woman whose responsibility it is to investigate, understand and ‘lay’ the ghost.

In keeping with Burke’s anthropomorphic perception, the narrative can describe a rebirth in which the survivors escape from a house which is a metaphoric ‘bad mother’.

Haunted house films are interested in all the things that can go wrong with houses and the optimistic intentions of the people who foolishly fail to take heed of warnings about their isolation, or their cheapness, or who fail to be adequately suspicious of estate agents’ explanations of why the house is on the market, or to take heed of the warning signs manifested in the behaviour of local people, children and servants. Such films are closely related to melodramas. They are often about tragic families and the influence of the past on the present. As in melodramas music plays an important part in establishing moods, and the soundtracks of these films are often complex montages of innocence and shock.

1 7

The surreality of the everyday, extravagant responses and distortions of familiar spaces can also produce humorous scenarios. Houses that malfunction are closely related to the rigging of structures that provide the settings for slapstick. Early cinema explored this option in films where the ‘ghost house’ was an aggregate of trapdoors, sliding panels and ‘in camera’ edits and superimpositions. Writers on Gothic have suggested that this popular generic impulse that produced thousands of novels and plays was related to the emergence of a class – a collective bourgeois subject – and explored new values of family, withdrawal from the realm of work and public life and a negotiation with the intimidating pasts of the aristocratic families that they tentatively regarded as aspirational models. This recipe for the ‘mock heroic’ was richly exploited in film and continues to play a part, not only in comic films like Disney’s cartoon The Haunted Mansion (Rob Minkoff, 2003), but as a lingering trace in the anxiogenic relationship to houses that are difficult to afford, or that suggest, through their grandeur and scale, that the new owners are already implicated in a scenario of ‘pretension’. The narrative of a family confronting a house with an unknown past has been played out in hundreds of films and continues to be a fundamental trope in recent horror.

dark houses and flickering screens

At the end of the nineteenth century the new entertainment of cinema transformed the relationship between actors and

1 8
structures, exploiting special optical effects and the reversibility of time. Gilles Deleuze has observed: ‘There is no present which is not haunted by a past and future, by a past which is not redu -
cible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come . ’8 The cinema itself is a haunted phenomenon, des cribed by John Ellis as ‘a half magic feat in that it makes present something that is absent’.9 The development of moving pictures intensified an awareness that emerged with the debut of photography – that the object world has been transformed into a realm of negotiable communication.

In the 1930s a sub-genre of films were referred to as ‘old dark house’ movies. These popular films feature apparently supernatural events that are revealed to be complexly contrived.

They conjure a fascination, dating back hundreds of years, with the stage magic of illusory telekinesis and trapdoor apparitions and disappearances, and uncover a continuing popular interest in the engineering of spectral illusions and the exploration of a modern indeterminate space. Such films are intimately con nected with inheritance and the law in ways that, as David Punter has pointed out in his exceptionally rich analysis of Gothic fictions, lie at the heart of the complex, imbricated iconography of

‘dark places’.

Exploring dark places has become a familiar experience in the realms of computer games and the Internet. The portals, levels and prohibitions are frequently cast in forms that share a generic awareness of the archetypal oneiric house, castle or institution.

The dreamlike way in which ‘games’ create space on demand relates to the uneasy relation between the filmic exploration of a

1 9

‘house’ and its plausible physical coordinates. Margaret Wertheim suggests that cyberspace conforms to older theological spaces and draws attention to the ways in which immersive screens and exploratory narratives configure theatres for the psyche.10 A number of recent horror films have deployed conflicts in dreamlike interiors that generate spaces as they are consumed by a moving, seeking point of view. In recent years a new haunted realm has been added to popular consciousness in the ubiquitous surveillance camera and its degraded, repetitive images of the recent past. The cctv world of potential menace, usually presented in low resolution monochrome, is a code for authenticity and memory, always threatening to lack revelation when the information it provides is most urgently needed. It is a searchable reminder of the abrupt eruption of violence in everyday reality.

The film Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) introduced the theme of mediated environments by amplifying the menace of the approach to the towering spires of the alien ship by ren dering it The Ring: a ghost emerges from the TV.

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as a distressed image on a monitor. The memorable scene in which the film audience observes the crew’s enforced passivity in their remote view of events they cannot influence is a vivid reminder of the frustrations of voyeuristic disembodiment. A partial, obstructed, fixed camera/ screen, degraded by interference and abrupt involuntary edits, has become a device for creating anxiogenic viewpoints in more recent films such as The Ring ( Ringu, Hideo Nakata, 1998) and Pulse ( Kairo, Kiy oshi Kurosawa, 2001). In these films the screen reveals its ambivalent reality as a masking device as well as an opening into other realities and a potential source of threat. The haunted house film plays a game of alternating what can be seen and what is hidden, what is inside the mind and what is happening in material spaces. It also resonates with experience of the media as a familiar set of conventions that entail a continual rupturing of reality.

The camera, often detached from any plausible human agency, serves to disembody the act of looking. Perhaps most House of Voices: the space behind the mirror – the heroine prepares to join the ghosts.

2 1
conventionally, but to disturbing effect, the investigative journey involves a fearful anticipation of something indistinct and mis-understood that occupies the margins of vision in the dark transi tional places at the end of corridors, at the foot of stairs, behind doors and walls and under surfaces. As the uncertainty becomes more urgent it brings into play the ethereal links with unknown spaces, intermittently called into being through wires, pipes and cables and the potentially threatening voids opened up by windows, mirrors and screens.

Cinema in its early years was closely associated with the magic of attraction and distraction. The bounded locale that opened onto other kinds of visual reality was an enhanced realization of the continuation of the conjurer’s stage.11 The haunted house was a popular genre that offered what Norman Klein refers to as ‘frantic seances’.12 The ‘old dark house’ was a complex apparatus where trickery shades into the unexplained and its renovated appeal persists in films like Thir13en Ghosts (Steve Beck, 2001), Ils ( Them, David Moreau, Xavier Palud, 2007), Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984) and The Frighteners (Peter Jackson, 1996). The mock-heroic compound of fear and persistence in the exploration of fearsome places has been reno vated, parodied and re-inflected. Periodically new kinds of technical or narrative sophistication or simplification have resulted in films that establish new levels of relevance and inten sity, such as Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) and The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, 1999).

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Since the 1990s the theme of haunting has acquired a new impetus and significance. Some writers have suggested that supernatural themes are a response to an awareness of hidden energies and forces. In the late nineteenth century invisible rays, the impact of evolution and the discovery of ‘deep time’ as well as the telephone and ‘wireless’ radio stimulated an interest in the possibility of spirit communication.13 Developments in miniaturization, mobility and tele-presence and their new kinds of ‘magical’ interface have prompted new kinds of ghost fictions and explorations of

‘postmortality’.14 Time travel has been one way of encountering ghosts of past and future, emerging from the destabilizing shock of technological revolution. It has figured in a number of films, such as Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) and The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) to create primal scenes and generational inversions. Ghosts have always been archetypal travellers in time, caught, as is the protagonist of Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993), in involuntary repetitive loops.

A sense of an alternative dimension of the dead, access ible by portals which are sometimes physical openings and sometimes immaterial psychic channels, was increasingly sup -
plemented in the nineteenth century by technological connections.

Every new means of reconfiguring time and space has created anxieties about infiltration and possession. A dramatic example is provided by Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, which takes place in a world where communication technologies have ruptured the boundaries between the living and the dead, and spectralized architectural openings become points of entry and departure. The computer network is full of ghosts who can be glimpsed in blurred

2 3

Pulse: atomic stains of the departed.

manifestations on monitors. They draw the living into the realm of spirits, causing them to fade away, leaving a dark smudge. The rooms of the entropic and lonely dead are doubles of the barren environments in which people interact with computers.

A later, American version of the film ( Pulse, Jim Sonzero, 2006), establishes that this blurred distinction between the afterlife and the everyday world was precipitated during an attempt to reach out to wider bandwidths. The apocalyptic scenario establishes a correspondence between the two worlds in ways that resonate with earlier fantasies about the capacity of new kinds of technology to rupture the membrane that makes death a distinct liminal boundary. ‘Cyberspace’ offers a complementary theatre of reality and realization that relates to ‘meat’ life – the material body of the etherealized online identity – in much the same way

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that the afterlife functioned in earlier times. A number of the films that will be considered here explore the fantasy of up- or downloading between real and ‘virtual’ worlds.

‘Haunting’ has become an easy metaphor for anything that is forgotten, unacknowledged and repressed. It suggests places that are infrequently visited, or visitors who have a fragile, marginal or oppressed status. In a recent book, Queer London, the shadowy, illegal person of a gay man in the interwar years is described in one account as ‘a member of one of those furtive groups which haunt cheap eating places’.15 Haunting implies, as Freud suggested, anything that cannot be fully understood or classified.

‘Haunted’ fictions often seek to restore to attention something –
such as injustice, neglect, murder or slavery – that is absent from the record. In this respect these films are often on the side of the overlooked and demand that understanding and reparations are their due. The idea of the ‘ghost’ functions in popular culture as something that has lost its vitality yet still has claims on the present, that can be reactivated by some act of intrusion or dis -
respect. The experience of being haunted is accompanied by a crisis of objectivity and demands a process of supplementing unreliable vision with other kinds of knowledge. Haunting stimu -
lates other senses; it revalidates touch and hearing and plays on anxieties that result from the senses being in conflict. The ghostly is immaterial to a degree that it can inhabit objects and

‘possess’ people. Possession and the loss of autonomy is perhaps the main fear, but it is significant that most of the newly arrived inhabitants of haunted houses are already vulnerable; families are

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divided, relationships severed, death has already deprived them of loved ones. The ghosts enter in at the most vulnerable and neglected points of houses and people and represent the anxiety that the barrier between life and death may be as porous and full of openings as the fabric of a house.

the spirit of the nineteenth century

The mise en scène of the haunted house film is overwhelmingly possessed by the spirit of the nineteenth century. Theorists have suggested that a shift of emphasis between the visual and the other senses took place at that time.16 A visuality was produced that manifested desire for new kinds of image, that assumed a more mobile, dematerialized point of view, detaching the act of looking from the body and creating a ‘gazing subject’ free to range across space and time.17 New sensations became associated with moving through space.18 Motions were accompanied by the arousals offered by a range of optical devices, many of which had long pre-histories, but were integrated and orchestrated in new ways. Furthermore, the screen became a mysteriously profound virtual stage. William James, the distinguished psychologist and fellow-travelling spiritualist, used the metaphor of a screen to describe the boundary between rational and unconscious thought processes. This identification of the screen as both a kind of psychic landscape and a dividing plane between the domestic realm and a world beyond suggests the extent to which illusion and the ‘other side’ interfaced with the interiors of everyday life.

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An ability to record and replay images and sounds engages memory and ambivalent fantasies of rebirth. The idea of haunting and the implied presence of the dead is as old as mankind, but it acquired new meanings and forms when distant communication and virtual presence became features of everyday life and entertainment. Extraordinary advances in the production and consumption of images since the advent of video in the 1980s have re-enchanted representation. John Durham Peters has commented on this summoning of the absent: An effect of modern media . . . is the externalization of the fragile and flickering stuff of subjectivity and memory into a permanent form that can be played back at will. The supposed ease of transfer was paid for with ghostliness.19

A fascination with supernatural presences in film coincides with the spectral nature of viewing. Ghost and spectator share a realm of suspended animation in which time and space are manipulated in a fantastic limbo of repetition and irresolution against which the narrative of the film works as a kind of exorcism, capable of restoring normality as it brings about resolution and closure.

Friedrich Kittler has claimed a direct ratio between the realm of the attentive dead and the swelling scope of the archive and claims a dramatic intervention effected by electricity: ‘Once memories and dreams, the dead and ghosts became technically reproducible, readers and writers no longer need the powers of hallucination.’20

Ghosts can take many forms and there are distinct national traditions that define their nature and behaviour. In the West

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ghosts were transformed with the advent and spread of spiritualism in the 1840s. This new set of protocols for contacting the dead democratized the world of spirits and enabled ordinary people to seek contact with the supernatural. Spiritualism presented itself as comparable with other scientific and expeditionary endeavours, extending human knowledge into undiscovered realms. The

‘ordinariness’ of ghosts liberated them from narratives of ancestry and revenge. One sceptical character in Lanoe Falconer’s Victorian ghost story ‘Cecilia de Noël’ suggests: It is a curious thing that in the dark age the devil was always appearing to somebody. He doesn’t make himself so cheap now . . . but there is a fashion in ghosts as in other things . . . If you study the reports of societies that hunt the supernatural you will find that the latest thing in ghosts is very quiet and commonplace. Rattling chains and blue lights and even fancy dress have quite gone out.

In fact the chic thing for a ghost in these days is to be mistaken for a living person.21
the film ghost

In the cinema ghosts have taken many forms. Inevitably the film ghost is a special effect, a spectral ‘exposure’ or more recently, a glitch in the process of transmission, a flickering light, interrupted flows of energy – disturbances in the medium itself.

Edmund Burke’s definition of the Sublime recognized the role of repetition in visual and aural effects to produce anticipation and

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surprise; he acknowledged how obscurity added to feelings of

‘dread’, and the power of light overwhelmed the senses, particularly when it was amplified by quick transitions and by ‘inequal-ities’ of light and dark. The alternating chiaroscuro effects of lightning were deployed in the very first Gothic fictions and have found their contemporary manifestations in the anxious realm of immersive and possessed electronic environments. The flickering supernatural conjures the mingling of familiar and unfamiliar and deploys a generic use of the flashback and flash forward to produce jerky narratives of predestination and apprehension.

Film has a particular relationship to conjuring ghosts, recreating the past, rendering mythic worlds and finding ways of re-presenting people who are absent from an immediate narrative. Computer-generated imagery has increased the potential to create plausible renderings of imaginary beings, and to blur the distinction between familiar reality and plausible fiction.

Re- creations of the past are more than ever a virtuoso effect of cinema – a spectralization of the medium. Animation is fundamental to the mood of digital cinema in a way that implicates it in the realm of necromancy and magic. In many recent Hollywood films there is a fundamental assumption that the route to understanding lies in the imaginative reactivation of the past and the resolution of conflicts that are located there – a kind of exorcism that is a simplified version of therapy. Freud suggested that in the labyrinthine structure of the mind the threads of patients’ narratives descend into the past as if they are returning to the scene of a crime or trying to find their way back to the house where the problems originated.

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Ghosts have been referred to as ‘the shape of an absence’, requiring special sensitivities that are often associated with a heightened receptivity to emotional states and historical events.22

In most fictions there is a question regarding the conditions under which the ‘ghost’ becomes animated and the relationship of the haunted to the haunting. The haunted house relates to the mysteries of projection and animation – a blurring of the distinctions between the living and the dead, the organic and the material.

Marx’s contemplation of the mystery of the commodity touches on the essential presence of haunting in a capitalist economy. However, the notion of the ghost is itself constantly referred back to older, pre-modern sensibilities and myths reintroduced into contemporary contexts. New ways of incorporating the ghostly into familiar realms of urban myth, technology and family melodrama have been introduced in the early twenty-first century by Asian ghost films which have been eagerly incorporated into Western cinema.

‘Gothic’ tropes are persistent and constantly renewable.

In Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2007) the three-dimensional, Spider-Man 3: breaking free of the ectoplasmic growth.

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multi-turreted labyrinth of New York is imbued with ghosts of a dead father and a dead uncle, whose conflicting claims on their young heirs have to be reconciled. The transformation scene in which a ‘darkening’ of the soul is enacted by a black tentacular overgrowth takes place in a Gothic cathedral and the spectral presence is exorcized to the sound of bells. Throughout, the mysterious kinship between what was once human and what remains of it after its death is a powerful theme. Characters undergo ritual deaths and are then reanimated as ‘super’ – a kind of refined spirited version of the body that has been left behind.

Being a superhero means making journeys into dark places, taking on a shamanistic role and enduring the tricks, jokes and violent attacks of evil spirits. Spider-Man, who like all heroes of early twenty-first-century cinema has taken on a darker persona, strad-dles the everyday and a realm in which magic, science and mythology conspire to continually return as antagonists.

In this account of the ghost film, the main stress is on the physical contexts in which these dramas of death and return are played out. The haunted house mediates between the exotic and extensive realms of the cinematic experience and the familiar places in which films are increasingly consumed. The haunted house film has become a popular theme at a time when more viewings are conducted within the home and it is noticeable that screens within the cinematic settings often figure as distractions from the threats that are converging from remoter parts of the house, or they act as portals which open onto sites of danger, or as menacing instances of similar threats enacted in other fictional scenarios.

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

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Halloween: the haunted house in the suburban street.

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.

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

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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 archae -
ology, the uncovering of an occluded narrative that constitutes the exorcism in much the way that Freud or Marx understood the sub -
structure 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

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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 intimi-date 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 devel-opers 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 un -
resolved 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

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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

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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.

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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 intersti-tial 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

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House: the facade.

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.

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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 com -
plex 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 confus-ing 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

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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 souvenirs, symbolic objects and symbolic decoration, of bringing together the far away and long ago in a delirious confusion of space and scale.

Benjamin suggests that the ‘dream filled sleep’ of capitalism reactivated mythic forces.11 The interior as a memorial and allusive space is present in numerous novels and paintings of the time. The interest in spiritualism from the mid-nineteenth century coincided with a fictional exploration of the ‘figure in the carpet’, the animated portrait and the passage ‘through the looking glass’. To the retrospective gaze of the Surrealists Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí, the nineteenth-century interior was charged with fantasy and animation. For Modernist design reformers, the con gealed symbolic content of the interior was symptomatic of devaluation and delirium. Thomas Carlyle described the addiction

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to ‘falsehood and fiction’ as akin to madness that causes the ‘Fine Arts’ to ‘walk abroad without keepers, nobody suspecting their bad state, and do fantastic tricks’.12 The intricacy of detail and anthropometric ornament in haunted house films is symptomatic of this fantasia of allusion and appropriation.

It was a feature of the grand houses that the income and investment that elaborated and embellished spaces and surfaces came from far away. The obscure places of the world were mined, harvested and exploited and traces or the source of wealth were displayed in eclectic patterns and ornaments. Benjamin Disraeli, writing of the continuously renewed investment in the English country house, noted that the war profiteers and industrialists who were the arrivistes of the 1840s had usurped the obsolete

‘breeds’ of previous cycles of profiteering: ‘the Levant decaying, the West Indies exhausted and Hindoostan plundered’.13 Fictions were alive to the possibility of lingering ghostly presences that were imported with the profits from these enterprises. The ‘grand house’ was sinister in the ways that it drew in resources that were conspicuously lacking elsewhere. Beatrice and Sydney Webb, staying as guests on the Luton Hoo estate in 1908, were struck by the contrast of the grand ‘millionaire’s park’, rarely occupied by the family and so remote from the ‘mean streets’ of Luton, which were ‘drunken, sensual, disorderly . . . with a terrific infant mortality’ . They noted: ‘the contrast was oppressively unpleasant and haunted our thoughts.’14

Characteristic modest single-family houses began to appear in Britain in the early eighteenth century, in response to new attitudes to property, individuality and identity. John

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Archer in his study of the origins of suburbia has suggested that the writings of John Locke on the autonomy of ‘self ’ are particularly expressive of the underlying aspirations of those who designed and commissioned them. The characteristics of the suburban ‘villa’ are dedicated to withdrawal from the world of work and sociability, and to family values strictly ordered under the control of a patriarch. The ideal house was privatized property on land set aside from social use or access. The internal disposition of space scripted the elements of the haunted house narrative. Plans were dedicated to staging distinct activities, providing separate bedrooms, staircases and corridors designed to reduce casual contact. Separated zones were established for servants and children, and discrete, rarely visited, places were set aside for storage. Public and private spaces were carefully distinguished and symbolically marked. The extremities of the house were what Bachelard has described as the ‘vertical polarity’ of attics and cellars. This verticality also mapped class relations in upper-class families where the servants occupied occluded spaces within the house, using separate staircases and the extreme margins of attics and area basements. The servants’

quarters were screened from view and their realm was identified with margins where dirt and waste were kept at bay. In many haunted house narratives the servants preserve the memories of previous inhabitants and significant traumas of the past. When the Enlightenment mood began to deride popular supersti-tions, there was a particular focus on the relationship between nursemaids and children and the passing on of stories about supernatural beings. Servants were particularly vulnerable to

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the presence of intrusive spirits, positioned as they were on the frontiers with contamination and dirt.15

The idea of spaces that actualized individuality and the status of the family was susceptible to notions of creative customizing. The Gothic style favoured eclectic eccentricity and the influential critic John Ruskin offered a view of architecture that endorsed the idea of dwellings that aged with their owners and became biographically charged with meaning. This left little room for children or servants whose subordinate roles were lived out as spectral presences in these highly personalized interiors: The right over the house, I conceive, belongs to its first builder and is to be respected by his children and it would be well that blank stones should be left in places to be inscribed with a summary of his life and its experience, raising thus the habitation into a kind of monument.16

As well as embodying individual possessiveness, haunted house stories can also function as parables of thwarted and demented domesticity, as kinds of warning against succumbing to a bind-ing relationship between person and place that might continue after death.

In the nineteenth century the notion of ‘possessions’ and their capacity to store idiosyncratic memories and contribute to the individuality of the home coincided with the development of the ghost story. The indistinct boundary between identity and belongings and the development of the notion of ‘personality’

were bound together with a new awareness of childhood and the

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special relationship of home and its detailed contents to the play of the imagination. The haunted house became both desirable, as evidence of a place fully possessed and animated by history and meaning, and anxiogenic, as a place of unresolved historical conflicts. The idea of ‘personality’ was reinforced by eccentric acquisitions and a bonding with objects and interiors. In particular a ‘heterotopic’ linking of familiar contemporary spaces to distant places and times became more marked with the growth of imperial exploration, trade and travel.

The theme of childhood is encountered again and again in films about haunting, particularly in relation to memories of fear and experiences of abuse. The monstrous emergence of revenant events and characters whose histories have been with-held replicates an experience of childhood. The adult witness is subject to a situation in which the causes are obscure and only the effects are experienced. Bachelard’s proposal of the possibility of a ‘topoanalysis’ emphasizes the house’s capacity to ‘hold childhood’ and retain an indistinct, indescribable quality: ‘the first, the oneirically definitive house must retain its shadows . ’17 The repetition of the experience is particularly disturbing and closely associated with that aspect of the ‘uncanny’ that Freud suggests

‘recalls the sense of helplessness experienced in some dream states’ and the compulsion to repeat associated with ‘certain daemonic’ states of mind.18

The London house of Sir John Soane, bequeathed to the nation in 1837 as a museum at the very start of the Victorian period, with its eclectically composed interiors, contradictory spaces and mysterious sources of light, stages shadow and mirroring as a

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prototype of the virtual adventures of the point of view in a contemporary haunted house film. The film Night at the Museum (Shawn Levy, 2006) exploits childhood anxieties about the lifelike latency of statues, taxidermy and dioramas and their potential to transform themselves from dead things to vengeful revenants after closing time. The uncanny quality of museums configures the anxiety of encountering the stored energies of the past and refamiliarizes adults with the fetishistic potency of models, toys, preserved corpses and alienated objects.

The Victorian house has itself acquired the recurrent persistence of a ghost in popular film. The conventional vernacular house of the twentieth century retains many characteristics that are traceable to the villa, the family home and even, in its more aspirational moods, the mansion and castle. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the promise of Modernism as a way of exorcizing the demons of empire, unrestrained capitalism and the oppressive class system that continued to dominate British culture in the interwar years led to a new fascination with the haunted quality of nineteenth-century interiors. Marghanita Laski’s powerful short novel The Victorian Chaise Longue (1953) describes an antique day bed that transports an impulsive young woman back into a mid-Victorian interior, where she finds her -
self dying of tuberculosis. Laski describes the claustrophobic, repressive horror of the Victorian interior as a macabre con -
denser of repugnant attitudes and behaviour. The story evokes an anxiety about the potency of objects in their capacity to bridge time. A few years earlier at the Festival of Britain a cautionary exhibit titled ‘Gremlin Grange’ located another association of

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Dead of Night: the
haunted mirror and
its other interior.

the supernatural with the architectural sins of the recent past.

The exhibit was an educational display of a scaled down interwar ‘jerry built’ semi, showing how many things could go wrong when scientific building principles were not employed. The

‘Grange’ had leaning walls, structural cracks, rising damp and poor acoustics, water leaked from the tank and fireplaces smoked. The 1945 film Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer) gathers stories of ghosts and possession into a narrative framed by an uncanny encounter with a house. An architect visits a remote country farm -
house where he finds himself trapped in a recurring nightmare, in which other guests tell stories. The story of a haunted looking glass, in which a room from early Victorian times appears, is testimony to the anxiogenic nature of the Victorian interior revived in a period eager to escape the social relations that are coded into its reflection.

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energies that appear in the outmoded

The period of rapid social change after 1945 provided a particular opportunity to supernaturalize recent history. The rootedness in the past of the dark house is a persistent theme. Change reminds us of generational antagonisms, but also of the inherited nature of property that renders it a repository of events and memories brought into play by some crisis in the present.

Benjamin describes this relationship between past and a present in which memory acts as a detonator that ‘flashes up at a moment of danger’. His writing is particularly sensitive to the emanations of obsolescent objects and locales – ‘the revolutionary energies that appear in the outmoded’. The Surrealists incorporated into their work a fascination with the highly charged interiors of the nineteenth century as places where a dense accumulation of alle-gorical objects threaten to acquire a life of their own. Benjamin’s writing is full of ghosts and haunted places and a fascination with the shell-like spaces of sequestration.

In 2003 Disney released The Haunted Mansion as a comedy horror film. In haunted house films the element of homage, parody and self-awareness are present in ways that suggest direct continuities with the pleasurable ‘double coding’ apparent in the much older ‘Gothick’ texts of the late eighteenth century. It is characteristic of the genre that the audience already know the conventions that are incrementally discovered by the pro tago -
nists. Catherine Spooner’s study of ‘contemporary Gothic’ traces the elements of parody and excess back to the originating examples of heroines and dark places.19 The Haunted Mansion was

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advertised as being ‘from the studio that brought you Pirates of the Caribbean’ – another popular ‘ghost’ film, based on the tale of

‘The Flying Dutchman’ and featuring the restless and vengeful

‘undead’. It made simultaneous reference to the Disneyland ride of the same name. The ‘Haunted Mansion’ was originally con ceived in 1953 for Disneyland, as part of the ‘Main Street usa’ attraction.

Early drawings suggest a complex ‘Victorian’ structure – ornate, decayed and characteristic of the iconography of the antebellum South – an important source of ‘American Gothic’. The ride was constructed and opened in 1969 and has since been replicated in other Disney theme parks. Disney’s ‘imagineers’ brought to it a wealth of ‘special effects’ and audio animatronic experience derived from making films. However, the Mansion is rooted in an older tradition of optical tricks and carnivalesque experiences.

In The Haunted Mansion a husband and wife bring their two young children to the house. They are estate agents and are interested in the problematic task of selling what is objectively a desirable, albeit excessively large and frightening house with ‘a graveyard in the backyard’, to prospective clients. In Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990) the young urban professionals who are renovating the factory ‘loft’ comment that the transformation could double the value of the property. The Amityville ( The Amityville Horror, Stuart Rosenberg, 1979) house is described as ‘the deal of a life-time’, Cold Creek Manor (Mike Figgis, 2003) is a ‘dream house’. In each case attention is drawn to the irony of placing a commercial value on the complex unresolved history of houses that belong as much to the dead as the living. The hubris of dreaming is countered by nightmare. The Haunted Mansion opens with a scene from

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The Haunted Mansion: floating signifiers.

an aristocratic past, accompanied by literally floating signifiers, mysterious levitating objects – a knife, a music box, a candelabra, a letter, an envelope being sealed with wax, a wine glass, a tarot card, a clock striking – scenes suggestive of romance and murder.

The beginning of the contemporary ‘second narrative’

leading to an encounter with the ghosts is announced by a distant view of the house. A boy on a bicycle approaches the overgrown and neglected mansion; there is a reverse shot, from the house’s point of view, of his face reacting to the impressive sight. This reverse shot, establishing an agency for the house, is a conventional moment in the haunted house film. The house becomes animated and distends; the boy flees. When the agents approach the mansion the formidable gates open mysteriously so that an implacable barrier becomes a seductive invitation.

The theme of obstruction becoming induction is generic – the aristocratic spaces of history suddenly become penetrable, but at the cost of surrendering a logic of spatial and temporal coherence. An early sign of the haunted quality of the house is the

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Monster House: the house morphing.

animation of the inanimate, one of Freud’s preconditions for the uncanny. The mysterious ease of entry signals a predestined engagement. In the animated Monster House (Gil Keenan, 2006), all the resources of cgi are deployed to anthropomorphize the house that lies across the road from the boy protagonist and mirrors his own unexceptional suburban home, in much the way that the ‘haunted’ house in Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) is located in an otherwise normal street. The house is a vengeful and voracious embodiment of the dead wife of a mysterious child-hating man. It literally rearranges its component parts to ingest objects and children into an interior that is a morphed compound of organic and architectural elements. This knowing version of the archetypal haunted house exploits a characteristic association of facade with human face, in which windows are metaphoric eyes that return the gaze of the intruder. The house eventually sprouts limbs and pursues the children who lure it to its destruction.

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The haunted house is essentially a lonely house, withdrawn from everyday life with clearly set boundaries marked by thresholds that have to be decisively traversed. In the Stephen King-inspired tv mini-series Rose Red (Craig R. Baxley, 2002), the mansion is rendered as a vast incoherent mass of buildings separated from the busy modern city by monumental railings that create a spatial, as well as a temporal barrier. Rose Red was inspired by ‘the Winchester House’ – a ‘real life’ example of a manifestation of psychic disturbance in spatial form. This Californian tourist attraction was the house of a widow who in -
heri ted the profits from the sale of the successful Winchester rifle.

Rose Red: the spatial, temporal barrier.

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Rose Red: the
extending corridor;
the inverted room.

By building a plan-less house over thirty-seven years, she sought to avoid the vengeful ghosts of the firearm’s victims. More than 160 incoherent rooms accumulated, with strange anomalies of scale, staircases leading nowhere, blind corridors and extravagant ornamentation. The house in Rose Red is daringly juxtaposed against a contemporary urban landscape but is situated in a nineteenth-century ‘elsewhen’. A group of psychic investigators

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enter and experience a variety of spirits, although the house itself is the chief source of disorientation – walls move, rooms invert and corridors lengthen. The house is a shape-shifting, reactive supernatural force that consumes its victims. The artist Jeremy Blake’s animated dvd Winchester Trilogy (2002) relates the Winchester House to the operations of ‘manifest destiny’

that secured the territory of the United States and links the owner’s individual quest for psychic safety to national obsessions with security.

at the edge of town

As many filmmakers indicate in the supplementary materials available on dvds, the haunted house film reprises some of the economies of early cinema – a house and a cast can come relatively cheap. The basic generic format can engage with a range of supernatural and sociological themes. The recent French/

Romanian film Ils ( Them, 2007) deploys generic themes of haunting – terrifying noises, ubiquitous threats and abject places

– to render a ‘true’ story of the persecution of a couple by a merciless gang, later revealed to be young children. The assault on the house is mysteriously comprehensive. Terrifying sounds, televisions abruptly activated and electrical disturbances all seem to testify to some malevolently ubiquitous force. This malevolence is inexplicable and seems to exceed any rational, spatially coherent explanation. The ‘haunting’ extends into the realm of a wider anxiety about the questionable humanity of delinquent youth.

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Them: phantom forms.

In the haunted house, the laws of nature are suspended –
time has been occluded by some traumatic incident that continues to exert a hold on the present through a persistence of energy that can continue to manifest itself. The haunted place has a timeless quality, sharing with the castle and the cottage a resistance to the insecurity of perpetual change that characterizes everyday life. The house is often remote, or marginal, on the

‘ragged edge’ of the suburb – a characteristic that is vividly expressed in the titles of films such as The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972) (‘It rests on thirteen acres of earth over the very centre of hell’), House on Haunted Hill (William Castle, 1959) or The House by the Cemetery (Lucio Fulci, 1981). Remoteness is a sign of its liminal nature and a hint that it might be annexed to some even more marginal place. In The Amityville Horror and Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982) the basement is a portal to a malevolent underworld. In Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), which Laura Mulvey sees as a pivotal film, minimal, self-reflexive yet studio-based and generic – there are two places haunted by

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deaths, the symbolic house on the hill, referred to by Hitchcock as

‘Californian Gothic’ and probably inspired by Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad (1925) and the banal motel. The interiors of the ‘Bates’ house were constructed on the stage originally built for the 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925), which required five tiers of balconies and underground catacombs and provided the vertical space for high angle shots of the stairwell and the descent into the basement.

Psycho evokes a more contemporary kind of haunting.

The fleetingly inhabited motel is the scene of a significantly mundane yet supernatural murder, and its office is a Gothic outpost of the haunted mansion on the hill, decorated with stuffed birds that are evidence of Norman Bates’s necrophilic skills as a taxidermist. Hitchcock was interested in the motel’s modernity and horizontality. Slavoj Žižek has suggested that the mansion and the motel represent a dialectic tension between history and the present in a way that is emphasized by the contrast between the dark maternal space of the house and the harsh, bright, reflective surfaces of the motel bathroom.20 The themes of horizontal and vertical are presented graphically in the title sequence. Peter Wollen has drawn attention to the eerie nature of the minimal, symbolic homeliness of the motel room and to Hitchcock’s fascination with its potential for staging a murder scene in which the bright hygiene of the bathroom contrasts so effectively with the darkness of blood and swamp.21

The motel is the site of transitions and transgressions – a context for Norman’s capacity to morph and animate in the everyday yet estranged locales of crime and road movie.

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Fragile: searching the archive.

The camera is a curious amoral entity as it zooms into the window of a city block and as a disembodied observer of murders in the shower and on the stairs of the old mansion.22 The motel is rendered particularly sinister because it has been left behind –

‘they moved the highway away’ – it is a shadowy interstice, beneath the ‘castle’ on the hill and in front of the swamp that swal-lows up Marion Crane’s car. The motel is disturbingly porous, with its peephole and mirrors. Mirrors proliferate throughout Psycho; hand-held, in cars and rooms, they help to define the theme of multiple personality as well as opening out the architectural space, rendering it maze-like and ambiguously transparent.

It is characteristic of haunted houses to be perceived as journeys that often start with new beginnings and proceed as regressive attempts to locate the causative ‘crime’ through a process of a patient tracing back to the genesis of the disordered condition of its locus. The haunted house requires an investigation of labyrinthine spaces that is closely akin to a pilgrimage or

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rite of passage. The search for an explanation is complemented by a more conventional forensic schema of research that takes new owners into archives, libraries and the homes of eccentric witnesses in order to discover occluded past circumstances. The spatial journey requires that the point of view of the spectator becomes spectral itself in order to investigate the liminal spaces and traces that might lead to a necessary resolution. In The Return (Asif Kapadia, 2007) the heroine is haunted by subjective visions of the murder of another woman. She researches and identifies the location of the murder in a small Texas town, and her quest takes her back to the scene of a road accident in which she was somehow possessed by a young woman who died. Alone in a hotel room, she finds her own image doubled with the image of the woman, whose fate she reconstructs as she falls victim to the same psychopathic killer and overcomes him with the help of the murdered woman’s lover. The resolution of the possession involves a therapeutic ‘return’ to her own past.

Inhabited: looking
for evidence of the
haunting’s origin.

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The Return: the superimposed spectral reflection.

inheritance and possession

Ghost films of the interwar years were characteristically about the uses of contrived supernatural effects, intended to deceive, usually in relation to negotiating the inheritance of property. They share with Victorian stage magic and the special effects of early cinema a fascination with architectural contrivances, the secret doors and passages that produce the haunting experience. The ghost is a simulation, and comic reactions are more important than the spatial disorientations that characterize later films. The Cat and the Canary (Paul Leni, 1927), a Universal silent film, was adapted from a popular stage play.23 The first title, ‘On a lonely pine-clad hill overlooking the Hudson stood the grotesque mansion of an eccentric millionaire’, is followed by a superimposition of a complex turreted mansion and a seated elderly man. We are informed by another title that ‘his madness has been brought about by predatory relatives’, and the next image superimposes

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massively scaled cats clawing at a manuscript – which we later realize is the contested will. The opening sequence is a moving camera point of view, at eye level along a corridor. A title suggests, ‘There is something more substantial than a ghost’; a light beam cast upon the walls reveals a human hand. The hand opens a safe and places a sealed document in it. This sequence establishes an ambiguity between the nefarious exploits of human plotters and the possibility of supernatural agency. The ‘ghost’ of the old millionaire is symbolic of the restless, unresolved nature of the inheritance that is eventually rightfully directed to his heir.

The exploratory point of view that penetrates the house, alternating between subjective and alienating positions, is The Cat and the Canary: tracking along the corridor with billowing curtains.

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deployed in a number of films made in the 1920s and ’30s that are often referred to as ‘old dark house’ movies. In The Old Dark House (James Whale, 1932) two men and a woman arrive at an imposing and isolated house, having been prevented from proceeding through a storm by a landslide. They speculate that the inhabitants ‘might all be dead’ before the door is opened by a monstrous mute servant who admits them to a hall dominated by a vast shadowed staircase. The film characteristically places an emphasis on the exploration of the incoherent dark spaces of the interior, intermittently illuminated by lightning. Attention is specifically drawn to the door at the top of the stairs, behind which is imprisoned a psychotic pyromaniac brother. The mobility and unreliable testimony of the camera creates the enigma; it

‘looks’ from impossible places, in one case from behind the fire in the room in which the visitors are gathered. Although there is usually no supernatural agency in ‘old dark house’ films there is a crisis about seeing as opposed to ‘seeing things’, about being believed and overcoming the obstacles to producing an understanding in others. There are many barriers to establishing what is real – mirrors, glass, veils, the effects of light that dematerialize and animate objects. The staircase, the metaphoric vehicle of ascent and descent, is particularly potent, lying at the core of the house, immediately accessed by the front door and usually confronting it. The staircase mediates the distribution of space, connecting public to private, evident to secret. In Psycho the

‘ghost’ of Norman’s mother, seen from high above, appears suddenly and unexpectedly to kill the investigator, Arbogast, as he ascends, emphasizing the vulnerability of intruders caught

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‘between floors’. In The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963), in which the house is metaphorically haunted by the sinister figure of the servant – precipitating issues of class, doubling and possession –
the staircase that dominates the mise en scène was described by Losey’s biographer as
constantly tortured . . . into new perspectives, angles, shadows, vantage points, power points – a motionless object which was never at rest . . . the coiling snail linking the separate rooms, each of them a place of hierarchy, privilege and sexual subversion . 24

The marginality of haunted places is accompanied by a sense of immobilized time. A traditional use of the term ‘haunt’

is to describe a place frequented by animals or people that suggested a refuge, much like the ideal villa or country retreat in which the suspension of time was regarded as a virtue. The nature of being haunted suggests a withdrawal, not only in space, but as an escape from the relentless demands of obligations and deadlines. Freud remarked of the disregard of ‘the world of magic’ for spatial and temporal differerence.25 The sense of frozen time is often accompanied in ghost fictions by a literal dropping of the temperature. An important influence on spatial renditions of interrupted narratives was the fixated character of Miss Havisham. In the filmed version of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946) Miss Havisham’s obsession with her wronged status and her incapacity to overcome the disappointment of her abandoned wedding brings about a richly

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visualized historical occlusion, melancholy evidence of the subjective immobilization of the passage of time. Pip’s first inkling of the neglect of Satis House is provided by his sight of the diaphanously clad Estella, advancing along an overgrown path from the imposing building’s shadowed doorway. The camera tracks the couple up a dark, cobwebbed staircase to a closed door that opens slowly to reveal a scene of baroque dis -
array and neglect, where the pale Miss Havisham sits transfixed at her dressing table among torn drapes and cobwebs. The traumatic moment is implicated in the spatial coordinates of the room and the house, which characteristically self-destructs ‘under the pres-sure of its own contradictions’, as Roger Dadouin, characterizing the fate of haunted houses, observes.26 Closely related to the preserved trauma of Miss Havisham’s life is the theme of childhood play, lent a sinister caste by the training of Estella to become a femme fatale. This vivid explication of the contaminating potential of an unresolved past and its mise en scène as a Great

Expectations:

Estella advancing
from the dark
doorway.

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childhood environment, like so many other ‘ghost’ formulations of Dickens, seems to have become influential in the later representation of heritage, memory, identity and real estate. Steve Connor has commented on Dickens’s ghostly desire to ‘inhabit all space, to be everywhere’, and other writers have suggested that he had an imaginative capacity to navigate in ways that pre -
figure the cinematic devices of narrative cinema.27

The imbrication of ghost and house is generically accepted in the literature of ghosts. Ghosts are committed to re-enacting emplaced grievances, withdrawing, as they do so, to margins and unfrequented places. Their repetitious nature is a reminder of the fate of buildings that fail to adapt to new circumstances. Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn has explored the ways in which buildings live in time, how different layers and components are de- and reconstructed to accommo-date their new uses.28 He proposes a hierarchy of change in which some elements of the structure are relatively invariant, while at the other extreme, some are rearranged on a daily basis.

The haunted house disrupts this model, not only in terms of its structural secrets and incommensurate spaces, but in the ominous fixity and supercharged significance of non-adaptive elements. Although architectural histories notoriously prioritize the ‘original’ in buildings, a number of historians have suggested that they are more productively considered as ‘a series of events’

and, like Neil Harris, have focused the rituals that accompany stages in their construction and considered the possibility of

‘sick buildings’.29 Most haunted house fictions relate the impact of a bad event on the life of a building, claiming that it is capable

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The Haunting: the house looks back; Eleanor merges with the house; Eleanor mirrored by statuary.

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of traumatizing and distorting its very structure and then transmitting long-term effects to future inhabitants.

The daunting first encounter with the haunted house raises an implication of the possibility of possession as an inter -
active phenomenon. The house must be wrested from prior ownerships, usually by rituals of re-conceptualization and redecoration and by the vitality of the new owner/occupants who bring their narrative of projecting a future into conflictual relationship with the nostalgic impetus of the house. In The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963) the heroine, Eleanor, commits to an elaborate experiment by a psychiatrist interested in the effects of haunting on his subjects. Like other entrants into haunted places – in this case the house in which the experiment is to be conducted – Eleanor is vulnerable and troubled; her special relationship to the house is signalled from her first encounter with it. The camera shares her point of view as she approaches the house and confronts its formidable Gothic facade, then reverses the point of view to look down at her from a lofty interior position. The reverse shot establishes a relationship that is developed throughout the film: each manifestation of spirits is followed by a shot of the facade. In one case a fade superimposes Eleanor and the house. Inside the house she is visually matched with the statuary and carved faces that abound in the High Victorian Gothic interior. Her identification with the house makes her forced eviction (by the psychologist, who fears for her safety) a highly charged emotional incident that results in her death, mirroring an earlier fatal accident connected to the house. The Haunting is exemplary of a generic struggle over ownership and the repetitious nature of unresolved histories.

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The discourse of ownership is complex – haunted houses are possessed and possessing. Ghosts are raised by an act of usurpation or a troubled disruption in the line of heritage. The privilege of ownership, like the liability to ‘death duties’, had become progressively available to a wider public during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even ordinary houses are imbued with characteristics of grandeur and relate to patrician archetypes. Isolation, scale and complexity are always metaphorically present, even in relatively humble houses. Darkness and obscur -
ity foreground the metaphysics and logistics of vision and the shifting, forensic point of view, as well as the anxieties produced by what is sketched in and screened off.

The haunted house is characteristically cluttered and excessive, frustrating any attempt to map and totalize. It tends to be ‘doubled’ in mirrors, or by an intricacy of structure, involving hidden rooms, corridors and an excess of doors and closets. The decor includes paintings, photographs and sculptures that create metaphoric (and sometimes actual) portals into other spaces or that function as bridges in time. Portraits, as representations of previous owners, or of unknown people, are particularly enigmatic and anxiogenic because they occupy an ambiguous atemporal psychic space. In one memorable scene in The Haunting Eleanor runs towards what seems to be the camera along a corridor distorted by the use of an imperfect wide-angle lens, adopted by the director to create this unsettling effect. The next shot reveals that she is running towards a mirror (from which, in the conventional ‘ghost like’ fashion of realist cinema, the camera is absent) so that she is converging on her own terrified and disoriented self.

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The Haunting: the haunted women converges with her reflection.

souvenirs, dust and heirlooms

The narratives that describe haunted places are primarily about the process of exorcism. Memory consigned to objects, images and documents plays an important figurative role in the mise en scène of the haunted house. The contents of houses are imprinted with events in time. ‘Old things’ – souvenirs, keepsakes and relics

– played a significant role in the idea of home and in accessoriz-ing the ‘personality’ of their owners by maintaining continuities, or establishing links with previous times or distant places. The implication that memories can be imprinted onto surfaces and objects may have gained extra currency from the advent of photography and the analogies made between what Martin Jolly, in his study of spirit photography, has called the ‘soft labile membranes’

of ectoplasm – the substance of ghosts, and the chemicals on the photographic plate.30 Stephen King suggests that the haunted house might function as a form of ‘psychic battery’, absorbing

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emotions as if they were electric currents that could be stored and accessed.31 The notion of fading, the ghostly trace, functions as a metaphor for the passage of time and erasure of memory and invites a process of disinterment. In the haunted house lost memories are often restored by being brought into the light and by processes of figurative or literal excavation, by ripping up floorboards, battering down walls or more systematic archaeo -
logical investigations of troubled places.

The objects within the house are conventionally discovered in a state of disarray, as if some vital original order has been lost. It is in the piecing together that the supernatural is released, or that order is restored. Often objects are encountered in remote parts of the house, suggesting that they have been marginalized and forgotten by previous owners, or purposefully banished because of their potency. In Skeleton Key (Iain Softley, 2005) a young woman is brought to a neglected Southern plantation house to care for an apparently demented and disabled elderly man. She uses a key to open a concealed door to an attic, beyond which strange, apparently random, objects and old photographs are stored. They are revealed to be the material components of a black magic ritual. Objects that have become separated from their subjects in the founding disturbance, and the impending

‘return’ of the original, long dead owners, are two of the tensions that structure the narrative. Characteristically remote parts of the house are veiled in a layer of dust that also obscures windows, mirrors and the vitrines that preserve photographs and other mementoes. Dust is the residue of human existence and the state to which it returns. Bachelard, in an affectionate endorsement of

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dust, suggests a relationship between the ‘condensed motionless-ness’ of discarded objects and their testimony to ‘far distant voyages’. In Skeleton Key the haunting is a complex one incorporating the histories of individuals implicated in the troubled history of slavery, voodoo and the American South.

A recent Taiwanese film, Heirloom (Leste Chen, 2006) takes as its theme a similar preoccupation with the malevolent power of a family secret. James, a young architect descended from a family mysteriously driven to mass suicide by hanging, inherits the ‘heirloom’ of the title – a huge house built in colonial times. Although advised to sell it he decides to stay and begins to occupy the house with three friends. An inaccessible level within the house that ‘should be the attic’ is discovered at the top of an imposing staircase. It proves to be a shrine with an excess of historical meaning signified by photographs and footprints.

Simultaneously the memories of the young inhabitants become disjointed and they experience episodic visions as the history of the house invades their reality, transporting them from other locales back to the interior. Images of people hanging register on mobile phones and cctv. Finally a family secret – that of abusing its own children to preserve a trade in child ghosts – is uncovered, and the malevolent spirits claim James, who starts to remember disturbing scenes from his own childhood and then commits suicide. The heirloom is also a curse – an obstacle to achieving a viable modern existence and a haunting presence that can only be put to rest by a heroic and ultimately doomed quest for knowledge of the past.

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Heirloom: the attic at the top of the stairs.

expressionist noir

The scenario of the haunted house has been profoundly influenced by a strain of dark imaginings that derive from Gothic origins and found vivid expression in the German Expressionist films of the Weimar era. These were particularly influential in deploying architectural spaces in ways that emphasized their subjective and dreamlike dimensions. Supernatural scenes of chiaroscuro and distortion produced an iconography that was widely adopted by horror films. In Hollywood the influence of émigré filmmakers coinciding with a tradition of harsh urban realism ensured that the dark places of expressionism were integrated into dramas of urban transformation. Recent reassess-ments of the ‘film noir’ cycle of films made in Hollywood in the

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1940s and ’50s locate the haunted space as ‘downtown’ at a time when centrifugal forces were beginning to disperse housing and commercial premises to the suburbs. The locales of the dark labyrinthine city were already charged with a mood of obsolescence and the mean streets of noir already a kind of revenant city peopled by the ghosts of the past. The element of haunting is particularly present in the films of the period that make reference to the nature of filmmaking as a process of invoking and laying ghosts.

Edward Dimendberg’s recent revisionary view of film noir invokes Ernst Bloch’s theory of ‘nonsynchronous’ history and Henri Lefebvre’s ‘layered spatialities’ to explain the ways in which the urban films of the noir period develop their dark places as pockets in time as well as space, allowing the camera to create a fluid temporal mise en scène.32 In many of the films of the period characters appear to be fatalistically reconciled to death –

The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946), D.O.A. (Rudoph Mate, 1950); vulnerable to revenants – Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), In A Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950); and moving in and out of states of unconsciousness and hallucination

– Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955), The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946).

The legacy of Expressionism and the themes of half-lives and the malevolent haunting presence of the past has permeated popular cinema to the extent that ‘noir’ is now a recognized thematic and stylistic description that has been particularly dedicated to evoking an urban context in which signs of the past are reinflected. The enhanced significance of the mise en scène,

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particularly of urban scenarios, is a legacy of the particular primacy of architecture in the films of the Weimar period. Many of the directors brought artistic and theatrical training to their work. F. W. Murnau was an art historian, Paul Leni a painter and Fritz Lang an architect. The quests undertaken by the characters in noir are very specifically located in the labyrinthine milieu of the city, or in following the dark webs of intrigue into remote ancillary spaces.

The claim of Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) to be a ‘ghost film’ is that it is narrated by a dead man, and describes an encounter with an even more remote historical past. The opening titles roll over a scene of police pulling up at the entrance to a mansion and discovering a body in the pool. The body/hero is next seen in past time, alive, through a veil of billowing curtains.

An impecunious screenwriter evading repossession men, he found himself ‘in the driveway of a big mansion that looked run down and deserted’. His monologue locates the house in history and in the imaginative realm of the haunted place: it was a big white elephant of a place, the kind crazy movie people built in the crazy twenties . . . A neglected house gets an unhappy look . . . it was like that old woman in Great Expectations, taking it out on the world because she had been given the go by.

At a number of points Sunset Boulevard invokes the generic gothic melodrama – the sinister servant, Max; the mock heroic funeral of a simian pet; the awesome scale of the mansion; the

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Sunset Boulevard:

first encounter with
the house.

sound of the wind whistling through organ pipes: ‘the whole place seemed to have been stricken with a creeping paralysis, crumbling apart in slow motion; there was a tennis court, or rather the ghost of a tennis court’. The oneiric nature of the interiors is compounded by the repetition of images of the

‘sleepwalking’ Norma Desmond and the deepening confusion of the young ‘ghost writer’, whose post-mortem voice tells the audience ‘this is where you came in’ – drawing attention in the process to the customary way in which audiences normally encounter films as discontinuous and disordered narratives, as well as to the similarity between entering the cinema mid-narrative and exploring the haunted house.

The mood of Expressionist noir has become an element in many contemporary haunted house films: the use of shadows to produce menacing alter egos, the alienated and obstructed point of view, frames within frames, the contorted and fatalistic narratives that closely resemble the troubled progression

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Sunset Boulevard:

first encounter with

Norma Desmond.

through space and time characterizing the pursuit or flight from ghosts. Perhaps most significantly for the ghost film, the style of

‘noir’ uses light as an element that is relatively divorced from plausible sources – as a metaphoric enlightenment, or play of otherworldly illumination, capable of bringing spirits into play.

One of the characteristics of Expressionist film that has become a trope in the rendition of supernatural scenarios is the animating of objects with a bewitched symbolic life in scenarios where the actors have become objectified. The dislocated architectural spaces create an environment that determines and con -
strains the movement of inhabitants, physically rendering the effects of a predetermining fate. ‘Techno-noir’, which has be -
come a commonplace as a mise en scène for films set in the future, is a reminder of the persistent currency of the 1940s film noir and its rendition of cities as palimpsests of past and present. In the influential scenarios of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) the tech nology of the future is haunted by obsolescence and

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upgraded with ‘add ons’ that speak of reanimation and combination. The much analysed ‘postmodern’ quality of Blade Runner’s mise en scène marks a realization of the impossibility of futures that escape the consequences of their own ancestry.

2 gothic and the uncanny

In the castles, the labyrinths, the maddening locations of Gothic we are not only in the presence of a crumbling down to ruin, but also and simultaneously immersed in some kind of work of reparation, of trying to see some sense in the damage done.

David Punter, Gothic Pathologies 1
the castle monster

‘We are more impressed by Gothic than by Greek mythology, because the bands are not yet rent which tie us to its magic.’2

Henry Fuseli’s radically conservative claim reflects an affili -
ation to Gothic as a more natural and, for some, more Christian culture. Gothic conferred upon familiarity a mysterious and exotic ‘other’. In this respect it shares in the strange contradictory economy of the uncanny. Writers on the Gothic have suggested that it resists any kind of authenticity and that the Gothic style is always a palimpsest referring itself to origins that are essentially a confusion of ultimately untraceable sources. A new nostalgia for distant times was mixed with apprehension. In the 1770s the novelist Tobias Smollett related the appearance of medieval cathedrals to weapons of torture,

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finding a fascinating cruelty at the heart of a native and Christian tradition.

By the late eighteenth century, the prototype of the Gothic place had been established in such fictions as The Castle of Otranto (Horace Walpole, 1764), with animated portraits, trapdoors, rusty hinges, secret passages and a mysterious substructure ‘hollowed out into several intricate cloisters’.3 John Summerson, the architectural historian, traces what he calls the

‘the concept of the castle monster’ through English taste from the Middle Ages via the Elizabethans to the Georgians.4 The confused and mazy heritage of the Gothic is an aspect of its vertiginous effect. H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Exham Priory’, the subject of his short story ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (1924), is typical of Gothic narratives and structures in claiming a Gothic tower, resting on a Saxon substructure, whose foundation is Roman, or even Druidic, with a suggestion that it belongs to a supernatural time scale.5

Haunted scenarios were well established and widely recognized from a range of popular entertainments before filmmakers began to exploit the themes of Gothic in cinema. The Haunted Palace (Roger Corman, 1963) is characteristic of a popular genre of ‘horror’ that developed in the post-1945 period, deploying a rich iconography shared with the contemporary Hammer ‘horror’

films but adapted to an American context. The film advertises itself as ‘Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace’ on its posters, but also acknowledges a debt to H. P. Lovecraft, albeit without the necromantic elements of the original story. The intention had been to make a film version of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter

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Ward (1941) but aip films insisted on continuity with the director, Roger Corman’s, other popular Poe adaptations. It opens in a seventeenth-century New England street in the town of Arkham.

Mist and darkness and the vaporous cemetery establish the liminal nature of the place. The troubled townspeople discover that the owner of a huge palace in the town, Joseph Curwin (played by Vincent Price), is luring local girls to mate with the monstrous

‘Elder Gods’. The palace dominates the village, conveying an eerie sense of its power and ominous volatility. W. G. Sebald has observed: ‘Somehow we know that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them.’6 Curwen is confronted by torch-wielding townsmen, tied to a tree and burned to death, but before he dies he curses the village. A hundred years later a great-grandson, Ward (also played by Vincent Price), arrives in town pursuing his legal claim to the building. It is revealed that the palace is ‘cursed’ and the townspeople advise him to tear up the deeds; in the murky streets, he encounters the monstrous mutations that resulted from the monster’s couplings with local women. When Ward becomes possessed by the spirit of his ancestor it is registered in visual terms by his confrontation with a painting whose later destruction releases him. The apparent reactivation of a dead person by way of an image is a theme explored in numerous other filmed ‘hauntings’. In this case the identification of the living descendent is secured by the recent innovation of a zoom lens that closes on Ward’s face and ends by locating it within the frame of Curwen’s portrait. This process required particularly intense lighting and demonstrates the close relationship between innovative cinematography and

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supernatural themes. The ‘curse’ that haunts Arkham is one of the malevolent powers that issue from the castle on the hill and the demonic miscegenation that plagues its citizens. It is also implied that the town is frozen in time – all of these themes continue to be explored in films that locate their hauntings in places of economic neglect and obsolete institutions.

Gothic style dominates the mise en scène of haunted houses. The advent of haunting is accompanied by a regression into an imaginary nineteenth century and its own ‘recreation’ of a mysterious Gothic past. Part of the appeal of Gothic as an anti-dote to the cool, well-proportioned smooth surfaces of the Classical tradition was an animated quality that evidenced invested labour and embedded souvenirs, the restless naturalism of ornament and the sense of accumulation over time that was a characteristic of the great cathedrals. Ruskin stressed that the nature of Gothic was to fuse structure with carefully crafted ornament, and the Gothic revivalists of the nineteenth century were particularly enamoured of the ‘play’ of light and shade on Gothic facades. Ruskin influentially proposed that the essence of natural forms should be a structuring principle and warned ominously that attempts to restore old buildings were ‘like waking the dead’.

It seems that Gothic successfully combined a sense of uncanny regeneration and a necrophiliac quality. Popular culture was awed by its ghostlike latency from the very earliest stages of its revival. In Britain, the Gothic castle became a model and a metaphor for home. J. M. Richards, returning from the desert after the Second World War, called his celebratory account of suburbia The Castles on the Ground.

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The iconography of Gothic was a persistent presence in nineteenth-century literature, drama and in the expansive realm of popular culture, where it merged with an older aristocratic baroque tradition of disorientation and mystique – in fairgrounds, magic displays and as features of optical toys and tricks. In the early years of cinema the fascination with ghosts, skeletons and dark places was powerfully manifested. The haunted house that featured in literary and dramatic contexts before the advent of film condenses the traditions of remote threats and domestic unease.

This combination is vividly present in the influential films made in Germany after the 1914–18 war. The theme of ‘haunting’ in relation to Weimar cinema has been extensively explored in Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen.7 In this account, the capacity of film to encode the disturbing ideological themes of the time are focused on the recurrence of malevolent authority figures, often associated with supernatural powers and the capacity to produce hallucina-tions, but there is also an emphasis on stylistic themes that become significant and generative of a rich visual repertoire for cinema.

projected gothic

In early cinema the rendition of haunted places allowed film -
makers to exploit a full range of technical devices. Stop frame, superimposition, over- and underexposure, negatives and experi -
ments with accelerating and slowing the succession of images were all called into play. The compulsively voyeuristic nature of cinema was in close accord with Gothic narratives of exploration and the porosity of perspectivally arranged set designs. The visual

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rhetoric of the macabre was developed in the cinema of Weimar Germany. Low-key lighting, unfamiliar angles, double exposure and radical shifts in scale were combined with the use of optical devices such as mirrors and camera movement that drew the viewer into the threatening spaces of the mise en scène. Paul Rotha commented on what he termed the ‘studio structuralism’ of German film and the opportunities it afforded for coordinating the architectural settings with lighting and camera mobility.8

F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror (1922) exemplifies this elaborated tradition of unease. The film had a troubled relationship to its source in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, previously adapted in various ways as stage dramas and for earlier cinematic renditions. Murnau’s version was deemed to be too close to the original, resulting in contested copyright, distribution problems and some savage re-editing. Murnau devised a visual style that vividly evokes the transmission of a haunting presence within and between spaces. The film opens with an establishing shot of a tower in the Baltic town of Wisberg, and moves to witness the sunny, affectionate relationship between the young lovers Hutter and Ellen in a naturalistically lit domestic interlude.

But even within this untroubled domestic scene a cat is shown clawing at a toy, one of many reminders of a harsh predatory side to Nature. Hutter is an estate agent, as usual a liminal creature in many haunted house narratives, concealing knowledge of the supernatural while representing the house as an untroubled, ideal place. He undertakes to travel to Transylvania to complete a property deal with Count Orlok, who is seeking to buy a house in Wisberg: ‘a handsome deserted house, the house opposite yours.’

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Nosferatu: the house opposite.

At the end of his journey lies Count Orlok’s castle, a visual echo of the opening shot of the film. It is a sombre turreted structure, looming above a valley, an archetype of the lonely castle recognizable from many renditions in the literature and art of the Romantic period. It was an evocation of Stoker’s description of an inspirational remote Scottish castle, originally medieval, rebuilt in the sixteenth and again in the seventeenth centuries and remodelled as a Victorian Gothic country house.

Essential to the visual impact of both structures is this sense of structural accretion over time. In Nosferatu Hutter has to cross a river into the menacing space of the castle – an episode that is marked by eerie cinematic devices – a transition into negative and accelerated motion. In the castle he is attacked and infected by the vampire Orlok. Then, as in the original novel, the remote

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Gothic menace invades and contaminates the space of home.

The ‘house opposite’ that he inhabits, with its ominous windows, is the dark double of the domestic space of the Hutters. Nosferatu fades into walls and manifests himself as shadows in his inex-orable quest for consummation with Ellen.

Orlok, in his aristocratic foreignness, his malignance and insubstantiality, is representative of a number of Gothic themes.

In Nosferatu a cinematic language was forged that emphasized the surreal effect of light and shade, the function of lighting to detach shadows and create phantom-like presences, the use of irises and a manipulation of off-screen space to promote an acute consciousness of the audience’s limited vision. Orlok’s sinister journey and the strange spatial affinities between castle and home that the film establishes are echoed in many subsequent films. In the 1931 Dracula, directed by Tod Browning, the estate agent seeking Count Dracula ignores the warning of the villagers who live in the shadow of his castle. He enters through a huge door into a vast misty hall, cobwebbed and infested with vermin; the Count descends a massive staircase in deep shadow. These tropes of melodramatic power and neglect and the quest to seek out the mystery that lies at the heart of the building are fundamental to the iconography of the haunted house, whose boundaries are disturbingly porous and prone to the invasion of parasites and predators. Even when there is no supernatural threat, the explor -
ation of the ‘old dark house’ and the reactions of the explorers that so clearly correspond to the experience of viewing were popular themes in cinema as compound ‘horror’ and ‘comic’ dramas. The intensely formulaic experience of shock and response can be

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conceived as an ‘uncanny’ dialectic, providing the pleasures of a familiar formula held in pleasurable tension with constantly updated and intensified eruption of memento mori.

building gothic

The key theme of haunted house films is the past’s power to disrupt the present. In order to lay the ghost and exorcize the place it is necessary to resurrect and re-memorialize by finding living witnesses to the trauma that initiated the haunting, or by delving in archives, discovering newspaper reports or documentary or photographic evidence which is metaphorically ‘buried’

somewhere. This process reflects something essential in the nature of Gothic – its documentary genesis – the constructed nature of its origin that always lies in versions of a past. The ghost story, which is clearly indebted to the Gothic novels of the eighteenth century but enjoyed its golden age in predominantly Anglo-Saxon cultures of late Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain and America, is characterized by its preoccupation with authenticity in the form of precise descriptions of place and mood and plausible circumstances within which the supernatural is manifested. The eighteenth century saw an increasing divorce of funeral arrangements from the presence of the dead body. This may have stimulated the symbolic and imaginative element in rituals intended to materialize the dead in spectral form. A kind of melancholia prevailed in which the dead were never effectively laid to rest and instead persisted as omnipresent ghosts. Terry Castle has argued that after the Enlightenment

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there was a ‘spectralisation’ of everyday life, a sense of another parallel world that interacted with the world of the living.9

David Punter has made a powerful case for the universal-ity of Gothic and its provision of subject positions, which may explain why in cinema it is so associated with conspicuously inventive constructions of point of view and the suggestion of altered states of mind:

Gothic enables us to consider our options, in a wider space than is usual: we may contemplate what it would be like to be a devil or an angel, what it would be like if domestic space were simultaneously freighted with the extremes of passion, what it would be like to have at one’s own service a double for whose actions we are not responsible and who we know might at any moment proclaim him or herself ruler of the house which we had imagined our own.10

Gothic provided scenarios in which doubling and imposture are part of the narrative and mise en scène, and where the counterfeit-ing of ghosts for purposes of entertainment often merges with claims for ‘real’ manifestations of the supernatural. In a fiction of clustered thematic fantasies ornament and intricacy play an important role in encoding a complex and secretive language of past lives. The Victorian Gothic that helped to define the vernacu -
lar house was itself a profoundly haunted ‘style’ – buildings were constructed with a ‘back story’ – and made to appear as if they had accumulated over generations. The early manifestations of Gothic were ‘picturesque’, deeply influenced by theatrical

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design and aristocratic fantasies of the past constructed as part of landscape scenarios, but they also sought to reinvest in a vernacular ideal of unpretentious domesticity. This fusion of the humble and the grandiose was constitutive of an ambivalent architecture that embodied uncanny tensions.

In its grandest manifestations the Gothic was a com -
pound of historicism and the fantastic. William Beckford’s megalomaniac Fonthill Abbey was an attempt to invest in the mysterious allure of the ruins of a Catholic culture of magical contrivances. The artist and set designer Philippe de Louther-bourg, whose ‘Eidophusikon’ – an enhanced magic lantern – was a harbinger of the ‘Phantasmagoria’, and of later cinematic experi -
ences, was employed to activate the vast spaces of the Abbey using ‘preternatural sounds’, clockwork machinery and powerful lanterns, projecting through painted lenses and fabrics to create sunrises, sunsets, moonlit scenes and volcanic eruptions, producing what Beckford gleefully described as ‘a strange necromantic light, a realm of Fairy, or rather perhaps, a Demon Temple, deep beneath the earth, set apart for tremendous mysteries . ’11 Among the fantasies embodied in Gothic architecture was the sense of the ‘natural’ complexity of plant life, frozen in time, often defying gravity and, even before the appearance of screens and projections, creating niches and embrasures that opened into other dimensional realms. In Gothic literature, and in the cinema that draws on it for inspiration, the mise en scène is often irrational, obscured and densely decorated with texts, statuary and images. Gothic buildings shared with film a capacity to bind time and condense historical narrative in ways that intensify and

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distort spatial perceptions. The castles, abbeys and desolate ruins that drew upon ideas of heritage and history informed the iconography of the haunted house. This investment in a dis -
turbing past coincided with the widespread experience of new technologies of travel, reproduction and communication which reformulated scopic and imaginative experience, revisited old stories and images and dramatized the interaction of the living and the dead.

The primitive house that is also the home of primal fears was a ligature between the dead and the unborn, a metaphoric gateway to the tombs of ancestors. The Surrealists, fascinated by the presence of the archaic in the present, described ‘trembling houses built on caves’12 and the Situationist Ivan Chtcheglov prefaced his ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ by drawing attention to the haunted nature of building: ‘All cities are geological, you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends . ’13 Gothic scenarios are often a preparation for a dizzying regression into deeper histories in defiance of the rational realms of the Classical and its promise of a direct communion with an ideal past.

The Stone Tape (Peter Sasdy, 1972) is a television play written by Nigel Kneale in which the preoccupation with haunting, aliens and deep history is reminiscent of Kneale’s earlier Quatermass and the Pit, evoking a history of haunting traceable to medieval times, activated by long buried alien telepaths. The haunted house in The Stone Tape is a Victorian mansion found to have Saxon foundations, within whose walls evidence is found of a structure that dates back over 7,000 years.

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The scientists, who are using the house to develop a new kind of recording technology, find themselves troubled by strange noises and a spectral image, first seen by a young female scientist who is, characteristically, more sensitive to the presence of spirits than her colleagues. They discover that the silicon in the granite has been impressed with the traumatic events of the Victorian past and is capable of ‘replaying’ the record of a murdered servant girl. It has also preserved older, more malevolent and inchoate revenants that are known to the local people of the village. The thoroughly contemporary scientists find themselves adrift in a timeless realm of ancient magic, reanimated by their futuristic experiments.

optical haunting and ghost dramas

Although the literature and imagery of the Gothic is replete with everyday ghosts and revenants, the scenarios are still associated with aristocratic or institutional milieu. The spatial grandeur and ambiguity of Gothic produced anxieties about feudal excesses as well as transgression of linear perspective and irrational uses of space. The evil spirits of Gothic were associated not only with the dead but with exotic others that existed in an imaginary, irrational realm. ‘Orientals’, ‘Asiatics’ and especially the manipulative practices of Catholicism were seen as sources of the Gothic mood. In post-Reformation Europe, with the elimination of purgatory, there was little conceptual space for ghosts.

Fear of the dead still prevailed and revenant manifestations were seen as the devil’s work. There were many anomalies in the way

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that ‘ghosts’ were understood to fit into an accredited religious schema, and there was a powerful current of pre-Christian belief in spirits. The firm denials of early Protestant reformers became diluted in time, but ghosts were largely thought to be a product of Catholic magic or a remnant of older folkloric beliefs. Catholic rituals for exorcizing haunted houses were shunned by Protestants, who relied on prayer or fasting. The association of Catholicism with trickery and ‘hocus pocus’ was persistent and is evident in the fascination with the haunting ruins of old abbeys and monasteries.14 In 1603 Samuel Harsnett, in his Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, suggested that ‘all these brainless imaginations of . . . house-haunting and the rest were the forger-ies, cozenages, impostures and legerdemain of crafty priests and lecherous friars.’

In the nineteenth century the ‘diabolical’ technologies of the Catholic ritual and its setting provided not only the settings for Gothic melodrama but also prototypes for the means of staging it. Barbara Stafford suggests:

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Protestant paranoia increasingly demonised the Catholic Church, whose enslaving machinations seemed epito-mised in the shifty mirrors, metamorphic lenses, distorted perspectives and ‘thaumaturgical projectors’ perfected by the Jesuits. Then as now the prevailing angst was that an unethical use of technology would incorporate humans into machines.15

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The new technologies for conjuring images of the remote and the dead were closely implicated with the delirious space modulations of the baroque and the new and increasingly everyday Gothic of the nineteenth century that disseminated experiences of the supernatural to wider audiences. When cinema became a popular attraction at the end of the nineteenth century it provided scenarios that were familiar to audiences, among which were numerous variations on the theme of death and resurrection.

Ghosts, skeletons, shocking appearances and disappearances are persistent themes in the history of optical devices.

Inevitably the ability to represent carried with it an association with reanimation and a rich repertoire of necromantic imagery.

A common theme in optical entertainments was the longstanding imaginative relation between the illusory and the demonic –
doubling, possession and damnation. The earliest images in printed books and in the slides used in magic lanterns featured skeletons and images of the afterlife. As early as c. 1420 Giovanni da Fontana illustrated ‘a nocturnal appearance for terrifying viewers’ in the form of a lantern capable of projecting an image of a demon.16 In the early 1600s a camera obscura was used to project an assistant dressed as a ghost or demon into a darkened room where he or she appeared against a background of sunlit everyday reality. Frequently reproduced versions of Athanasius Kircher’s device for projecting ‘translucent watercolours’ from an edition of 1671 show images of a devil burning in hell and a skeleton with a scythe. The art of the magic lantern involved an exploration of light and shadow and inevitably activated life emerging from the spaces of death.

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For those who did not believe in them, ghosts were projections of memories and fears analogized to the operation of optical devices. In the eighteenth century, when science and rational thinking were establishing new ways of conceptualizing reality, there was a corresponding fascination with the ‘dark side’

– a European-wide culture of imaginings of the returning dead.

From the mid-seventeenth century, when moveable glass slides were used to animate a skeleton removing its own skull, through many manifestations of lively bones in early cinema, to Disney’s reinvention of the theme, there has been a continuous fascination with the post-mortem body. Disney’s inspiration for the ‘skeleton dance’ in the first Silly Symphony (1929) derived from a fusion of nineteenth-century Gothic sources, from Dickens and Cruikshank, the Gothic illustrators of Poe, vaudeville skeleton dancers and the iconography of the ‘spook houses’ found in fairgrounds. These activated revenants had a long history in shadow plays and peep shows, but in the nineteenth century there was a new concern for intensifying the experience by optical trickery, and for rendering the appearance of spirits and the comic horror of objects manipulated by them.

The magic lantern was an increasingly sophisticated device for rendering these themes. It was an instrument of travelling showmen and street entertainers, as well as a scientific and instructive device. The ‘lantern of fears’, as it was popularly known, functioned as a memento mori and was capable of creating effects that could be environmentally enhanced by sound, lighting, smells and complex settings. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, the Frenchman Étienne Gaspar Robertson

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Robertson’s ‘Fantasmagorie’.

staged a notorious ‘Fantasmagorie’ in an abandoned convent. He included live actors and the eerie music of a ‘glass’ or ‘finger’

harmonica to produce unearthly sounds.17 A powerful projector with an ingenious geared focus-pulling device was deployed behind a waxed gauze screen to throw images of ghosts and demons into a suddenly darkened room. The mobility of the projector produced ‘zoom’ effects – ghosts and skeletons lunged into the auditorium space and terrified audiences. The term

‘Phantasmagoria’, from the Greek ‘assemblage of spirits’, came to suggest an experience intensified to the point of overwhelming judgement and creating confusion between internal states of mind and external reality. Robertson’s presentation was intensely topical, trading on the uncanny atmosphere of a religious establishment recently dissolved by the Revolution, and ‘bringing

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back to life’ many of those who had fallen victim to the guillotine.

Variations on this popular spectacle appeared in London in 1801, New York in 1803 and Russia in 1805, accompanied by other supernatural experiences produced by hydraulics, automata and acoustic illusions involving feats of ventriloquism.

Many of the supernatural extravaganzas shared with contemporary cinema the combination of ‘special effects’ and affecting narratives. It was characteristic of the showmen of the nineteenth century that they advertised the experience as a scientific one that demonstrated the means by which the senses could be fooled. The recent film The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006) recreates the complex mixture of science, showmanship and engineering that combine to create magical appearances and disappearances. ‘Multiplane’ projection and

‘dissolving views’ enabled transparencies to mount ambitious three-dimensional illusions that became a popular domestic form of entertainment with the introduction of the ‘stereoscope’. As Laurent Mannoni has comprehensively demonstrated in his book on the archaeology of the cinema, these spectral experiences were available to the poorest as well as the leisured classes.18 Furthermore, well before the advent of cinema, audiences were familiar with spectacular illusionistic scenarios and inventive manipulations of the point of view. The richness of the popular culture of simulation and virtuality suggests that early cinema’s monochrome photographic reality may have seemed ‘ghostly’ in comparison with the full-coloured sensorial impact of other modes of projected spectacle.

However the cinema did absorb and eventually marginalize

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other forms of magic. A number of magicians like Georges Méliès in France and G. A. Smith in England found ways of extending their repertoire in hybrid animation and live action films. The projector, an inverted camera, was a machine for producing illusions at a sufficient rate to animate them and raise them from the implicit death of the still image.

Dioramas and panoramas enjoyed enormous popularity from the early years of the nineteenth century, providing the pleasure of supernaturally expanded scopic vision. These complexly engineered illusions correspond more closely to the

‘establishing shots’ in film and the characteristic bright sunlight of the opening and closing scenes of haunted house movies. The panoramic view is far removed from the claustrophobic visual trickery associated with stage magic and the architectural spaces of the haunted house. However, the pleasure of seeing awesome vistas from lofty places depended on submitting to a dark disorienting journey from the street to the platforms and auditoria that constituted the carefully engineered point of view. The panorama experience has been described as a kind of exorcism of the dark mysteries that the streets of fast expanding cities presented to pedestrians – an opportunity to rise above the labyrinth and the blurred motion of crowds that Thomas De Quincy described as ‘a pageant of phantoms’.19 But the isolation from external reality also produced a strangely dematerialized

‘out of body’ experience. The liberated, empowered point of view has been extensively deployed in the cinema of the supernatural in order to disembody the spectator and identify them with the elusive movement of haunting spirits. Dioramas that

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‘The Fox sisters, Hydesville, USA.

1847’.

pioneered many of the effects later employed by the cinema were referred to by Louis Daguerre as ‘a veritable sight travel machine’ – a comment that links scopic pleasure with the sensation of being transported.20

The phantasmagoric ghosts could be made to visually penetrate the spaces of the audience but the quest to enable them to interact with humans was resolved in the mid-century. By that time the culture of spiritualism had spread from Hydesville, near Rochester in New York state. There, in 1848, three adolescent girls had established a format for communicating with the

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‘A séance in 1871’.

spirit of a ‘murdered peddler’ whose ‘knocking’ alerted the family to a presence under the dirt floor of the cellar, where the remains of a body were subsequently found. In the same year an influential book, The Night Side of Nature by Catherine Crowe, a collection of ghost stories gathered from books, letters and diaries, was published in England. Crowe, who had lived in Germany, used the term ‘poltergeist’ to describe particularly active spirits and introduced the book with a plea for serious scientific research into supernatural phenomena. The idea of communicating with the dead rapidly became a worldwide preoccupation. The impact of spiritualism was profound; it was

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a revolt against established religion and against the materialism and scientific positivism of Victorian culture. It was aligned with

‘the modern’, corresponding to a fascination with the invisible forces of magnetism, electricity and ‘rays’ and a belief in a hitherto undiscovered medium that allowed spirits to manifest on a material plane.

Historians have traced the growth of spiritualism and established its role in empowering women ‘mediums’ and align-ing them with scientific investigation. In recent haunted house films it is customarily young women who enter into a relationship with the restless spirits and mobilize the emotional and investigative energies necessary to encounter and appease them.

Spiritualism brought ‘haunting’ into domestic environments and spirits into association with mundane household objects. Ghosts became closely associated with the animation of tables, chairs and cabinets. The Davenport brothers, who produced supernatural phenomena on stage, insisted that cabinets ‘condensed psychic energy’. In the film Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982) the spirit first manifests itself in playful games with chairs and later with toys, but it also occupies the cabinet of the television and from there exerts its power to possess and liquify the boundary between the afterlife and the domestic realm, using screen and closet as channels. In the world of spiritualism, ghosts needed management in order to become popular spectacles. P. T.

Barnum, who took a close interest in the entertainment potential of the supernatural, commented on the disappointingly low levels of communication attributable to ‘real ghosts’. From 1855
onwards, the Davenport brothers and other performers brought

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Kellar poster – the cabinet of mysteries.

show business and ghosts together in hugely popular, and much imitated, staging of séances.

The popularity of plays involving the appearance of ghosts resulted in ingenious contrivances of stagecraft deploying optical tricks and mechanical manipulation as well as the cunning use of mirrors and screens. The ‘cabinet’, a small con fined dark space, oneirically related to the coffin and the tomb, has been an essential component of illusion from the ancient origins of the camera obscura to the carefully engineered environments of the phantasmagoria and the auditoria of contemporary cinemas. It is reprised constantly in the mise en scène of the haunted house – the closet, the attic, the cellar and the confined spaces of corridor

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staircase and elevator. Freud suggested that the womb was the archetype of all these spectacular ‘cameras’, representing a place subject to anxiety and compelling curious returns.

‘The vampire trap’ came into use in 1820 to manage the phantom disappearances in the first staging of the The Corsican Brothers (written by Dion Boucicault, adapted from a story by Alexander Dumas, first performed in 1852). A sliding mech -
anism was deployed in combination with a trapdoor to enable an actor/ghost to glide mysteriously across the stage and appear to vanish slowly into the ground. This popular spectacle was revived many times and accompanied by a theme, known as the

‘Ghost Melody’. Mechanical devices enabled actors to appear magically and to move in mysterious ways. The ratio of increasingly luminous light sources to image made more complex

‘Pepper’s Ghost’.

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projected effects possible. In 1866 an author with the soubriquet

‘A Mere Phantom’ produced an instructional book that demonstrated to owners of magic lanterns how to raise ghosts. Charles Dickens, who combined an interest in the supernatural with a highly developed cinematic sensibility, provided the script for The Haunted Man, for which the first staging of the ‘scientific’

illusion known, after its presenter John Henry Pepper, as

‘Pepper’s Ghost’, was contrived in 1862. This illusion required a carefully constructed relationship between a dark space, situated in front of the stage, and an angled sheet of glass. The illusion of a glowing skeleton, a performer dressed in black velvet with applied ‘bones’, could be superimposed on the ‘live action’ on stage. By calibrating the power of the light source, the apparition could be made more or less substantial, fading and reappearing on demand.

In America spectacular combinations of scientific instruction and special ‘magical effects’ were popular, and the journal Scientific American, founded in 1845, provided appreciative reviews revealing the mechanisms and manipulations involved.

Henry Morton, chair of Chemistry at the University of Pennsyl-vania, attracted thousands of spectators to see three-dimensional images hovering in mid-air, projected through his ‘Megascope’.

It is possible to source many of the illusions offered by cinema in various popular displays. These involved not only the special effects produced by dissolving views and projected slides but also ambitious deregulations of the relation of spectator to spectacle.

In 1894 ‘The Haunted Swing’, which seems to have been typical of numerous fairground and exposition ‘experiential’ attractions,

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was staged in Marseilles, enabling participants to experience the sensation of swinging through 360 degrees in a rotating room. ‘Haunting’ in this context refers to the uncanny sensation of disrupted architectural space and a disembodied point of view. The association of haunting with disorientation became increasingly familiar in the many ‘Haunted House’ fairground rides, combining tilting floors and disappearing walls with journeys through darkened spaces and simulated skeletons, ghosts and corpses.

From the late eighteenth century ‘ghost dramas’ often drew criticism for sensationalism and poor taste. As ghosts were deemed to be subjective illusions, it was thought to be inappropriate to stage them. The Castle Spectre, first staged at the Drury Lane Theatre in London in 1797, was heavily criticized but very successful. It was a triumph of special effects and, like many haunted house films, comprised gullible characters who believed in ghosts, characters mistaken for ghosts, jokes about ghosts and, finally, a ‘real’ ghost accompanied by a ‘swelling organ’ and a blaze of lights.21 The ‘ghost drama’ was an early fusion of science and fiction – enabling awe and wonder to be conjured by new scientific devices and anxieties about the body and spirit to find a dramatic and visual form.22 Contemporary scientists drew heavily on theatrical conventions in order to present their latest discoveries.

Condensed versions of such dramas featured in travelling shows and fairgrounds, combining theatrical performances with stage magic and optical devices. Randall Williams, who was one of the first ghost show operators to deploy ‘moving pictures’,

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as early as 1896 managed an annual ‘Grand Phantascopical Exhibition’ at the Agricultural Hall in Islington, London, and had already toured various ghost shows from the 1860s, competing with rivals such as the ‘Phantospectral Ghostdrama’ and ‘The Genii, Ghost and Goblin Show’. Moving pictures were easily insinuated into a hybrid environment that informed the content of early films. Subsequently the ghost drama metamorphosed into more experiential events such as ghost trains and haunted houses.

Experiences of disembodiment and new vertiginous perceptions were provided by panoramas and the richly temporal attractions of dioramas. But the railway journey and the fairground and amusement park ‘rides’ that dramatized the ‘shock’

and disorientation of abrupt motion were also influential on the supernaturalization of experience. Cecil Hepworth, a pioneer of British cinema, was the son of a popular scientific lecturer who worked at the Royal Polytechnic Institute, the original home of the ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ illusion. Hepworth remembered a childhood visit in 1879, during which he had enjoyed a precursor of cinema projection in Beale’s ‘Choreutoscope’

featuring ‘a cut out stencil of a skeleton figure in about a dozen different positions which changed instantaneously from one to another’.23 Hepworth went on to make ghost films and films that featured explosions and dismembered human bodies. He records in his autobiography his enthusiastic response to the popularity of ‘Phantom Rides’, a new film genre pioneered by the American Biograph Company consisting of a view filmed from the front of a train, providing a vicarious thrill of breathtaking speed and freedom. Hepworth constructed a camera big enough to take a

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thousand feet of film, providing images four times the usual size to emphasize the clarity and drama of the image.

In 1899 Walter Booth, another early British filmmaker, produced a similar illusion in On a Runaway Motor Car Through Piccadilly Circus, undercranking the camera and screening a frantic motorized zoom through crowded London streets. Jonathan Crary has traced the processes by which revolutionary develop-ments in optical devices in the 1820s produced a detachment of the eye from its ‘incarnation in tactility’,24 making it available for disturbing sorties into a world rendered strange by supernatural points of view. Oliver Wendell Holmes, viewing a stereoscope at mid-century, expressed the spectralization of this etherealized viewing as ‘a dreamlike exaltation of the faculties in which we seem to leave the body behind us and sail away into one strange scene after another’ . 25 The technological innovations of later years of the century found ways of incorporating the melodramatic ‘shocks’ which had been a feature of literary Gothic with the physical disorientation produced by speed and unexpected movements.

In stage magic complex geometries and the use of trapdoors and mirrors made it possible to disrupt and dissolve physical boundaries. Windows and mirrors, like screens, can alternate between apparent transparency and a troubling sense of opening onto another reality. Mirrors, in particular, were associated with the potential to release doubles into the world and according to popular superstition should not be allowed to reflect corpses.

The haunted house film re-enacts many of these illusions by using an interplay of editing, camera movement and set designs

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that call into question the assumed solidity of walls and coherence of interiors. The distorting geometries of the Gothic castle with its labyrinthine confusions of space and level continue to exist in scenes of troubled domestic spaces that verge on the cavernous and obscure. In The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) the young female heroine, Clarice, herself haunted by a traumatic experience of death, follows clues leading to the discovery of the lair of a man who clothes himself in the skins of captured female victims. She enters an unremarkable suburban house whose dark interior is characteristically incoherent. Clarice is a recognizably Gothic heroine who has to navigate her way in a nebulous demonic space by moving in darkness while observed, through infrared glasses, by a grotesquely tattooed shape-changing serial killer.

It is difficult to disentangle the elements that intertwine to produce a sense of the hauntedness of familiar spaces.

Mesmerism in the late eighteenth century produced what John Durham Peters has referred to as ‘a unified field theory of the material and moral forces’. The hypnotic relationship between subject and object was based on a perception of vital forces that were adapted in the many manifestations of spiritualism to a sense of the presence of supernatural agencies and insubstantial channels of communication. Ghosts provided evidence of the connectedness of things – the universal presence of ‘ether’, which was thought to be the medium for the transmission of light and electricity, and the existence of an electromagnetic spectrum that united the living and the dead. Ghosts exist in intimate relationship with the places in which their troubled

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persistence was activated, often inhabiting an architecture that does not correspond to the material structure experienced by living people.

invocation, exorcism and excavation

Gothic serves as mise en scène for dramatizing the contradictory nature of contemporary reality. In Urban Ghost Story (Genevieve Jolliffe, 1998) a twelve-year-old girl dies for three minutes in a car accident but is revived. A spirit follows her back from the afterlife and haunts the apartment that she lives in with her mother and younger brother in a Glasgow tower block. It is, indeed, a

‘haunted tower’, with maze-like interiors, distressed and graffitied surfaces. The effect of a palimpsest of deteriorating textures and defiant messages is a characteristic ‘Gothic’ trope – a delinquent incapacity to maintain an integrity of law and order. The film locates the supernatural in a context of urban realism but flashes back to Lizzie’s subjective view of the bright light that recalls her to the world of the living after the accident that killed her friend. The dvd packaging emphasizes the superimposition of two genres by quoting one reviewer’s claim: ‘Ken Loach meets The Exorcist’ . The polter geist manifestations are experienced in addition to the social problems that Lizzie’s family experience, as well as her own pains of adolescence, the ‘guilt of the survivor’

and post traumatic stress.

In Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992) a residential block, home to Helen, the troubled wife of an unfaithful university lecturer, proves to be the gentrified double of a nearby ‘project’

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– a building occupied by poor black residents. The project is haunted by the vengeful ghost of the son of a slave, brutally tortured and murdered for miscegenation in 1890. In the process of anthropological research into urban myths, Helen invokes the ghost and discovers that the passage between the spaces and the ruptured time of the haunting is connected by an opening behind her mirrored bathroom cabinet which is replicated in the twinned building by a huge graffitied rendering of a mouth.

The invocation of the ghost involves chanting his name while looking in a mirror. The appearance of the Candyman in the mirror – announcing his all too material presence behind the victim – is evocative of the contradictory, disorienting laby -
rinthine spaces and the ominous role of invocation in Gothic.

The project building, with its stark, graffitied interiors, con -
denses the horror of poverty and violence with more profound supernatural abjections. Helen’s fate is to realize her affinity with the Candyman who claims her as his lost lover – she dies a death that duplicates his immolation. The final scene features her husband’s remorseful memory of Helen as he looks into the bathroom mirror and chants her name in invocation before he is butchered by her ghost.

Gothic is fascinated with power and the law, particularly at its fraying and abusive edges. The institutions of the state and powerful interests are potential scenes of ruin and amnesia that translate into ghostly spaces. Gothic is redolent of lost initiatives and what is left behind when systems of belief and practice are displaced. Ruins were always an important property of Gothic melodrama as signs of lost vitality, sites for the contemplation of

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Candyman: passing
through the mirror;
emerging in a place
of supernatural
abjection.

transience and loss and evidence of the destructive power of time and the inevitable return of nature and the forces of decay and predation. The last decades of the twentieth century were particularly rich in signs of obsolescence, and a cinematic fascination with haunting testifies to this. Globalization and the forces of unrestrained markets, the mobility and ruthlessly ‘innovative’

forces of capitalism and privatization rendered the 1980s ‘a golden age of industrial ruination’.26 Marc Augé has identified the late twentieth century – a period of what he calls ‘super-modernity’ – as a generator of ‘non places’, places that are never completed, as against the characteristics of ‘place’ which, like spirits are ‘never completely erased’.27 A number of films suggest

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this tension between the ineradicable haunted place and the attempt to abandon and transform them into something that conforms to current uses.

In the twenty-first century the rich narrative and visual traditions of Gothic and the metaphor of the haunted house have been newly inflected, often in complex revisions and recogni-tions of the continuing power and relevance of dark places, evil powers and the sites of traumatic events. Freud’s complexly suggestive essay ‘The Uncanny’, published in troubled times, after the Great War, establishes a different kind of mundane unease, associated with a new bourgeoisie seeking out and moving into the familiar spaces of historical privilege and the anxieties that accompany ownership and heritage. In ‘the middle of the isolation of wartime’ Freud identified a particular fear,

‘the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him’,28 and a fundamental paradox – that the kind of safety identified with the home and family is very close to its opposite – an anxiety produced by ‘the secret and hidden coming to light’ . The idea of ‘the uncanny’ suggests the inevitability of a house incorporating traces of the dangers and unease it has been constructed to protect its users against. Freud describes the process by which a home can be transformed into ‘a class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’. His inspir -
ation was a ghost story from The Strand magazine in December 1917 titled ‘Inexplicable’, by L. G. Moberley.

‘Inexplicable’ features a neglected house in an ‘unromantic’ London suburb – ‘ordinary’ and ‘solidly built’ – in which the

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mundane interior is haunted, partly by the well-stocked Gothic imagination of the female narrator, whose ‘subconscious’

provides the sensation of entering through a creaking prison door and associates the innocuous dwelling with ‘traps and prison bars’. The locus of the haunting is an intricately carved table whose reptilian ornaments come alive in the dark and supernaturally manifest the sensations of a New Guinea swamp, opening out domestic spaces into the realms of imperial adventure and exotic fetishes. Freud admits that the story is half-remembered and some of its details are wrong. He stresses the confusion between animate and inanimate, the infantile anxieties invoked by silence, solitude and darkness and the attribution of malice to the dead. The story itself combines many of the generic ele -
ments of a haunted house narrative. There is a duplicitous ‘agent’

who fails to provide information about previous owners, un -
explained noises, superstitious servants and the remote origins of the ‘slithering’ supernatural threat. The narrator’s husband burns the table but concedes that ‘matter never dies, and the smoke is doing some useful turn elsewhere’; so the story ends provisionally, as many ghost stories do, with a threat of some future return.

The haunted house is a place where there has been a disruption, an often unacknowledged embedding of the past.

Stir of Echoes (David Koepp, 1999) opens with a night view of an ordinary detached house and the sound of a child’s voice. The child, Jake, is able to see and communicate with the ghost of a girl who inhabits the house and sometimes appears in mirrors. His father, Tom, is a resolutely rational linesman found to possess

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latent psychic powers. At a party he allows himself to be mesmerized, and sees a blurred image of a scene of aggression on the steps of his own house. Subsequently troubled by this episode, Tom has a series of premonitions, registered by narrative ellipses, negative images, flash-forwards and visions of the past, that drive him to excavate the basement of the house, where he finds a girl’s corpse. His inner turmoil is resolved by a process of ‘bringing to light’, discovering the rape and murder committed in his house by his landlord’s son before he occupied it. The film proposes that the most ordinary, recently constructed house might have secrets available only to peculiarly sensitive states of mind. The film is unusual in featuring a male ‘psychic’; the other characters who share his sensitivity are characteristically marginal, a child and a black policeman.

The haunted house is a familiar place that exists on an axis that connects with the labyrinthine exotic of the castle, the ruin and the abbey. It is this dialectic that activates the dynamic quality of haunted places. In a number of films the connection is made explicit by the opening of doors or basements from the realm of the domestic into the abject spaces of hell and the underworld. In the film They (Robert Harmon, 2002) a young woman pursued by childhood fears discovers that a bathroom cabinet, mirroring her face, opens into abysmal space – a vivid illustration of the Surrealist contention that houses are meta -
phorically built on caves. In the haunted house it is necessary to excavate in order to discover the source of the disturbance, but excavation always carries with it the danger of releasing repressed meanings and bringing unexpected entities back to life.

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Stir of Echoes: a
dream of the murder
house; excavating
the haunting.

The category of the uncanny relates closely to the sense of estrangement from familiar spaces and anxieties about access and boundaries. In haunted places doors, windows and other openings – telephones, screens and channels of communication –
often act independently of desires and refuse to stay shut or turned off.

the haunted community

A number of recent films have explored the theme of a com -
munity in which the haunting is environmentally extended to

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incorporate whole towns that are often significantly dislocated from contemporary life. In Silent Hill (Christophe Gans, 2006) a nine-year-old daughter’s unconscious recall of a town called

‘Silent Hill’ prompts her mother to take her there. The abandoned father finds it listed among ‘all the abandoned and forgotten towns’ on a ‘Ghost Towns of America’ website: an underground fire killed hundreds of its citizens and it became a place where corpses from subsequent crimes were dumped. Mother and daughter are killed in a road accident en route but play out an encounter with monstrous incarnations of the dead and a witch-hunting cult in a hellish parallel version of the ghost town. In some scenes the husband, who is hunting for them, occupies the same spaces as the ghosts of his family. The mise en scène is a rendition of a town frozen in time, seen through a grey haze of falling ashes as the mother pursues a phantom daughter through a maze of plastic-sheeted, rusted, distressed spaces. The film, adapted from a cult Japanese computer game, demonstrates the difficulty of matching a narrative to the complex protocols of gaming.

The location for the outside scenes was Branford, a small town outside Toronto, which provided the closed businesses and signs of decay that could be further degraded and ‘aged’. The film involved the creation of an entire environment of over 100
sets and locations that were ‘historicized’ and ‘distressed’, in the words of the set designer, ‘a world of rust and blood’ characterized by peeling and broken surfaces . In Silent Hill the archetypes of dark Gothic places mesh with the iconography of hell and the inexhaustible, self-generated space of computer gaming.

However, the purgatorial mother’s search for a ‘real’ girl takes

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place in a simulacrum of small-town America in which the retrospective pre-computer age of industrial hardware and institutions is an ominous setting for troubling scenarios. The ghosts of the mother and child return to their modern sunlit house, but they are invisible presences to the widowed father and continue to exist in the near monochrome world of the spectral past.

Hospitals, as places in which loss and death are continually negotiated, reflect contemporary anxieties about institutional care. Silent Hill’s climactic scenes occur in a satanic hospital with Silent Hill: the haunted town; the abandoned classroom.

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Infection: a reflection in the window ; the incoherent interior of the hospital.

gore-encrusted walls. As Masayuki Ochiai suggests, hospitals used to be places which were trusted, but have become places of anxiety. In his film Kansen ( Infection, 2005), the hospital is a dark, troubled realm: underfunded, understaffed and, in the traditions of the haunted location, cut off from the outside world. An ambulance appears menacingly at the entrance with a patient suffering from an unidentified illness. The staff accidentally kill him, and then try to conceal their negligence by speeding up the decompo-sition of his corpse. One by one they succumb to the same illness, mysteriously decompose and return as ghosts. But the malaise communicates through the subconscious and brings about hallucinations, so that the complex architecture of the deteriorating building with its many mirrors, in which one patient seems able to communicate with the dead, is a metaphor for their confused subjectivity. As in many ghost films, the revenants are in part manifestations of the guilt of the living. In Fragile (Jaume Balagueró, 2007) an old children’s hospital, first seen from high above and recognizable as an archetypal Gothic structure, is haunted by the vengeful spirit of a girl who is rendered terrifying by obsolete mechanical prosthetics. The sealed second floor en capsulates the

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horrors of forgotten medical practices and must be explored and exorcized by a nurse who is already haunted by her complicity in a previous case of negligence.

Riget, a Danish television series known to British and American viewers as The Kingdom (Lars von Trier, 1994), negotiates the generic politics and romance of hospital drama but takes place in a supernatural context. Filmed in degraded washed-out style, the series starts with a description of the origins of ‘Kingdom Hospital’. The huge Modernist slab block, constructed on marshland, was dedicated to principles of logic and order and built with a determination that ‘ignorance and superstition’ will never return. But the titles relate that the persistent denial of the spiritual is causing the cold and damp to reclaim and fatigue the structure, so that the ‘gateway to the Kingdom is opening up again’ . Riget confronts the hubris of rationalism with images of hands reaching up out of the grave and blood gushing through cracks in the concrete. In each of the episodes the formalized ‘chorus’ of two young Down’s Syndrome Riget: a ghost ambulance appears on CCTV; communicating with the ghost in the lift shaft.

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workers, engaged in the endless task of washing the hospital’s dishes and cutlery, talk of supernatural events and comment on the activities of the staff and patients. A phantom driverless ambulance appears and disappears. As in other ‘institutional hauntings’ the elevator assumes the liminal roles of staircase and closet. Images from cctv, ct scans and x-rays conjure a parallel realm of malfunctioning organisms. The antagonism of science to the spiritual is activated in cases of criminal negligence and, as von Trier, dressed as a stage magician, explains in the dvd’s commentary, ‘the hospital is becoming unravelled in some way or another’. The fabric of the building is compromised by a failure to come to terms with its ‘foundation’ and to acknowledge what one character describes as the ‘fellowship’ between the dead and the living.

The ghosts in films such as Session 9 (Brad Anderson, 2001), House of Voices (Sant Ange, Pascal Laugier, 2004), Boo (Anthony C. Ferrante, 2005), Madhouse (William Butler, 2004) and Gothika (Mathieu Kassovitz, 2003) are aspects of the afterlife of industrial and institutional buildings. They are haunted by the cruelties of the past that reside in spaces, machines and instruments. Session 9 is eloquent about the anxieties and guilt associated with old buildings. In this case it is an asylum (the location is an actual asylum, a site of the pioneering of full frontal lobotomies and shock treatment, closed in 1985 as a result of health cuts). The Gothic structure, ‘built in more enlightened times’ to house a community of mental patients, is described by the lugubrious caretaker as having a plan ‘like a giant flying bat’.

The film opens on a vertiginously inverted image of a chair with

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Session 9: the asylum; graffiti and reflections; a palimpsest of images.

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straps and clamps that seems to hold the key to what is troubling the place. The men who come to strip the asbestos (the material pollutant ‘haunting’ the structure), already troubled by emotional and economic problems, become possessed by the complexly concealed medical crimes of the past. The interior is immense and incoherent, vandalized and graffitied, troubling because of the strange fittings and instruments that persist as inscrutable testimony to a guilty past. The clue to the obscured events is found in an accumulation of images and recordings that have to be decoded. The raw experience of confronting the objects of a discarded system of beliefs and regimes is conveyed through the mise en scène, the textures of standing water, chipped enamel and rusted plumbing, lovingly rendered and edited by the point of view.

Haunted places in film are implicitly resistant to the reprocessing of the industrial and institutional past into examples of heritage or comfortable domestic spaces. They are presented in narrative forms that demand investigation and acknowledgement of what guilty knowledge has been lost in the process of renovation. Conventional tropes of ‘heritage’ are demonstrated in

‘haunted’ locations to function as a kind of unresolved mourning.

The laying of the ghost demands a work of research and empathy, involving not only the use of archives and testimonies but personal confrontation with the distressed relics and the layers of commentary that accompany the ruins. David Punter has called attention to the Gothicized nature of the idea of an institution:

‘prisons, gaols, monasteries, temples, they are all the physical incarnations of the notion of “institutions” itself, and as such

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they reflect the vicissitudes of “instituting”.’29 Session 9 calls attention to the historically recent horrors of institutional thinking and the dehumanizing strategies of authority encoded in built form. However, the alternative realm of atomized and virtualized individuality is also a breeder of ‘ghosts’ that reside in the means of communication, in bandwidths, cell phones and the immaterial static of existence.

psychic geography

The Surrealist and psychogeographic fascination with degrada-tion, obsolescence and the energies released by them have increased sensitivities to the lingering traces of what is latent and repressed, particularly in urban landscapes. The Ghosts of Berlin, a recent history of that city, starts by emphasizing the attachment of memory to place.30 Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography conceives a city of localities that resonate with the spirit of earlier events: ‘certain activities seem to belong to certain areas, or neighbourhoods, as if time were moved or swayed by some unknown source of power.’31 Ackroyd suggests that time is local-ized and moves at different rates and that locales can influence and in some cases determine the behaviour of those who inhabit them. Iain Sinclair’s writings are full of ‘ghosts’ – his travels through the liminal spaces intersected by the m25, which orbits London, refer to the haunting abandoned sites of mental hospitals, arms factories and various unrealized industrial projects.32

He notes the zombie-like procession of motorists: ‘the line of traffic advancing towards the rising sun looked like a procession

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of the returning dead.’ In his recent edited collection of writings on London as a ‘city of disappearances’ Sinclair introduces a ghostly world of memories and traces and asserts the transience that ultimately ensures that ‘all we can ever know is the shape the missing object leaves in the dust.’33 A characteristic of recent urbanism is the extent to which obsolete places have been brought back into play as apartment blocks, clubs and bars, but they may still remain partly outside the coordinates of secure contemporary reality. In Long Time Dead (Marcus Adams, 2002) a North African ‘djinn’, activated a generation previously by a hippie parent, terrorizes a group of young Londoners in an industrial warehouse partly converted as a club venue. The inscrutable rusty machinery, creaking lift and graffitied walls evoke an incoherent ‘past’ of cruelty, as the ‘victims’ suffer and regress in a space redolent of importation and invocation.

The Gothic sensibility thrives on margins – the places where the law is at its weakest and destruction and reconstruction is in progress. In the horror and ghost scenarios of recent films, the sense of moving beyond the boundaries of society and surveillance into weakly framed, unpoliced realms is a precondition for a confrontation with a revenant, even when the revenant is a flesh and blood monster whose social ‘death’ has conferred supernatural powers. The scope of ghosts has been extended to the unregulated realms of cyberspace. Fear Dot Com (William Malone, 2002) presents a complex scenario in which rain-washed urban noir, occult deaths, viral infections, forensic investigations, disused industrial sites and degraded electronic images combine in a palimpsest of icons, numbers and pixelated graphics. The

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Fear Dot Com: the website/portal.

agents of haunting are the mutilated, vengeful victims of a sadistic killer who inhabits doubled lairs – a website and a compound studio/torture chamber. The website offers ‘a chance to find out about death before it’s your turn’. It is entered through a forbid-ding virtual portal animated by disembodied hands, rusty scalpels and scenes of mutilation. The murderer and host of the website is traced to an abandoned industrial building approached through a dark opening into an interior containing a blind woman, open flames and a corpse-filled pond. The website is accessed by unknown subscribers with whom the audience share voyeuristic complicity. The combination of relayed and recorded images functions as the complexly sourced documents that characterize Gothic fictions.

These recent manifestations of a Gothic sensibility are complex expressions of anxiety that condense elements of horror, melodrama and the comedy of excess. Historians of the ‘Gothic’ have drawn attention to the parodic character of many of its key texts. Marx’s account of fetishism as a grotesque carnival

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mode – likening the life conferred on objects to a table ‘that stands on its head’ – suggests something of the close relationship between the absurd and the disturbing. William Paul, in his study of the dynamic of horror and comedy, suggests that the transgression of boundaries always carries with it a potential to provoke incredulity.34 Ghosts, and the ways in which they trouble categories and shape themselves in confrontations, have always been implicated in the use of media, from the ectoplasmic traces on photographic plates to the taps and static that have been the secret sharers of familiar telecommunications. In modern Gothic, the ‘overwriting’ and juxtaposition of texts that trace the origins of haunting and suggest parallel realities in which the everyday can be doubled are represented within a visual realm of the ‘ghostly’. Like the ‘Gothic’ of the mid-eighteenth century, always necromantically in love with an original that was never recoverable, the fascination with ghosts is still indivisible from their capacity to store information, manipulate space, mutate over time and resist comprehension.

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3 film: ‘a fragile semblance’

Film gives back to the dead a semblance of life – a fragile semblance.

Christian Metz1
photography and ghosts

In haunted house films the early signs of haunting often take the form of a curious image or vision, or an awareness of an atmospheric change or a disruption of a medium of communication.

Ghosts manifest themselves in the troubled space of reflections, or as electrical disturbances, but the photograph has a particular significance by testifying to a time before the disturbance, when the image of what once lived could still be captured iconically.

Old photographs constitute a visual clue to the original form of what has become deformed or insubstantial, and by testifying to the intervening time between the narrative of the event that initiated the haunting and the event that reactivates it. The framing and glazing of the image are uneasy guarantees of temporal closure. Until they are called back into the realm of awareness and narrative, ghosts reside in these two-dimensional spaces. Mirrors, statues and portraits as well as the film in which we see them are all testimonies to the possibility of split and doubled identities

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and reminders of the possibility that what has been stored in time may return in distorted or malevolent form. Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray narrates an anxiety about parallel time scales, mirrors, the porosity of frames and the splitting of identity as the imaged ‘monstrous soul life’ of Gray, leads to the destruction of the reproduced human avatar. In recent films, such as Hide and Seek (John Poulson, 2005) and Secret Window (David Koepp, 2004) the alter ego functions as a ghost, until the more ‘natural’, psychological explanation for the haunting effect becomes apparent. The coming together of fictions of fractured identity and ghostly revenants in Victorian times are partially explicable by a new emphasis on integrity of character. Freud identified repetition as one of the aspects of the uncanny and Jung’s interest in the ‘Shadow’ – a dark version of the self – was expressed in distinctly architectural terms: The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well . . . where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me . 2

In haunted houses, photographs of previous owners are often early signs that the house is still possessed by other subjectivities and narratives. Old photographs stand as warnings that any incoherence in the narratives of new owners may cause them to become possessed by exposing vulnerabilities that spirits can exploit. The plot of Darkness (Jaume Balagueró, 2002) follows a

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Darkness: a ‘photographic ghost’ manifests on the ceiling.

young woman who moves with her family into a house that has been used for supernatural rituals involving the abuse and death of young children. The ghosts that inhabit the house are present in a photograph from which they are able to escape, and manifest themselves as gravity-defying monsters that cling ominously to the ceilings. The permeability of frames relates to other anxieties about the provisional nature of the compartmented and hierarchi-cally organized nature of grand houses.

In The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) a photograph is the final resting place of the dead Jack Torrance, trapped forever in the scene of a Christmas party that took place many years before the present time of the film. The space of the photograph, like the space of the screen, is capable of communicating across time, functioning as a portal that enables travel between locations. A significant photograph also features in The Village (M. Night Shyamalan, 2004), providing the evidence revealing that supernatural events have been staged, by showing that the

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The Shining: the zoom to Jack haunting a photograph.

‘elders’ of the village really belong to the present and that the timeless past in which the community conjure their demons and organize their social relations is a ‘period style’ contrivance. In What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis, 2000) the haunted wife finds the necessary evidential photograph of the woman killed by her husband, who has returned to haunt their home, on the Internet. In The Forgotten (Joseph Rubin, 2004) a photograph that included a dead son is transformed to exclude him and put his existence, and the sanity of his mother, into question until she is able to discover that the world she lives in is a construct engineered by alien intruders.

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The ghost story, although its roots lay in the Gothic literature of the eighteenth century, developed simultaneously with the tale of detection and shares with it the drive to explain an anterior narrative. The photograph functions as a communication between the two points in time that are the temporal coordinates of the haunting. At the level of the personal, haunting is a conjuring with the remembered and material traces of the familiar dead. Some séances involved groups of friends meeting to reconstitute the spirit of someone they all knew and collectively remembered. The souvenir, an object once owned, functions as a kind of clue, establishing the affinity of ghost stories and the recreation of lost narratives with those other ‘clue’-driven enterprises of detection and psychoanalysis. Contemporary with the flourishing of the ghost story were: the tracing of authorship in Morellian art history; the astonishing sensitivity to detail of Sherlock Holmes; and the ‘slips’ used by Freud to determine unconscious processes.3

From its origins in the early nineteenth century, the photograph was associated with scientific advances and with magical What Lies Beneath: documentary evidence.

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properties; with naturalism and access to otherworldly places. One of the preoccupations of those who first encountered this uncanny technology was its capacity to fix a moment in time and preserve life beyond death. The reception of photography in its early years commonly deployed a necromantic vocabulary. Felix Nadar, one of the pioneers, likened the new process to the power of creation and celebrated the photograph’s capacity to ‘give physical form to the insubstantial image that vanishes as soon as it is perceived’ .

Because the photograph relied on the fixing of light it was identified with the shadows of things and the preservation of people in a timeless medium. In early photographs the solid image of posed subjects was distinctive from the phantom images that were too fast to be captured and were therefore ironic evidence of the transitory nature of life and the relation of ‘quickness’ to death. Photographers aimed to capture a likeness that entailed a concentrated stillness on the part of photographer and subject. The doubling of reality that photography made possible inevitably invoked a supernatural quality in the image. Like other technological innovations in representation and communication, the photograph provided new ways of looking that inevitably reactivated archaic emotions and anxieties. Plucking scenes out of the continuum of time, the absolute stillness required of the sitter, the formality of poses, and the mirror image produced by the early daguerreotype process all contributed to a result that was as surreal as it was ‘lifelike’.

Photography was perceived as both preservative and as evidence of something ‘taken’. There are many variants on the theme of photography as an accompaniment to death. Balzac perceived it as removing a layer of skin, a stripping away of identity

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with each submission to the camera. He proposed that the human body consists of infinitely thin layers of ‘specters’ and that the daguerreotype stole one layer after another. Other witnesses to the quality of memento mori that photographs bore commented on the likely dwindling of memory that would result from this new ability to fix moments in time. The film theorist André Bazin likened the preservative qualities of film to the burial practice of mummification, insisting that the image was always a transference of reality.4 Susan Sontag compared the making of a photograph with ‘sublimated murder’. She suggested that ‘to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability’ . 5 Photographs immortalized their subjects at the cost of reminding them of their mortality by depriving them of motion and signalling the post-mortem survival of their replicated reality. This relation of imaging to mortality was particularly acute in the nineteenth century when the practice of photographing the dead, or the living, holding photographs of deceased relatives, was common and the role of the photographer trespassed on that of the mortician. Walter Benjamin has drawn attention to the ways in which photography and film open up a world invisible to conscious observation. In haunted house films the traces of spirit presence are often manifested as trivial or insubstantial signs that are signalled by a zoom or strangely angled shot, requiring that the viewer focuses on a detail and enters a realm of forensic optics.

Photography coexisted with a range of other optical devices that produced illusions of movement, three-dimensionality and eerie juxta- and super-impositions. Francis Galton’s

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experiments in composing family photographs from different negatives indicated how cuts and new relationships could be made in time and space, and was cited by Freud as analogous to his theory of condensation in dreams.6 Other marvels, such as magnetism and electricity, that were dematerializing the ‘real’

world, seemed to testify to the presence of a connecting and pervading medium that allowed the passage of disembodied messages. By the late 1740s scientific ‘magic’ was already deploying electricity as entertainment. Steve Connor’s study of ‘ether’

quotes Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise of 1833, in which that invisible medium is celebrated as ‘a great and active agent in the work of the universe, as well as an active reporter of what is done by other agents’.7 In a world bound together by a unifying, responsive element that sponsored transmitted messages and at a time when there was a widespread belief in the survival of the soul after death, it is not surprising that the belief in spirits was very much alive.

New media have always suggested the possibility of mounting expeditions into the beyond. Friedrich Kittler has proposed that ‘the realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture . . . in our medias-cape, immortals have come to exist again.’8 Photography offered a new kind of acuity of vision that could render the otherwise invisible visible, and suggested the possibility of rearranging time and space in ways that could offer access to the supernatural. Spirit photography first appeared in the 1860s in America, stimulated by the death toll of the American Civil War and the battleground photographs of corpses, often staged for maximum impact.

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One contemporary commentator has drawn particular attention to Mathew Brady’s not entirely documentary images and ‘the strange spell that dwells in dead mens’ eyes’.9 Spirit photographs enjoyed widespread popularity for nearly a century and involved complex manipulations of photographic plates and negatives, nearly all involving double exposures to produce composite images of the ‘extras’ – the spectral supporting cast for the living subjects. This visual condensation of dead and living testifies to a widespread sense that ‘ghosts’ may exist outside the realm of everyday vision.

The emulsion that received and embedded the image was likened to the receptive mood of ‘mediums’ whose sensitivity registered the presence of ghosts. Tom Gunning has suggested that the perceived relationship between spirits and the photographs that record them was more subtle than is commonly assumed.10 Martin Jolly cites a claim that ‘spirit chemists’ actualized the memories of the dead in order to allow them to present themselves in recognizably contemporary forms to the living.

This sense of ghosts as capable of metamorphosing into an acceptable ‘photographic’ likeness of their dead selves is present in some films. Dead Birds (Alex Turner, 2004), a film set during the American Civil War, follows a group of deserters seeking a hiding place after carrying out a bank robbery. They find a deserted house set among wheat fields patrolled by strange distorted creatures. The house is haunted by the ghosts of children and slaves who have been savagely tortured by the fanatical owner of the estate. The children’s spirits are recognizable from an old photograph discovered by the intruders, but when

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Dead Birds: morphing child ghost.

encountered they morph from vulnerable victims to horrific monsters. The theme of criminals hiding in a haunted house, common in early cinema, is reprised here with a twenty-first century consciousness of the horrors of slavery, religious mania and child abuse – all absent from the ominously stylized family photograph.

The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001) materializes a mother, Grace, and her children, who live in an isolated mansion in the Channel Islands. The exterior of the house finally appears in the opening sequence as a drawing morphed into a photographic image of the facade seen across a misty landscape. The children suffer from a strange photophobic condition and Grace enforces a strict religious regime in a gloomy interior, behind permanently drawn curtains. Three servants present themselves at the house and submit to the conventions of locked doors and candlelit interiors. The family hear inexplicable noises and a

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young child and old woman appear to the daughter whose drawings, as in many other ‘ghost’ films, provide the point of transition between the fantasy world of children and a reality that incorporates their supernatural fears. Grace, seeking explanations for these strange events, finds an album of photographs in the attic in which she discovers post-mortem photographs of her three servants. She is eventually forced to realize that the spectral visitors are real while she, her family and her servants are ghosts, and that the house is being occupied by a new, living family. This inverted ghost story is particularly harrowing because it involves a generic quest for documentary and photographic evidence that usually results in tracing the source of the haunting. In this case it merely confirms that the dead are unaware of their condition and that their point of view is closely identified with that of the audience. In The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999), in The Others: the dead servants approach the house.

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The Others: post-mortem photographs.

which a psychiatrist is slowly brought to the realization that he is a ghost, the young boy he is treating for delusions raises the uneasy possibility that the plight of the unknowing dead has implications for the audience: ‘I see dead people, they don’t know that they are dead. They only see what they want to see.’

Still photographs inserted into filmed dramas have a powerful evidential effect. The search for the photographs and other forms of evidence of obscured lives is often a central theme in the haunted house film. A recent non-fictional film uses photographs, re-enactments and simulated scenarios to produce a disturbingly doom-laden account of real life events in nineteenth-century Wisconsin. Wisconsin Death Trip (1999), written by Michael Lesy and directed by James Marsh, was inspired by an archive of 3,000 photographs taken by the town photographer of Black River Falls, a small town in the American West. The

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supplemented collection of photographs documents a time of deaths, apparitions, crimes and madness. Post-mortem images of dead children are integrated into re-enacted rituals and short sequences of contemporary life in the town are chillingly integrated. The voiceover narration reads from contemporary newspaper accounts of terrible privation, compulsive behaviour and demented aggression. Unknown and non-professional actors were filmed at 30 frames a second to produce a barely perceptible slow motion effect, creating a dreamlike sense of spooky inevitability. Greil Marcus described it as ‘a distant story from a century ago that with the force of prophecy seems to rush forward to our time and past it . ’11 The act of reconstructing narratives from photographs produces an unsettling effect by creating an awareness of the strange arbitrary nature of the images and the way that they have been plucked from a continuum.

Laura Mulvey’s perception that ‘the photographic index reaches out towards the uncanny as an effect of confusion between living and dead’ is extended into the electronic realm in White Noise (Geoffrey Sax, 2005).12 All new media technologies are accompanied by a sense of their capacity to communicate across the barrier of death. White Noise opens with a quotation from Thomas Edison, who actively sought to invent a way of communicating with ‘personalities [who] pass on to another existence’.

There is an establishing shot of a spacious house, isolated on three sides by water. The owners are a happy, successful couple.

The wife announces her pregnancy just before driving away to an appointment. She is subsequently murdered and begins to communicate with the living by way of electronic disturbances.

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The inexplicable malfunctioning of domestic electrical appliances has become a generic sign of the presence of spirits. Electromagnetic fields and frequencies also play a significant role in many fantasies of contact with aliens. In this case the mobile phone becomes an imperfect channel (as ‘rapping’ did when the manipulation of telegraph keys was commonplace). Visual and aural static have come to represent the imperfect mediumistic connection – scanning radio stations, sporadic activation of toy cars, gushing water, all signal that the boundaries of house and consciousness are being penetrated. The bereaved husband is introduced to the phenomenon of evp – ‘electronic voice phenomena’ – and attempts to receive messages from his wife through patterns of static on television screens. His communication brings forth aggressive messages from the ungrateful dead and there is a climactic encounter with semi-materialized vengeful ghosts in a degraded industrial building.

The architectural components of White Noise are particularly interesting – the widowed husband, an architect, moves from White Noise: an architecture of screens.

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the original vernacular house to a radically Modernist environment as he pursues his wife’s electronic after-presence. But this antithesis of the haunted house – a place of plate glass transparency – is rendered as ‘static’ itself by perpetual rainfall trick-ling down the windows, figuring as a restless opacity and replicating the strings of ‘code’ that characterize the visual design of The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999).

digital ghosts

The scientific and technological advances of the nineteenth century brought about fundamental changes in notions of distance and time – optical simulation, accelerated travel, new ways of communicating at remote distances and a new awareness of ‘deep time’ and the extinctions it implied – through discoveries in geology and the gradual acceptance of theories of evolution. Excitement about the potential of the modern was accompanied by a fascination with the primitive and the non-Western world as models for the prehistory of the future. In fictions the exciting advances of science were juxtaposed with anxieties about their potential to do harm. Recent cinema often presents the symbiosis of mind and media as fragile and potentially dangerous. The Net (Irwin Winkler, 1995) explores a dangerous spectralization of identity in an electronic culture.

The film opens with a death and the camera panning up to the sky as if to follow an invisible spirit; there is a fade to a mobile aerial viewpoint that slowly zooms into a skylight through which we see the heroine, Angela, seated before a computer screen. She

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The Net: a supernatural, persecutory point of view.

is a professional programmer, ‘disconnected from the human race’, according to an ex-lover who is also her analyst; her only social contact is her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and is unable to recognize her daughter. As part of an extensive computerized conspiracy Angela’s identity is stolen, she is dispossessed of her home, and she is forced to recognize that it is possible to erase her existence: ‘I’m not me anymore . . .

this little electronic shadow on each and every one of us (is) just begging somebody to screw it.’ Angela eventually redeems her identity through her skills in the virtual realm of programming by virally exorcizing the conspiracy and restoring the electronic component of her identity.

In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse ( Kairo, 2001) the computer terminal functions supernaturally as a portal enabling the dead to return to earth, possess the living and wreak destruction. Pulse

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re-enacts the anxiety that has accompanied each new technology of communication and reproduction – that it may open communications with the dead. The film commences with the view of a computer monitor on a desk partly obscured by a veil of poly-thene sheeting, a visual metaphor for the tenuous membrane that separates the dead from the living. In Pulse, the dead return, leaving traces on walls and floors reminiscent of the ‘atomic shadows’ first encountered at Hiroshima. One student suggests that the spirit world is full and overflowing. A website known as

‘The Forbidden Room’ shows isolated traumatized people at computer terminals. Doors are secured by tape to deny access, screens become menacingly porous and the dead are subject to a discontinuous, distorted appearance that reflects their passage through electronic media.

The ghosts of Pulse emerge from screens nested in other screens, infiltrating the spaces within the superimposed

‘windows’ familiar in the anti-gravitational space of a desktop display. The frames and bandwidths that admit ghosts offer a bewildering variety of metaphoric ‘views’ and are conduits for viruses, identity thieves and heavily disguised presences. Derrida makes the point in the film Ghost Dance (Ken Mc Mullen, 1983) that
contrary to what we might believe, the experience of ghosts is not tied to a bygone historical period, like the landscape of Scottish manors, et cetera . . . but . . . is accentuated, accelerated by modern technology, like film, television, the telephone. These technologies inhabit, as it

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were, a phantom structure. When the very first perception of an image is linked to a structure of reproduction, then we are dealing with the realm of phantoms.13
architectural spaces of projection

The haunting experience of cinema is partly produced by its contexts. Since the 1980s the viewing of films has increasingly taken place outside of organized spaces of projection. Laura Mulvey has commented on the effects of this relaxation of the conditions for viewing and the increased control that it provides over the sequencing and flow of images.14 She suggests that the cinema has increasingly come to resemble ‘a mausoleum’ in its staging of images of the dead. Films have become self-aware texts that feature a play of homage and parody, frequently restaged and adjusted to present preoccupations. For eighty years, the cinema with its auditorium and protocols of entering and viewing was designed to create an out of body experience.

Cinemas, as ‘dream palaces’, devised architectural styles that made reference to various grand and idealized pasts – Roman, ancien régime, Spanish colonial, Gothic – as suitably mysterious and imaginative places to create spaces of fantasy and empower-ment. Auditoria were the heirs to a rich tradition of embellished Egyptian and baroque exposition buildings, fairground, entertainment and music halls. To enter was to be translated into other times and ‘houses’ of considerable mystery, in which the interior spaces bore little relation to the exterior. Audiences were prepared for an experience that would spirit historic characters

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and scenarios back to life and engage the viewer in mental states of projection that elide the real and unreal in a dreamlike synthe-sis of uncanny mobility and repetition.

The cinema is a ‘theatre’, but without live actors; each specific audience is referred to as a ‘house’, as if they constitute a domestic scenario brought into engagement with the imaginative realm of the ‘show’. When the lights dim, social relations are diminished and the process of viewing initiates a new kind of soli-tary spatial audacity as the viewer confronts illusory depths and negotiates routes into the multiple imaginative spaces of the fiction.

Laurent Mannoni records this encounter being orchestrated for the first time in 1895: ‘The human being and the chronophotographic alter ego found themselves face to face, one sitting in a seat in a darkened room, the other moving on a screen . ’15 This confrontation was marked by an uncanny reversal – the passivity of the living viewer and the mobility of the virtual performer. Tom Gunning suggests that projectionists in early cinema dramatized the mobility of the image and the versatility of the apparatus by starting from a still image and cranking it into animated life – this demonstration of the ‘uncanny’ is reprised in many ghost scenarios when a still, assumed to be inanimate object, or an image ‘comes to life’. The cinema was a context for new kinds of psychological projection, often involving attributions of unacceptable thoughts and desires onto others. In the haunted house, this kind of projection is a constantly shifting locus of anxiety.

The cinema auditorium is a carefully cultivated dark space with subtle adjustment of lighting and an arrangement of opening and closing curtains that the Surrealist Luis Buñuel

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likened to the shutting of eyelids in preparation for an oncoming dream. The withdrawal of the projector into a concealed space signalled the end of the screening as a scientific curiosity and reprised the hidden, magically innovative back projection of the phantasmagoria. The projector sends a beam of light into the auditorium that resolves into a shifting image. Older cinema -
goers remember the beam as suffused with the rising smoke of cigarettes, bringing to light a pervasive skein of misty exhalations and a reminder of the originating light absorbed by the camera and drawn out of the long dead atmosphere of the filmed event.

Gilbert Perez remembers:

In the movie theatres of my childhood people smoked and the smoke in the air would allow one to see the rays of light reaching across the dark auditorium, and like a long spectral brush, painting the pictures on the screen.16

In keeping with the dual genesis of cinema there is a sharp contrast between the bright Modernist space of the screen and the evocative period elements of the decor – Jean Goudal writing on Surrealism and cinema referred to this geometry as a single plane, artificially delimited by a rectangle which is like a geomet-ric opening giving onto the psychic kingdom.17

The dreamlike experience of viewing corresponds to D.

W. Winnicott’s notion of a ‘holding environment’ that is neither personal psychic reality nor external shared reality but a third area in which cultural experience can be framed in various ways and playful negotiations with reality can take place. Christian

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Metz observed that the cinema screen is a replication of the

‘dream screen’, a term first used by the psychoanalyst Bernard Lewin in a series of papers dating from 1946 to 1953. For Lewin, the ‘dream screen’ constitutes the background on which the dream projects its imaging: ‘flat, or virtually so, like the surface of the earth, for it is genetically a segment of the baby’s vast picture of the mammary hemisphere.’18 The screen figures as a need-satisfying experience, activating memories of satisfaction which are themselves a conjuring of something lost.

Haunted house films manage a relationship between the banality of the house as a widely shared experience of spatial expectations, and a shift into a realm that exists in an ambivalent relationship to reality. This procedure dramatizes the subliminal elements – doorways, windows, passages, mirrors, the obscure places at the bottom and top of the stairs. There is a fundamental irony in the way that ordinary objects can evoke supernatural effects. Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film suggests that this may be an essential relationship:

Perhaps films look most like dreams when they overwhelm us with the crude and un-negotiated presence of natural objects – as if the camera had just now extricated them from the womb of physical existence and as if the umbil-ical cord between image and actuality had not yet been severed . 19

Dark spaces are latent and call into question the integrity of the viewer. Walls become mysteriously two-sided and participate in

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the animated super-reality of the house. In The Frighteners (Peter Jackson, 1996) a dead mass murderer inhabits a house in such a way that he morphs into walls which distend around his face and body as he pursues his prey down stairs and through rooms. In Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965) walls become permeable and porous in response to the paranoid anxieties of a young woman.

In Rose Red (Craig R. Baxley, 2002) elements of the house extend, invert, and move in and out of existence, walls form and dissolve. The house, which was ‘born bad’, was never finished and ‘continues to grow’. The computer-generated imagery of Monster House (Gil Kenan, 2006) provides an apotheosis of the animated house, possessed and anthropomorphized by a dead and unfulfilled revenant. In the Korean ghost film Wishing Stairs (Yun Jae-Yeon, 2003) an additional step appears in stairs leading to a school dormitory to create a realm of enchantment and the release of ‘unspeakable evil’.

For many critics of the cinema in its early years, the darkness of the auditorium was linked with abject states of behaviour.

It was an insanitary, sexual and irrational place, imaginatively linked to those other dark places invoked by Foucault as harbingers of the unseen – places of exile, asylum and quarantine.

Anxieties about the state of receptive passivity generated fears of possession, as if the hyperactivity of the screened drama drew life and will from the audience, depriving them of volition and humanity. Barbara Stafford has linked the Protestant fears of the dangers of subjection to the ‘eruptive properties of constructed depth’,20 a legacy of magic, Catholicism and the baroque energies of the Counter Reformation, which were countered by

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Cromwell’s diatribes against ‘feigned images’ and by subsequent Puritan formalisms. The indulgent ‘ghostly’ nature of viewing is amusingly captured in Truly, Madly, Deeply (Anthony Minghella, 1990), in which returning ghosts passively watch videos as a form of ‘escapism’, suggesting that the afterlife resembles the passive receptivity of the viewer. The kinds of suspension that are necessary to ‘enter into’ a film are like a willing entry into other dimensions of distorted time and space, a cohabitation with spectral presences that are partly exorcized by narrative resolution.

the haunted screen

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) is a haunted house film – in which a man dies trying to reanimate a lost world in a spatial and narrative realm that features frames within frames and multiple unfamiliar perspectives. Perez has identified it as a narrative ‘of oedipal desire for the irrecoverable, the lost childhood, the bygone age, the haunting, receding mother’ . 21 The narrative of the film is itself a journey through the labyrinth of memory and desire haunted by a lost object. The opening sequence is said to be influenced by another haunted house film, Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), in which, after a brief shot of the moon partially obscured by clouds, the image of an abandoned house,

‘Manderlay’, appears, seen through closed iron gates. A woman’s voice tells of the dream she has had of Manderlay and claims that

‘supernatural power’ enables her to pass through the gate ‘like a spirit’, and the point of view moves along a mist-shrouded drive

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until the complex ‘Gothic’ house appears dark against a clouded sky. The dream voice fantasizes what we see – that there are lights at the windows – but then admits that the house is a desolate shell. There is a cut, to a view of a ruined house, and the sequence is revealed to be a recurring dream.

Citizen Kane opens on a ‘No Trespassing’ sign – reminiscent of the sign seen in the opening of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) – the initiating warning that the unwary explorer of haunted houses conventionally ignores. Kane’s cinematographer, Greg Toland, had previously worked on The Bat (Roland West, 1926), an ‘old dark house’ film which featured inventive camera work that followed the supernaturally agile intruder who is ‘the Bat’ of the title. In Citizen Kane, via conspicuously artificial mattes, the camera proceeds to track and fade through a series of fences to a castle on a hill, which is Xanadu, seen through an ornate wrought iron gate, accompanied by porten-tous ‘Gothic’ music. In a snow-filled scene, a hand clutches a globe containing an icy winter landscape. The globe falls and breaks and, in its shattered remains, the reflection of a white-clad nurse appears in an ornate Gothic doorway and a disembodied mouth utters the word ‘Rosebud’. Citizen Kane, as Jorge Luis Borges suggested, is labyrinthine in terms of plot and mise en scène. The search for the source of the haunting is repetitively complicated by a proliferation of spaces and souvenirs.

Kane loots the world of charismatic objects, importing a ghostly confusion of period styles and origins, as the American horror film did in the interwar years in its assimilation of themes and cinematography from European cinema. Welles

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Citizen Kane: Kane’s spectral home.

himself described Xanadu as a ‘womb’ and it shares with other haunted houses the uncanny attraction and repulsion that is described in the trespassing camera of the opening scene.

‘Rosebud’ is a name for the ‘ghost’ of an undead childhood that has haunted Kane and precipitated the spatial distortions of Xanadu and the repetitive proliferation of its contents.

Like Manderlay and the uninhabited Xanadu, the haunted house is a vulnerable place. The quest for the source of the haunting takes the form of an intrusive forensic investigation of the structure that, as so often in the narrative of exorcism, leads to destruction. The quest involves a growing intimacy with what lies behind the walls and beneath the floorboards. Ghosts are

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indifferent to material barriers; they can pass through solid objects and manifest themselves in defiance of dimensional logic. André Bazin explained the eerie, disjointed spatial con -
ventions of narrative cinema in his description of the sequencing of shots that show someone approaching and passing through a door. The negotiation of thresholds is anxiogenic, symbolizing the liminal border between life and death. Bachelard referred to the door as:

an entire cosmos of the half open . . . The door schema-tizes two strong possibilities, which sharply classify two types of daydream. At times it is closed, bolted, pad -
locked. At others, it is open, that is to say wide open.22

The shared walls, ceilings and floors of apartment blocks and the invisible but audible lives that are carried on beyond them can evoke some of the familiar moods of the vast castles and monasteries of the Gothic romance. In terms of scale and inscrutability, Benjamin recognized the kinship between the apartment block and the Gothic castle.23 But the subdivisions also speak of anxieties that attended living in overcrowded and segmented dwellings in the dramatically compressed cities of the nineteenth century, where tenants were forced into close proxim-ity with the lives of unfamiliar others. The film Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944), set in Victorian London, configures this anxiety of sharing in scenes where slight changes in the luminosity of the gas mantels betray the presence of an intruder in a sealed-up portion of a family house. In The 4th Floor (Josh Klausner, 1999),

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The 4th Floor: the haunted tenant finds her apartment mapped on the ceiling below.

set in contemporary New York, a young woman moves into an apartment building in which her aunt died a mysterious death. A neighbour on the floor below, who is intermittently seen moving on the huge, dark communal staircase just out of sight, begins to persecute her. The floor is shattered from below; maggots and mice are channelled into her room. The apartment is a realm of shadows and mysterious furtive movements on the vertical axis of the staircase. In despair the heroine breaks into the apartment below to confront her persecutor only to find that the arrangement of furniture in her own apartment is drawn as a plan on the ceiling of this one, laying bare her domestic arrangements and schematically rendering her private space. The ending reveals that this is not a supernatural event. Her life is being manipulated by a jealous and controlling boyfriend. It is a drama of the opacity and permeability of shared spaces that betrays a sense of the menacing adjacency of unseen and unknown forces.

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ghosts in early cinema

The ‘invention’ of cinema, usually taken to date from the earliest projection of film to an audience in 1895, coincided with two other explorations of dark places, both suggested to their origi-nators in dreams. The x-ray and the early formulation of psychoanalysis shared in new kinds of interiority. All three were uncanny practices that disturbed notions of surface. In the case of cinema, what was presented was a flat three-dimensionality which early films explored relentlessly by celebrating illusionistic recession and by exploiting the capacity of the camera to explore and travesty architectural spaces. x-rays were greeted as a popular entertainment as well as a significant medical tool and opened up another realm of exploration, crossing the threshold of the skin and rendering it as transparent as film. The photographic penetration of self and the projection of its image were metaphorically coherent with the discoveries of Freud’s revelation that the unconscious – previously known only in the form of dreams, uncanny occurrences and a belief in the supernatural –
was in fact a systematic form of meaning. All three fin de siècle discov eries exposed alienated versions of the self through meta -
phor ical hidden spaces that opened up to the everyday world but were not quite a part of it.

The idea of the ghostly has accompanied cinema from its earliest manifestations and even the most documentary access to the past with its pretension to objectivity has never eliminated the sense of a parallel lifelike existence. Like the telegraph, telephone and wireless, the cinema created ‘phantasms’ – replicas of

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human beings that had a life of their own. As a recording technology, cinema produced versions that could be infinitely reactivated. The ability to produce likenesses and to connect distant bodies over time and space inevitably carried an erotic charge.

Like mirrors and copulation the new technologies of reproduction let loose a realm of doubles. Early film brought together a number of familiar pleasures and curiosities, many of which related to disembodied points of view. The exploration of spaces combined with the enhanced realities of editing, animation and special effects to produce supernatural phenomena. Commercial screenings took place in varied venues and featured scenarios that were indebted to the stage and to the fantasy environments of the fairground. Gary Cross and John Walton, in their study of the architecture of seaside resorts, describe the ‘boundary experiences’ popular during the great boom in investment and inventiveness that proliferated in fairground rides in the 1860s and ’70s.24 The early twentieth-century theme parks with their combinations of fantasy architecture, lighting effects, vertiginous rides and simulated environments provided virtual experiences that proved to be dramatically popular. By 1906 there were over 400 amusement parks in the United States, some of them closely aligned with the cinematic themes of ghosts and the supernatural.

One spectacle at Coney Island, called ‘Night and Morning’, offered the illusion of being buried alive in a coffin, followed by a tour of hell. Another ‘End of the World’ show featured spirits rising from the grave. The ‘Ghost Ride’ was a popular feature, organized as a narrative expedition through a haunted house in darkness, interrupted by shocking apparitions.

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Ghost films were abundant in the early years of cinema, frequently indebted to popular stage plays. Georges Méliès’ Le Château Hanté (1897), itself a rendition of a popular play of 1890, features a number of scenes of transformation – a bat that turns into a devil, then conjures ghosts, skeletons and witches before being banished by a crucifix. The skeleton was a particularly popular motif – perhaps, at a time when phrenology carried credibility as a way of divining the inner life, the skull had a kind of priority as a metaphor for the spirit. In early films the raising of the dead was one element among a range of supernatural transformations and animated renditions of inanimate objects.

Méliès made seventy-eight films in 1896 alone, many of which featured supernatural phenomena. The Englishman George Albert Smith, a conjurer, who patented a double exposure system in 1897 specifically for simulating ghosts, had been an experienced magic lantern operator who brought to filmmaking his experience in the editing techniques developed to exploit two-and three-lensed lanterns. Smith knew Méliès, and also made a

‘haunted castle’ film in 1897. In the following year, his Photographing a Ghost (G. A. Smith, 1898) featured two men carrying a trunk labelled ‘Ghost’. The photographer opens the trunk; a tall white apparition emerges and glides around. Before a photograph can be taken, it disappears, then reappears and re-enters the trunk. The photographer sits on the lid and locks it, but the ghost is standing behind him and throws chairs around. The photographer gives up in despair.

In very few of the early films are ghosts genuinely dis -
turbing; they are usually the anarchic force that ‘explains’ the

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surprising animation of objects produced by superimpositions and stop frame, devices that continued to be used to similar effects in avant-garde films of the 1920s. Hans Richter’s Ghosts before Breakfast (1928) conjures flying objects, accompanied by reversals in time. Ghosts coexist with other kinds of revenants that feature in later horror films. In The Haunted Curiosity Shop (Walter R. Booth, 1901), a lost British film, ghosts appear from cupboards; an Egyptian mummy is unwrapped and morphs into a skeleton; three ‘gnomes’ merge into one, are pushed into a jar and coalesce into a giant swelling head. In a French film of 1903, a hotel guest hallucinates a phantom that moves between states of transparency and opacity and causes furniture and candles to float mysteriously. In the same year the indefatigable Méliès filmed The Spiritualist Photographer, in which dissolves on a white ground enabled him to translate a woman into drawn and photographed representations and back again – possibly a re -
creation of a David Devant’s famous stage magic trick. The film starts with an assistant placing two inscribed placards at the front of the set that explains the ‘dissolving effect’. Advertising the technical trickery indicates the non-supernatural mood of these early films, although the potential of two-dimensional images to become a living presence is a theme that recurs throughout the history of the haunted house film and has been extensively explored in Lynda Nead’s book The Haunted Gallery.25 Resurrection was a popular motif, made possible by substitution. In 1903 R. W. Paul’s An Extraordinary Accident a.k.a. An Extraordinary Cab Accident, a man falls beneath the wheels of a horse and carriage and appears to be mangled, but after his body is examined

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by a policeman, he grabs the hand of a female passer-by and runs away. In James Williamson’s An Interesting Story of 1904, a man is flattened by a steamroller and two passing bicyclists re-inflate him with pumps – the passage from flatness to three dimensions is a feature of the shape-shifting realm of reanimation.

Catalogues of films, many now lost, record numerous titles featuring ‘ghost’ and ‘haunted’. In 1895, before Méliès claimed to have accidentally invented the transformative effect of stopping the camera and substituting one image for another, the Edison Company filmed the Execution of Mary Queen of Scots by replacing a live actor with a decapitated dummy. In the English The Haunted Scene Painter (R. W. Paul, 1904), various props – a dragon, the moon and a ghost – come alive. In the German-made The Haunted Café of 1911 a man dreams of a scenario with vanishing waiters, a materializing girl and furniture moving mysteriously. In the same year, the Italian-made film The Phantom Knight shows a knight reincarnated from a tapestry to save a girl. The capacity of the camera to see in intensive detail allocates heightened significance to unconsidered and marginal objects and to items that exist on the boundaries of the screen. Because the camera sees more, it can imitate the mental state of imbalance that is described as ‘seeing things’.

Walter Benjamin wrote of the different realms of reality that are opened up by the camera: ‘An unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for space consciously explored . ’26 In early cinema, the background of realist films was viewed with particular awe –
the moving leaves on trees and ripples on water seemed to distil the mystery of movement in ways that the more familiar staged

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presence of performers failed to. Louis Aragon’s first essay on cinema invokes the oneiric power of objects: ‘a table with a revolver on it, a bottle, that on occasion becomes a weapon, a handkerchief that reveals a crime, a typewriter that’s the horizon of the desk . ’27 The presence of live actors presented a different register of the uncanny – images of living people fixed on film forever in all the ‘reality’ conferred by characteristic movements and gestures. Vicky Lebeau, in her study of childhood in cinema, recounts the story of a mother seeing, at an evening’s screening of a film shot earlier that day, her child, who had been killed in an accident.28 The presence of vulnerable and mortal people preserved in the midst of life and action conferred on film a powerful necromantic authority.

Some early film scenarios were dedicated to debunking the supernatural, carrying forward the familiar project of nineteenth-century stage magicians who advertised their spirit illusions as educational responses to spiritualism. In Der Graa Dame, a Danish film of 1909, a rich man’s nephew dresses up as a ghost to secure his inheritance, using trapdoors and secret passages to manifest himself. In Séance de Spiritisme (Gaumont, 1910), a man hiding under a table convinces visitors that a spirit is present. The Haunting of Silas P. Gould (Cecil Hepworth, 1915), a British film, features an heiress who sells her home to an American millionaire and then masquerades as a ghost to scare him away. Similarly in the us film The Ghost Breaker (Oscar Apfel and Cecil B. de Mille, 1914) fake ghosts are used in a plan to steal hidden treasure from an old Spanish castle, while in A Deal in Real Estate (1914) a mansion is said to be haunted in order to lower the sale price. This

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theme has continued to be popular, notably in the long-lasting animated cartoon Scooby Doo, and variations have included films like The Frighteners, in which ‘real’ ghosts are persuaded to haunt houses to order. Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic comments on the traditional role of ghosts as detectives and agents of justice.29 From classical times, spirits of the dead have returned to secure neglected rights, or to solve crimes and identify culprits. Pre-Romantic ghosts were highly motivated by tasks, to ensure that rituals were performed and obligations to ancestors observed. Ghosts enforced general moral standards and persecuted the guilty. Early cinema exploited this ancient tradition. In a number of early films, thieves hide in haunted castles or dwellings and are terrified into abandoning their loot by ghostly manifestations. Cecil Hepworth’s A Ghostly Affair (1914) involves a burglar who attempts to rob an old castle, but is driven away by paintings that come to life. A ghost attempts to reform a corrupt man in The Ghost of Self (Essanay, 1913). In The Haunted Bedroom (1913) the heroine’s brother dies before he can reveal the whereabouts of money he has won for her dowry – his ghost returns to guard and reveal the location; and in The Phantom Signal (George Lessey, 1913), a man who causes a train crash is haunted by its victims.

The supernatural played a particularly significant role in early German cinema. S. S. Prawer, whose influential book Caligari’s Children pioneered studies of the horror genre, suggests that the German influence on the iconography of Gothic was important in the early stages of the Romantic movement. He quotes Sir Walter Scott on the expectations aroused by German

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settings for a fiction, with ‘all their properties of black cowls, daggers, electrical machines, trap doors and dark lanterns’ . 30

After the Great War, German Expressionists drew heavily on this Gothic mood and iconography. Lotte Eisner suggests that the war had a powerful impact: ‘the ghosts which had haunted the German Romantics, revived like the shades of Hades after draughts of blood . ’31 The distinctiveness of German cinema, that was to have such an influence on the style of Hollywood, was partly an attempt at product differentiation in order to compete with the better established national cinemas of France and the us, but it has also been widely interpreted as an expression of troubled times.

Among the lost films of the silent period, the theme of the double has a particularly strong presence. The Haunted Man (William Duskes, 1909) is described as featuring ‘a man continuously haunted by a ghostly figure that imitates his actions and is visible to no one but himself ’. The theme of ‘the doppelgänger’

was explored by Otto Rank in The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study in 1925, which was itself inspired by the film The Student of Prague (Henrik Galeen, 1913) in which a student sells his reflection for money, is haunted by it, and ultimately destroys it

– thereby killing himself. The term ‘doppelgänger’ was first used in the 1796 at a time when new attitudes to irrational impulses began to suggest that destructive forces may be located internally rather than in some demonic realm. The shadows, mirrors, paintings and sculptures that characterized the setting of the haunted place originated in earlier ‘magic’ contexts but were given a distinctive impetus in German cinema. Rank suggested

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that the threat posed by the ‘double’, the ‘I. not I’, to the unity of character also implies a rupturing of the unities of time and space. In The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919) the disorienting world of shadows and dream is evident at the beginning of the film where ‘irising’ and framing deny any coherent reality. The set design establishes a subjective and incoherent realm and the audience are warned that ‘spirits surround us on every side’. In the strange angular world of Caligari, the characters are forced to adapt their movements to the eccentricities of the structure; they are possessed by the carnival architecture of fairground and asylum.

The ghost in early cinema frequently adopted a slapstick role, exploiting its freedom from the constraints of materiality and gravity. Ghosts could function as anarchic mischief-makers, terrorize towns, or take holidays from the graveyard. This carnival spirit of animation persists in sequences in Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1981) or in the ‘magical’ powers of science fiction

‘aliens’ in E.T. (Stephen Spielberg, 1982) or the anonymous miniature alien robotic benefactors in Batteries not Included (Matthew Robbins, 1987). Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd both featured in ‘ghost’ films. Lloyd’s Haunted Spooks (Hal Roach, 1920) involves an attempt to prevent an heiress claiming a remote country house by various contrived ‘ghosts’ and scenes of terrified black servants. In a number of these films, servants, racial ‘others’ and ‘lower class’ people are represented as particularly vulnerable to irrational superstition. What humour there is lies in the animated furniture, and interiors in which every person becomes a source and a victim of fear. Well-known direc-

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Haunted Spooks:

spooky moving
furniture.

tors such as D. W. Griffiths and Paul Leni made haunted house films. Griffiths’s One Exciting Night (1922) involves conspiracies and simulated hauntings and is said to have provided inspiration for Leni’s The Cat and the Canary (1927) and a number of other

‘old dark house’ movies. Abel Gance’s Au Secours (1924) involves a bet that a man cannot spend an hour in a haunted castle. In the 1940s the popularity of such films, which negotiated the fear of ghosts and the pleasures of simulation, included The Ghost Breakers (George Marshall, 1940) and one of a number of remakes of The Cat and the Canary (Elliot Nugent, 1939), in which Bob Hope exploits the role of coward with his fearful black assistant, both assisting a young woman who has inherited a haunted castle. The Ghost Catchers (Edward F. Cline, 1944) features a surreal mixture of ghosts and gangsters. There was also a series of films that have been termed ‘film blanc’, in which romantic relationships are negotiated by way of the afterlife. These consolatory films seemed to have had a particular popularity in

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wartime and its aftermath, just as spiritualism was linked to the aftermath of the American Civil War and enjoyed renewed popularity after the Great War.

haunting and the cinematic

Early cinema is now rendered surreal by the mechanical appearance of the image. The historian of technology Friedrich Kittler has suggested that this alone conveys an uncanny quality. Jean Goudal refers to the synthetic black-and-white images and their jerky movements as ‘the relatives of the people who haunt our dreams’.32 Monochrome has come to stand for memory and nostalgia, as if the leeching out of colour produces the essence of an authentic past. The ghosts of many recent films adopt similar pixillated or disjointed motion. In the television series A Town Called Eureka (Andrew Cosby and Jaime Paglia, 2006) one manifestation is rendered ‘ghostly’ because its vacillation in time causes it to pulse in and out of temporal focus. In Deja Vu (Tony Scott, 2006) the death of the hero is immediately followed by his reincarnation in another timeline. In Pulse the movement of spirits flickers and jumps like a degraded digital image. Haunting implies an existence in another register – a part life that exists simultaneously in the present and some kind of past or parallel existence. The media image shares a similar ambivalence – of being there but referring to ‘elsewheres’ of production and mediation. In some cases the ‘ghost’ is the point of view. The heroine of The Return (Asif Kapadia, 2006), possessed by the spirit of a murdered woman, intermittently sees the last moments of her

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life as a subjective flashback. The return to the scene of the crime and to a horrific experience in her own past leads her to a confrontation with her alter ego in the mirror of a hotel bedroom, in which the reflection shows the faces of the two women in a shocking and eerie superimposition.

Ghosts’ insubstantial traces can be rendered through steam or exhalations or other atmospheric evidence of an invisible presence. The haunting is usually narratively incremental and various devices delay any certainty about the objectivity or subjectivity of the experience. Tzvetan Todorov’s category of

‘hesitation’ is useful for thinking about this ambivalence between states of mind and environmental threat.33 It suggests the absence of conclusive evidence for supernatural causes. The crisis of objectivity is often registered by the incoherence of the spaces of haunting.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Scott Derrickson, 2005) involves a young girl who is possessed by demons and dies as a result of an ‘exorcism gone bad’. The priest is put on trial and a young female lawyer is required to defend him and, in the process, decide whether there are supernatural elements involved. The film opens on a wintry country scene and moves to a high angled shot of an isolated neglected house in a bleak landscape. At one point the familiar Gothic scenario of the isolated farmhouse seems to be invading the modern domestic spaces of the lawyer’s apartment. Her clocks stop at three a.m. to a disquieting soundtrack of muted electronic screeching noises; she enters the kitchen in which the lights fail to work, and as she pours a glass of water she hears a creaking sound and glimpses a light spilling

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The Exorcism of Emily Rose: corridor.

from an opening door. It is not made clear if these phenomena are related to the dramatic scenes of possession or whether they are subjectively derived and comparable to the unease that the film is generating in members of the audience, but clearly there is a danger of the Gothic horrors of the demonically infested farmhouse taking familiar and uncanny forms in a parallel domestic space.

Laura Mulvey comments on the fundamental mystery of cinema as a co-presence of movement and stillness. Movement is a complex property in film, deriving from combinations of the point of view, the editing and the performance. In the haunted house film movement is of particular significance. Ghosts have become detached from their own narratives and disruptively penetrate the present. They are also caught in a repetition that is anathema to the drives of conventional narrative. In Panic Room (David Fincher, 2002) computer-generated technology provides an extraordinary version of subjective mobility. The assault on

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the house from outside is registered by a spectral point of view that travels through walls and floors and with uncanny agility through the spaces of the house. In one dramatic zoom, it moves from recording an attempted entry at the back of the house to another at the front in one long fluid motion that impossibly travels through the handle of a coffee machine and ends by entering a keyhole to register the insertion of a key from outside.

From the earliest days of cinema critics commented on the new medium’s surreal and ghostly nature. One critic writing in 1928 noted: ‘characters and objects appear to us through an unreal mist in a ghostly impalpability.’ In his book The Material Ghost, Perez emphasizes the experience of viewing as ‘entering into a realm of fragments’ and invokes the term ‘ghostly’ to describe the image as shimmeringly present yet remote. The idea of film as simultaneously past and present – as an image that Panic Room: zoom to
keyhole; zoom across
room.

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belongs both to the camera and the projector – locates it as a revenant. Ghostliness also pervades the structure of the film.

Editing enables the viewer to enter into and explore plausible spaces by erasing the presence of the camera that stands in for the point of view. The place from which we look is absent and apparently invisible to the performers in the film. The remarkable potential of cinema for reactivating the past is itself a necromantic capacity. In the scenarios of the haunted house, characters from the past can possess their counterparts in the present. The Fog (Rupert Wainwright, 2005), The Haunted Mansion (Rob Minkoff, 2003) and The Haunted Palace (William Castle, 1963) all feature cases of possession that produce literal

‘re-enactments’ of past events, rehearsals of the ‘remaking’ that characterizes cinema.

The metaphor of ‘haunting’ has been deployed to explain the ways in which films can be possessed by the milieu in which they are produced. Filmmaking continues to bear some of the necromantic and hyperbolic associations of centuries of showmanship, but it is also ‘superstructural’ – a sensitive barometer of mood and cultural dispositions. Lotte Eisner’s book The Haunted Screen makes the case for Weimar cinema as a collective text that registers the ideological preoccupations of the time. Doubles, dark shadows and ‘insane geniuses’ such as Mabuse, Caligari and Nosferatu are taken to be indicative of a national psychosis, evident in the themes and style of the films and in the indistinct borderline between dreaming and waking that they feature. The use of shadows is seen as metaphoric in the way the light irradiates and dematerializes its objects.

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Siegfried Kracauer’s psychological history of German films in the same period finds them reflective of ‘deep layers of collective mentality’ and ‘hidden mental processes’; he uses the term

‘haunted’ to describe persistent recurrent themes. Paul Mayersberg’s 1967 book Hollywood the Haunted House explores this metaphor in relation to a timely contempt for the artificiality of the ‘dream factory’. He suggests that Los Angeles resembles a film set, a place of disoriented ‘sun tanned ghosts of the future’

seeking to regain the reality they left behind. His claim that it is the ghost of Europe that haunts Hollywood is particularly relevant in relation to horror films that often attribute the cause of haunting to imported objects or entities.

If the ghostly capacity to cross through the impermeable boundary walls signifies our wish to cross through the impermeable boundary of death, the wall becomes an icon of the symbolic principle of order, of Law. Mervin Glasser suggests that the wall is the unconscious symbol of the father. The third term, the paternal principle, a position outside the binary of mother and child, is what gives boundary and delimitation to the amorphous maternal fantasies of space and energies, or states of becoming.

To penetrate an impermeable wall is to satisfy the unconscious fantasy of patricide, which is the Oedipal predicament that, according to psychoanalysis, underwrites all culture. The screen, which is a support for the projection of images, is also an ectoplasmic medium that invites the audience to ‘pass through’. What fascinates in the cinema of haunted house movies is not so much the fulfilment of a patricidal unconscious but the infinite variety of ways in which this fantasy is played out. To pass through an

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impermeable boundary of death, reality or bricks and mortar is to enter the transitional space of illusion, the flickering lights and shadows of the cinema screen and the intramural spaces of ghostliness. Playing with the idea of a dissolving plane is the basis of illusion, a term derived etymologically from the Latin ‘ludere’, to play. Its compulsive attraction indicates that the human hunger for culture is, like Kane’s Rosebud, the ambiguous gift/curse of an undead and undying childhood.

4 unreal estate

In an essay in which he relates land speculation to troubled spaces Fredric Jameson suggests that ‘the ghost story is indeed the architectural genre par excellence.’1 He explores this idea in relation to a new ‘extreme isometric space’ which he sees endlessly metamorphosing, enjoying the same semi-autonomy as cyberspace. Jameson sees urban renewal as a determined exorcism, ‘sanitising the ancient corridors and bedrooms to which alone a ghost might cling’.2 This theme of fading into air has been widely deployed in writings on urbanism that discount themes of dispossession, illegitimate ownership, the sudden withdrawal of work, money and energy, the speculative housing of spreading suburbia and the ‘see through buildings’ of the inner city characterized by high levels of vacancy and redundancy. Martin Pawley has pondered the sinister nature of what he calls ‘stealth architecture’– buildings whose facades suggest continuities with the past, whilst their high tech interiors are dedicated to the flows of money and information.3 Fred Davey has observed that ‘When money operates in cyberspace . . . entire communities and whole countries have been sucked out, like a horror movie corpse.’4

Increasingly urban environments are marked by surveillance, sight lines and security measures. The ‘condition’ that

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many writers on architecture and urbanism describe is one of increasingly affectless virtualization and mediation. The stark choice proposed by W. J. Mitchell in one description of the plight of late twentieth-century urbanism suggests two kinds of spectralization – the ‘gated community’, in which people with draw from the public realm into defended strongholds, and ‘the laptop in the piazza’, which proposes a public presence simultaneously dispersed in a realm of information flows and global presence.5

A sense of the haunted nature of contemporary reality may have become acute as a result of new kinds of fixity accompanied by fantasies of loss, and new aspirations that bring with them disruptive intrusions into unfamiliar places. This chapter looks at intrusions brought about by social mobility, by exploring the remote and exotic, or simply by losing one’s way in the marginal places of the world, or new labyrinths of bandwidth, information flow, and genetic engineering. Haunting serves in these cases to represent social conflicts in the form of supernatural agencies – the films demonstrate the intrusive nature of buying or straying into an unknown way of life. Marx wrote about the spectral nature of renting in the house of a stranger as a characteristic of the modern condition. The haunted subjects of these films are effectively intruding, uneasy tenants, not quite at home until they have done the necessary work of investigation, recognition and appeasement, in the process making identifications with the imaginary world of children,6 the intimate knowledge of maintenance personnel, or the ghost itself. In extremis it is necessary to carry out the revolutionary task of destroying the house in order to escape possession by it.

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The house as ‘real estate’ is the place where the agent and the family meet before exploring the reality of the new home. It is a place of determinable dimensions and functioning services. The relationship between foreground and distance, the ‘setting’ that is expressed in the characteristic ‘establishing shot’ in the film, is lost as soon as the interior of the house begins to be explored. Walter Benjamin noted this in a telling perception: ‘once we begin to find our way about, the earliest picture can never be restored.’7 The house will still contain traces of the lives of previous inhabitants. The new family bring their own ghosts that are capable of activating the property in unforeseen ways. Anne Troutman suggests what can go wrong: ‘Disturbing dreams and repressed fears transform surface into cavity, large into minute, the miniature into the overwhelming. These curious places become the refuge of the half-realized.’8

Anxieties about moving between spaces are designed into the conventional house as part of the engineering of privacy.

Hermann Muthesius, the codifier of English architecture, in his fin de siècle study of the intensely domestic turn of the late nineteenth century, particularly admired the hinging of doors: the person entering shall not be able to take in the whole room at a glance as he opens the first crack of the door but must walk round it to enter the room by which time the person seated in the room will have been able to prepare himself suitably for his entry. The striking feature about the opening of the doors . . . is that the person entering

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seems at first to be walking into a wall and sees nothing inside the room until he opens the door wide.9

This technical detail tellingly captures a relationship between privacy and the potential for shock and describes precisely the fusing of the familiar and surreal. The anticipatory opening of the door is a key episode in most haunted house films. The intrusion into an unfamiliar place of disputed ownership is a moment of truth, usually underscored by climactic music and further emphasized by the narrow field of vision offered by the camera and the viewer’s lack of control over what can be seen.

The individuals or families who experience these spirits from the past are often in tenuous emotional or financial situations and although the nature of the haunting is often very physically present there is also a level of ambivalence, a suspicion of projection and paranoia. There is always a question of how much the intruder into the new milieu brings the haunting with them. In The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944), a brother and sister, on a holiday from London to the ‘haunted shores’ of Devon, where the local people are ‘strangely aware’ of ghosts, discover the deserted and isolated ‘Cliff House’ overlooking the sea. The house reminds them of their childhood home – it is a place that communicates to them a sense of return. The house is melodramatically haunted by the ghost of a lonely and abused Spanish gypsy, the mother of a girl they befriend. This relationship of strangeness to familiarity is a common theme in the first encounter with the house; the element of repetition is linked by Freud to the uncanny, and is a reprise of the sense of helplessness that is often experienced in dreams.

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The Uninvited: the invitation to a familiar house.

Susceptibility to haunting is usually indicated or promoted by a withdrawal from society; it comes at the point of an assertion of individuality and a slackening of social and political relations that render the subjects more available to risk and anxiety. In the case of The Uninvited the brother and sister decide to give up their jobs. As in many other haunted house films there is a scene of packing and unpacking. This very characteristic moment is a promise of new beginnings, but also pre figures tensions between old possessions and new contexts. The room, filled with cardboard boxes or draped with dustsheets, is poised at a vulnerable point of transit and porosity, when the narratives

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The Shining: the hotel.

of the new inhabitants are weakened and receptive and the narratives of the new home are at their most influential.

The family in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) undertake to spend the winter as caretakers in a remote hotel –
it represents a refuge from a troubled present and a place where Jack, the father, hopes to rediscover himself. The audience are made aware that the ‘Overlook Hotel’ has a disturbing past –
the Donner party resorted to cannibalism nearby; there were Indian massacres; and, as they approach, there is a radio report of a missing woman. The ‘steadicam’ camera, an innovation at the time of the film’s making, was used to produce an uncanny

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stillness in the point of view that observes the car from high above, following the contours of a deserted land scape. As they are shown around the huge complex building, Wendy, the mother, a self-confessed ‘ghost story and horror film addict’, compares the hotel to a ‘maze’ and a ‘ghost ship’. Jack says that he feels already familiar with the place, that he knows what is around each corner. The cinematography provides an unsettling perspective within the building; the camera moves in unfamiliar and unsettling ways, often far distant from the action, as if it were a watching presence. Jack is claimed by the building –
he is drawn into conversation with dead characters and falls under their influence. Although his wife and child both see visions of The Shining: Jack fades into the hotel.

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past events erupting into the present, there is an element of uncertainty about the objectivity of the haunting.

The point of view in The Shining is crucial to the sense of a place already inhabited. In one scene Jack looks at a model of the hedge maze that has been constructed in front of the hotel.

His point of view zooms in to reveal that he is looking at the two tiny figures of Wendy and his son, who we see from an objective point of view arriving at the centre of the ‘real’ maze. The maze is a metaphor for all haunted places – involving a quest for what lies at its heart, and a need to negotiate its complexity and learn how to return. The establishing shot that later proves to be a human overlooking a model plays significant roles in films as The Shining: the maze model.

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varied as Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988), White Noise (Geoffrey Sax, 2005), Pacific Heights (John Schlesinger, 1990) and Rose Red (Craig. R. Baxley, 2002). In each case the ghostly is immanent in what Susan Stewart has described as the ‘frozen time’ of the miniature: a world clearly limited in space but stilled and thereby both particularized and generalized in time.10 The model brings with it the sensitivities of childhood and the realm of toys to the hopes and fears associated with the possibility of animation. This sense of the magical properties of the model and the ‘set’, and of characters that are mobile between fictional and real worlds, is played out in films such as The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985), Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998) and The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) and even in the strangely repetitive and ghostly scenario of Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993), in which characters are transported into fictions, or fictions are mobilized as haunting presences in alternative realities.

The notion of the ‘demonic’ is never far away in ‘ghostly’

fictions. The Protestant response to the Catholic category of Purgatory and the scope that it gave for a space between life and death was to assert that all spirits were demonic in origin and that they were manifested by conjuring and manipulation. Guilt about surviving the dead is transformed into a suspicion of malevolence on their part. The supernatural beings are not all ghosts, but they are all examples of a separation of soul and body – soul without body, or body without soul. In many cases the threat they pose is as much physical assault as the capacity to possess. For the viewer, the threat is always a visual confrontation and the anticipation of what form it will take.

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In White Noise electronic communication with the dead provides a channel for demonic intrusions into the real world.

Anthropologists have suggested that magic is often encountered when there is a rupture in normality or a gap occurs in understanding. Haunting occurs at times of crisis, and particularly in relation to states of transition. The theme is frequently closely associated with the responsibility of parenting and managing the child’s transition between reality and fantasy. Many of the scenarios take place in children’s rooms that are already ‘haunted’ by various kinds of ‘familiar’ revenant dinosaurs, spirit aliens and posters from other films. A characteristic of horror, and part of the Gothic tradition, is the generic awareness of the ‘victims’, who are simultaneously haunted by what John Ellis has called the

‘memorial metatext’ – the rich iconographies and scenographies of horror fictions.

Hide and Seek (John Polson, 2005) plays on the theme of the imaginary friend. A number of hauntings are initially signalled by the acutely imaginative sensitivity of children, such as the eight-year-old boy in The Messengers (Danny and Oxide Pang, 2006), who, deprived of speech by a traumatic accident, is the first to register the presence of ‘nightmarish apparitions’ in an isolated farmhouse. Hide and Seek opens with a mother playing a game of hide and seek with her daughter. The mother is found dead after a brief disagreement with her psychologist husband, David, who then takes the child, nine-year-old Emily, to a remote country house to ‘start over’. Emily grows withdrawn and reports games with a mysterious unseen friend called ‘Charlie’, whom she claims hates her father. ‘Charlie’ appears to be a

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The Messengers: a child’s point of view reveals ghosts.

presence haunting the house and its environs and is implicated in the deaths of several people. The father is eventually forced to realize that the ‘haunted’ anomalies in time and space that he is has been experiencing – including waking at night to find re -
stagings of his wife’s death that seem to implicate him – can be explained only by his own agency in the original murder and subsequent murders committed in the house. The ‘doubling’ of David is enacted in a house that mirrors his own duplicity. It has closets with doors that lead to an eerie basement and there are slight displacements: doors left mysteriously open, keys that lock and unlock without apparent human agency, knives out of place and disruptions in time. The torn photographs of David and his family show him literally defaced. All of these unhomely incidents are signs of his own unconscious manipulation of identity and time. The ‘haunting’ comes from within – the imaginary friend is

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a transposed aspect of the haunted nature of self. The theme of

‘hide and seek’ is a metaphor for the labyrinthine quest that lies at the heart of all haunted house films in which the search for the hidden identity of what is haunting is accompanied by a desire to hide from the consequences of the confrontation. The labyrinth exceeds the frame of what is visible, spatially and temporally; it is characterized by hidden beginnings and endings. The mobility of the point of view, however, enables the viewer to be on both sides of the confrontation, to be the ghost and the haunted.

The haunting in Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1980) is the result of real estate speculation that has caused a new housing development to be knowingly built on ‘Indian burial grounds’. The house of the Freeling family is far removed from the Gothic archetype. It is merely the oldest house on a new estate. The first indica-tion of the permeability of this middle-class household is the intrusion of signals from a televison remote control from the next house, the death of a family pet and the excavation of a swimming pool. These commonplace eruptions and the psychic powers of the young daughter trigger an intrusion from the ‘other side’, through the television, and then from the depths of a closet. The ghosts are playful and menacing, manifesting themselves initially in the manipulation of toys and household objects, in ways that reprise traditional ‘fairground rides’. The house is finally imploded and apparently claimed by the ghostly realm in a spectacular scene of carefully rigged destruction. The Academy Award-nominated soundtrack was influential, combining a calm, gentle childlike theme with quasi-religious choruses. Sound in haunted house films often combines repetition with complex aural mixtures.

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Haunted places are represented in film as ambiguous, first encountered as relatively simple establishing shots, and then explored as fragmentary, dispersed and incoherent components.

One of the implications of haunting is the problematization of spatial relations. Spaces become subjective and incoherent. The anxiety produced by the awareness of off-screen space is distinctively related to this exploration of a confined and largely familiar topology. The perception of something supernatural is usually partial, and often challenged by others within the narrative in ways that call into doubt the reality of the experience and, in some cases, the sanity of the observer. Houses are characteristically first encountered in the full daylight of rational decision-making. The loss of distinctness brought on by night and darkness, and in filmic terms the proliferation of shadows and unexpected effects of light, is profoundly architectural in its effects, amplified by the ambivalent nature of domestic architecture as public and private. Roger Callois, in an essay on mimicry and psychasthenia (a state of mind marked by obsessions and phobias), emphasizes the powerful effects of darkness, quoting Eugène Minkowski on the breaking down of distinctions between inside and outside. He comments on the permeability of the ego in darkness and suggests that ‘this assimilation to space is neces-sarily accompanied by a decline in the feeling of personality and life.’11 The struggle with ghosts often takes the form of a struggle over spatial awareness.

The transmission of property between generations is a contentious legal and emotional issue that figures prominently in melodramatic fictions. The haunted house is a fiction that deals

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specifically with what it means to inherit or to intrude on an inheritance. Houses condense meanings from previous gener -
ations. Stewart Brand has suggested that buildings can only be fully understood in terms of their adaptation to historical change: Buildings loom over us and persist beyond us. They have the perfect memory of materiality. When we deal with buildings, we deal with decisions taken long ago for remote reasons. We argue with anonymous predecessors and lose . 12

The ways in which restless unresolved problems live on and manifest themselves is explored through the medium of the house. The property market and the unwise intrusion of tourists create situations in which ignorance or amnesia is often punished, in which the collective mirror of the built environment reflects back distorted versions of the new inhabitants. The haunted house is caught in a historical loop of repetition and irresolution but it also enables the past to comment on the present. Perhaps this is why the theme of haunting was so productively reactivated in a period of property development and social mobility. A recurring theme is the move from town to country, often to avoid the stress of urban life and to restore a divided and harassed self, or to recreate family unity.

The theme of ‘modern subjects’ – contemporary families in realistic milieux brought into the realm of less mobile, more historical real estate – is a popular one in contemporary cinema.

The threat constituted in the haunted house is often related to

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the ‘small enclosed group where movement in and out is restricted’, described by Mary Douglas as a setting for superstitious and magical myth-making and ritual.13 Haunted house films juxtapose the positive enthusiasms for a moderated frontier experience, of making a family in a new, more detached place, with anxieties relating to the premodern and a sinister world of limited mobility and genetic inbreeding. The motivation to move is often a specific, dramatized confrontation with stress and urban adversity. The focus of anxiety in most haunted house films is the problem of making and completing a family and locating it successfully in a context and a way of life. Financial problems, status anxieties, cultural misunderstandings and fears about communication are all prominent at the outset and pushed into crisis by the need to confront forces that occupy what should have been a neutral and safe place. Fundamental questions about possession, both in its mundane and supernatural senses, are put into play.

The haunted house fiction is closely related to the rise of the middle classes and speaks of their apprehensions about

‘moving in’ to ‘dream houses’. It is possible to see all of these contemporary haunted house films as in some way about the hyper-valuation of home, the increasing social mobility and fragmentation of families at the turn of the twenty-first century and the ambivalence of a desire for community. The terrors of ‘locality’ have been explored in the British comedy television series The League of Gentlemen (Steve Bendelack, 1999), drawing its inspiration from a tradition of rural horror films, particularly The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973). In the mythical town of

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‘Royston Vasey’ ‘local’ is an essential attribute to the dangerously eccentric indigenes and a lethal category of exclusion to all others. The ambiguous motto of this frightening place is ‘You Will Never Leave’.

The House Next Door (Joey Travolta, 2002) is the film of a popular book with the strapline: It is for sale. Pray nobody buys it.

Information on the book and film appear in Google among studies of the effects of subsidized housing on property values.

The opening sequence of the film makes the links between supernatural haunting and anxieties about real estate values as the young couple who are established on the margins of a wealthy aspirational community find the building lot next door occupied by a newly constructed, ‘to die for’ ideal home. The immaculately modern house proves to be fatal to a succession of tenants by amplifying their existing weaknesses and anxieties. The film implies that the evil that inhabits the structure has been incorpor -
ated into its design by a demonic architect who finally has to be destroyed along with the house. The film ends with another wealthy young couple deciding to build a house according the same design. As in many contemporary films there is an explicit awareness among the characters of the conventions of horror. At one point they query whether the house ‘has been built on an Indian burial ground’. The reaction of the neighbours, who want to suppress the history of the house to maintain real estate values, demonstrates a generic awareness of the more mundane, yet sinister, fears that haunt property owners.

Another film that plays on these fears, Pacific Heights, features a young couple, Patty and Drake, who decide to borrow

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heavily in order to buy and renovate an ornate 1880s house. To meet the repayments they are forced to sublet, exposing their lives to the demonic tenant Carter Hayes, who progressively dismantles his apartment and victimizes his landlords in an attempt to dispossess them. Although ostensibly about white-collar crime, identity theft and tenancy rights, the film is also about the ‘nightmare’ of dispossession, downward mobility and invaded privacy. The tenant reverses the process of restoration, locking himself in with a succession of low-life accomplices, stripping the apartment back to a primitive condition, infesting the house with cockroaches and forcing the young professional couple to lower their status in pursuit of high risk loans. The isolated house is seen at night, with a single light in the ground-floor apartment occupied by the tenant; the camera zooms to the white blinds, passes through and moves with unsettling mobility to view the damaged walls of the apartment. In other scenes the camera view describes the disorientation of this secular haunting. Hayes’s backstory of secrecy and trauma is dramatized in a dream of Drake’s which immediately precedes Patty’s stress-related miscarriage. When the young couple return from hospital after treatment for the miscarriage, they are viewed through a distorting, ‘fisheye’ door lens and, when they discover the legal costs and complexities of eviction, the camera giddily circles round them in the cavernous foyer of the court building. Although essentially a thriller, the film deploys the visual style and themes of a ghost film in order to describe the plight of houseowners caught in a ‘nightmare scenario’. Like Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), there is a powerful

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engagement with menacing presences on the other side of shared walls: Pacific Heights integrates the demonic and economic aspects of possession.

Haunted house films find ways of dramatizing the house as a threateningly porous place. In Hider in the House (Matthew Patrick, 1989) a psychopath constructs a living space within the fabric of the house to spy on members of the family. One scene shows him overlooking a model of the house and manipulating tiny figures to demonstrate his architectural understanding of a structure whose geometry he has altered. In Panic Room (David Fincher, 2002) the large brownstone house is comprehensively explored and dismantled to reveal hiding places and exploit the services buried in the walls in order to dislodge the family from the room where treasure is buried. In Arachnophobia (Frank Marshall, 1990) the father of a young family moves them to the country to occupy an attractive detached house in a small village and take on the role of local doctor. The family’s financial problems are compounded by an invasion of poisonous spiders accidentally imported from the South American rainforest. As in the ghost story ‘Inexplicable’ that was cited by Freud as an example of the ‘uncanny’, the most mundane house is vulnerable to menacing presences from the most ‘primitive’ places. A bird starts the infestation by dropping a spider in the grounds of the house and the camera shares its soaring viewpoint in a way that suggests the arbitrary vulnerability of the family, which has already been established in a social dimension by the weakening of their financial situation when the previous village doctor decides not to retire.

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Cold Creek Manor (Mike Figgis, 2003) conveys a sense of the social hauntedness of family homes. The near lethal stresses of family life, juggling jobs, delivering children to school and suspicions of infidelity are established in the opening sequence.

The embattled mother and father find a cheap repossessed manor house near a remote country town. As they leave the city the camera observes their car from a supernaturally mobile and lofty point of view. The soundtrack eavesdrops on their conversation about the prospect of living in the country. The huge house is defended by a locked gate and a vigilant and suspicious policeman. It is marked by signs of negligence and decay and is still full of the possessions of the previous owners, including papers, clothes and intimate photographs that hint at worrying sexual practices. The clothes present particular problems as objects that mediate between absent bodies and the ‘inorganic world’. Most challenging are the lugubrious iron tools used for killing animals – they belong to a disturbing world of everyday cruelty that has become alien and remote to city dwellers and condense the animistic qualities of anthropological exhibits.

The family are forced to make decisions about what to discard and what to assimilate into their new lives. The realization of the extent to which previous lives and events have marked their new home is mediated by the menacing presence of a young male member of the family who owned it previously. There are no ‘real ghosts’ in the film, although the persistence of the past and its resistance to change begins to assume supernatural dimensions. The house is spatially complex, the lives of the previous owners are recorded in the furnishings and decor and

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Cold Creek Manor: prospective tenants intrude on the old house.

the family have to defend themselves against a comprehensive physical assault rendered more threatening by the intimate knowledge of the house possessed by the previous owner.

These forms of haunting are close to conventional anxieties about crime, pollution and class antagonism and although they do not feature supernatural agencies, they engage with levels of paranoia and victimization that hint at the presence of forces of unnatural malevolence and borrow extensively from a familiar cinematic repertoire of ‘haunting’. In The Carpenter (David Wellington, 1987) Alice, a young woman who has suf -
fered a nervous breakdown, moves with her husband to a new house that she first encounters in a montage of scenes of workmen engaged in renovation. While her husband is preoccupied with an extramarital affair, she busies herself in a lonely, dreamlike process of ‘homemaking’. She wakes at night to hear sawing and hammering and finds a carpenter in the cellar ‘just

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getting the work done’. As in other films that feature the work of home repair and maintenance there is an uneasy awareness of the dangerous places of work in progress, and the potential for tools to be wielded as weapons. A visiting sheriff reveals that the house was built by a man whose obsession with finishing it led him to murder a succession of agents sent to repossess items from his unfinished home. As Alice becomes more alienated from her husband she begins to work on the house late at night and starts a flirtatious relationship with the gallant and murderous ghost, who helps her kill her husband’s mistress, and then her husband, with an array of tools. As his violence is turned against her she realizes that he can only be defeated by burning the house. The unfinished house is haunted by the aspirations of a previous owner and the fragile relationship of its new owners cannot subdue the malevolent vitality of its history.

As Barbara Creed has suggested in her study of the

‘monstrous feminine’, the margins of the house, of the city and of the family are the places where disturbance occurs and threatens to spread.14 In houses there are flows of energy and fluids that sustain the structure but also threaten to overwhelm it. Disturbances in the fields of energy – flickering of lights, the sudden stopping of clocks and leakage of water – are common signs of repressed memories or denied forces seeking to claim authority.

In Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002/Walter Salles, 2005), a ghostly fluid seeps downwards from its source in a container on the roof that conceals the body of a dead child – a graphic visual illustration of Henri Lefebvre’s observation that the house is

‘permeated from every direction by streams of energy’ .

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Katherine Shonfield explores the theme of porosity in terms of Mary Douglas’s categorization of kinds of ‘matter out of place’ and hybridity.15 She draws attention to the structural demystification of Modernism and its insistence on conformity of inside and outside elements, describing an example of the contradiction of this – a brutalist wall inside a brick-built structure – as ‘an exceptionally narrow haunted house’. In her analysis of Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965) she explores the idea of the

‘compromised edge’ and the blurring of architectural boundaries in relation to the emotional state of the heroine: In the course of the film, the surfaces of the flat start to crack, and can no longer hold back the outside. At its climax the walls begin literally to smear the edge between Deneuve and themselves.

Steve Pile has extended the analogy between the disruption of surfaces and structures to the fabric of the cities, where the out of joint persistence of anachronisms and ruins provide openings through which testimonies to pain and injustice can seize the imagination.16

Like skin, walls are boundaries that help to constitute an inside and an identity. Shonfield makes the point that the penetration of sound into an environment is a violation of this carefully constituted architectural ‘self ’. Reyner Banham, the architectural critic, was dismissive of purist Modernism because of the lack of interest in what went on ‘behind the walls’, regarding this formalist concern with planes and screens as an evasion

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Dark Water: hands
reach out of the
bathwater; surveil-
lance image of a
mother in a lift with
the child ghost.

of the rightful concerns of architecture.17 This idea of liberating the services was another form of Modernist exorcism, leading to conspicuous monuments of ‘high tech’ exposure of the conduits for power and circulation, and even to an architecture that was simply the product of invisible currents of air and energy.

The film Thir13en Ghosts (Steve Beck, 2001) explores the possibility of a transparent, ultra-modern haunted house that is really an occult machine. Made by Castle Films, it opens with a trademark silhouetted Gothic castle, a homage to William Castle, the producer of many low budget horror films. Thir13en Ghosts is a remake of a comedy horror film made in 1960, which required

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Thir13en Ghosts: approaching the high-tech haunted house.

the audience to wear 3d spectacles. The characters in the film use similar devices in order to ‘see’ the ghosts. The spectacles simulate the psychic sensitivity that enables one of them to assist in a project of trapping ghosts in order to power the constantly recalibrating walls and spaces with their psychic energy. The opening sequence that locates the source of haunting in an old car junkyard – an extravagant scene of industrial Gothic – is characteristically followed by an idyllic, sunlit scene of a family at play. Following a tragedy resulting in the death of the mother, the family inherit a house from an uncle, a construction of constantly shifting walls and openings that releases and imprisons ghosts and the family who are exploring it. The glass walls required complex filming arrangements to conceal the cameras and lighting and are rendered alternately transparent and opaque. As in more conventional Gothic settings, the walls

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are complexly textured and overwritten, in this case with graffiti of Latin spells and prohibitions. The film is essentially a version of the ‘ghost ride’, featuring chases, escapes and confronta -
tions with ‘ghosts’ that are intermittently visible and physically aggressive. The effects conjure a complex reality from layers of superimposed screens, and create a virtual three-dimensional diagram of the labyrinthine spaces of more conventional haunted structures. Thir13en Ghosts renders the anxieties over thresholds, appearances and disappearances almost formulaic and fulfils the generic destiny of highly charged magical places by self destructing.

Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) provides a further example of a building charged with demonic supernat -
ural force. The brooding intensity of the ‘Dakota’ apartment building in New York is established in the opening shots that scan the Gothic parapets. Walter Benjamin remarked on the ‘filigree of chimneys’ as a ‘Fata Morgana of the interior’18 and, as in other haunted house films where the house is more conventionally isolated, the jagged roofscape against the sky portends an experience of painful encounter. Repulsion, Polanski’s previous film, featured variants on the themes of memory and projection and disordered interiors that are developed here. The pregnant Rosemary and her actor husband move into a gloomy apartment whose previous owner, an old woman, recently died. Rosemary explores the building and is troubled by surreal demonic dreams; she suspects she is being drugged and seeks help from a mentor who tries to tell her about the history of the place, but is mysteriously killed. The interactivity of Rosemary’s anxieties about

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pregnancy, her suspicions of her husband and neighbours and the menacing and incoherent boundaries of the apartment lead her to question her own sanity. Sharon Marcus made a timely reading of the 1968 film which related current debates about abortion and insanity, new foetal visualization technologies and the integrity of the unborn child to the conventions of the haunted house film.19 Polanski established a protocol of viewing positions and edits that reinforce this compound ‘haunting’ and provides a soundtrack described by one critic as ‘horror jazz’

overlaid by a childlike chanting.20

What characterizes the horrific in haunted house films is the encounter with a history that is an aggressive opponent of amnesia and has antagonistic claims on the present. Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990) provides an insight into the initial confrontation and the contemporary realism of such confrontations. Generically the film belongs to what Katharine Fowkes has termed

‘comedy ghost films’.21 She suggests that these are marked by an amplification of masculine inexpressivity – a kind of ghosting of conventional male attributes. Although the haunting is not motivated directly by the ‘house’ the film does share with a number of other contemporary films an anxiety about stirring up incoherent historical forces. The film opens on a group of young people viewing a ‘loft’, an industrial space that is being reclaimed as an apartment. The opening shot is a lyrical tracking sequence of gentle fades showing indistinguishable objects shrouded in white dust sheets and ethereally lit by sun filtering through dusty skylights. These shrouded objects, left behind from the previous life of the building, constitute a familiar mise en scène of horror –

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things whose functions and relations have been forgotten. The tranquillity is violently disturbed by the dynamic violence of renovation, as billhooks burst through the ceiling from below –
the attic space is being opened up to create the luxurious volitional space of creative freedom, ‘the cathedral ceilings’ the young characters are searching for. The camera is licensed to ‘haunt’

this forgotten zone. Throughout the ‘moving in’ sequence there is a strong visual theme of the violation of a historical space.

The vulnerability of small groups of people in dangerous circumstances is characterized by a mobilization of the generic theme of the frontier. The abrupt deprivation of technologies of communication in such films as The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) and The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005), which are experienced as a kind of regression into dark pasts and threateningly remote places. Benjamin wrote of the experience of soldiers in the Great War in terms of the shocking loss of the urban milieu and its amenities which left them ‘under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing has changed but the clouds’ . 22 This sudden relocation into the threatening realm of the animistic dark was reactivated in 1960s and

’70s films by an awareness of the abundantly mediated Vietnam War. Indeed the idea of ghosts in the First and Second World Wars is explored in Deathwatch (Michael J. Bassett, 2002) and The Bunker (Rob Green, 2001) – in both films the dead appear as revenants, mysteriously mobile zombies, who wreak vengeance on the living.

Mark Wigley has cited a number of popular films which bring the threat of unknown frontiers close to the American

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home.23 He describes the openings of Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) and Honey I Shrunk the Kids (Joe Johnston, 1989), in both of which a ‘mock heroic’ assault on the peaceful inhabitants of suburbia is mounted by the miniaturized threat of tiny fauna on the crabgrass frontier. The isolated house can function as a threatened space at these micro levels, invoking folkloric ideas of malevolent spirits, closely associated with childhood belief and intimate with the fabric of the dwelling. Inhabited (Kelly Sande-fur, 2003) opens with a voice saying: ‘There’s no place like home’, while the titles are superimposed on nineteenth-century watercolour illustrations of enchanted houses, fairies and goblins. The cast list appears over an unstable zoom towards a detached, complexly detailed nineteenth-century house, moving through bushes towards an open window. The film links childhood fears to the anxieties of a family who are forced to discover ‘that some houses have memories’ and that the house of their dreams is a

‘nightmare’. What they take to be the fantasy companions of their little daughter are in fact real, vicious supernatural creatures.

The Closet (Cho Kin Nam, 2007), a Thai film, is subtitled

‘Something Hides in Your House’. It is a sparse, intensely architec -
tural film in which the camera patiently explores the perspectives and opacities of a coherent domestic space and creates intense anxiety about what cannot be seen or brought into relationship with the spatial experience of the inhabitants. The opening sequence shows an upwardly tilted shot of a balcony, followed by a reverse shot of the family unpacking a car and commenting on the ‘amazing’ appearance of the building that houses their new apartment. The point of view from the house is situated behind

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ornate cast-iron railings and moves inexplicably from side to side, replicating an eerie rocking motion. As the couple plan where to put furniture, they are seen through door frames and along corridors. The young son wanders along a blank wall; there is a cut to his point of view up a staircase flanked by ornate banister rails. This opening sequence establishes a presence, particularly attentive to the little boy, that is traced to the ‘closet’. The closet magically supplies money and then, with fairy-tale logic, absorbs the child into some other dimensional realm.

A genetic dimension is added to these anxieties of demonic, zombie, Frankenstein’s monster revenants in Godsend (Nick Hamm, 2004). The film opens with an extreme close-up of microscopic cellular forms that morph into a sea of umbrellas seen from high above. The opening sequences juxtapose a mugging in a dark alley with the bright joyful scene of a child’s The Closet: the house looks back at the new tenants.

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party. This characteristic reminder of the threatening places outside the home is followed by the death of the child and the parents’ attempts to reincarnate him with the help of a sinister doctor who uses genetic material from his own dead and matricidal The Closet: the child explores the new house; the child discovers the closet.

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son. The new child begins to manifest signs of troubled behaviour, mutilating photographs and drawing fantasies of blazing buildings. The family move to a new house on a sunny day, ‘a place we can all start over’, but the boy is claimed by some presence emerging from a closet in his new bedroom. The camera moves back and up to survey the typical suburb, now revealed to the audience to be contaminated by a genetically engineered ghost.

the haunted road

A number of films address anxieties about the dark places of the present and in particular, the dangers of travel and the possibility of getting lost in space and metaphorically in time. Although the journey, particularly in American culture and the road movie, is often a kind of exorcism, there is a menacing quality involved in the discovery of what Jack Kerouac described as the

‘bottom and dregs of America where all the heavy villains sink’ . 24

The ‘ghost zones’ of the empty road are evoked in the transmissions from local radio stations, the privacy of the car and the sudden encounters with the real, archaic and unfamiliar world of the roadside.

Remote, entropic places of the American wilderness are reactivated in off-road deviations that take families and groups of young people into unfamiliar territory. Although the monsters are not always supernatural, they evoke the historic Puritan assumption of the demonic nature of the native people, the

‘ghosting’ of the rust belt economy and the quasi-magical effects of radioactivity. In The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977,

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remade in 2006 by Alexandre Aja) a family make their way to California from the East, stopping en route to investigate a silver mine they have inherited. The interrupted journey leaves them stranded and preyed on by a monstrous cannibalistic family led by the mutant son of an old man who runs the petrol station where they stop for directions. The menacing siege of the family’s wrecked trailer reveals that they are under attack from an embodied generic compound of ‘Indians’, werewolves, zombies and mutants. The haunting is historical and environmental, representing the neglected and abused, imbued with supernatural powers of malevolence. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) the monstrous, deep country folk are directly involved in raising the bodies of the dead. These anti-families are thematically related to the dialectic of home and workplace, the vertical and horizontal structures of Psycho.The haunting of the present by the past is represented by an uncanny lack of familiarity with geographical margins or limits.

Another family set out on a routine Christmas journey in Dead End (Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa, 2003), but they take a short cut, leaving the main road. In the claustrophobic interior of the car the family argue. They stop at an abject roadside shack lined with skulls, chains and axes and pick up an apparently traumatized woman in white holding a baby that is discovered to be dead. The journey goes on, the same shack is rediscovered many miles down the road, the car is left behind and then found again. Inside the car the family make startling revelations to one another and as each leaves they die horrible deaths at the hands of some unseen agency. Only the daughter survives

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Dead End: the
haunted car from
above; sinister
implements in the
roadside cabin.

and the terrible detour seems to be her nightmare; the film ends with a suggestion that this is not a full explanation and that something supernatural has occurred. The fear of a narrative without end in a dark hostile wilderness caught between claustrophobic repetition and agoraphobic terror is a characteristic form of late twentieth-century haunting.

In Jeepers Creepers (Victor Salva, 2001) a brother and sister set out on a journey. Their car appears on a lonely road driving towards the camera and semi-audible speech resolves into an inconsequential conversation in which the brother says, ‘I haven’t seen a car in fifty miles.’ A grim industrial truck appears in the rear-view mirror and sounds its horn. Following a subsequent pursuit they are forced off the road. They return to a dark

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location where they had seen the truck parked earlier, a cob -
webbed, dripping, abject place which they explore by the beam of a torch. It combines laboratory, workshop and necropolis with preserved post-operative cadavers embedded in the walls of a tunnel, like a medieval rendition of hell. The traumatized pair eventually destroy the truck driver, a cannibalistic creature that metamorphoses from a puritanical scarecrow to a leathery winged demon and pursues them. The final shot looks through his empty eye socket. The title, taken from the Ray Charles song

‘Jeepers Creepers’, whose lyrics ‘Jeepers creepers, where’d you get those peepers?’ refer to the creature’s need to steal body parts Jeepers

Creepers: the
demonic truck
passes a car; the
view from the
passing car.

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in order to survive. The monster is a compound supernatural revenant, associated closely with the timeless country roads, shacks and the archaic fundamentalism of the off-road landscape.

The worlds of the marginalized workers and the leafy avenues of suburbia confront each other in A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984). A paedophile caretaker wreaks vengeance on the middle-class families who burnt him to death in a bout of vigilante justice. ‘Freddy’ announces his emergence from his boiler-room den by scraping the knives attached to his fingers on the labyrinth of leaking, steaming pipes. His anti -
quated demonic realm is juxtaposed with the light-filled, softly furnished bedrooms of the children. The alien world of manual labour is part of the disorder, dirt and decay of a Gothic realm – a reincarnation of the ‘broken frames’ that haunted the nineteenth century’s rhetoric of progress. Old agricultural and industrial tools are banal instruments whose uses are nearly forgotten, but serve as menacing weapons, accompanied by other Gothic signs of ruination – insects, vermin and decay. No longer part of an economically productive order, they are the instruments of sinister abuse.

The rusty remains of industry and agriculture have become part of a cyberpunk Goth sensibility; shards of the discarded technological sublime are radically juxtaposed against the contemporary interiors of the cars that cruise across the dark side of the American pastoral. These privatized, controlled zsound of static and hellfire religion. The passing landscape is a place of inbreeding, entropy and repressed vengeance and the survivors of recession become the disturbing revenants and

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zombies of horror scenarios, viciously resentful of youth and their culture. Roger Dadouin notes that the opening sequence of vampire movies generically involves an arrival in a village ‘closed in on itself ’. The intruder, arriving with a lack of awareness, finds ‘a dark enveloping, uterine space’, suggesting that the mise en scène links back to the image of the bad mother.25 The films serve to remind that there are always weakly framed places, left behind and liable to react to and amplify any interior fragility on the part of those who visit.

Ghosts lie outside the ‘commodified memoryscape’. The process of establishing national heritage and making the past safe for display and consumption is also an act of ritual amnesia and exorcism. Ghosts confound generalized histories and provide

‘spooky’ insights. The sadistic pleasures of watching the horrified reactions of those who blunder off the main road could be seen as an identification with the rejectamenta of tourism and property speculation. It may be that the present is particularly haunted because of the simultaneous repressions of the past and the multiplication of the means by which it can be revisited.

Michel de Certeau has said that ‘haunted places are the only ones people can live in’ . 26 The present is full of ruins of the recent past and they epitomize the fragility of boundaries, the disturbing presence of unfulfilled projects and aspirations and the materials for a haunting awareness of what forces might still linger in signs and traces.

Haunted house films reflect, and seemingly protest, increasing individualism and the isolation of the nuclear family.

The main victims of haunting tend to be the professional classes

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with substantial resources. The houses that attract haunting are detached, often in desirable outer suburbs or picturesque countryside. The ‘yuppies in peril’ movies that were characteristic of the 1980s stress the vulnerability and risk attendant on social striving. Economic booms of the last thirty years have been closely associated with property and the desirability of real estate and home-making. One aspect of increasing wealth is the extent to which it has colonized areas marginalized by economic change, bringing the beneficiaries into contact with the spectral and liminal places where redundant and rejected people live. In some cases the ghosts are reminders of past injustices that have been inadequately acknowledged. The implicit politics of films as varied as Cold Creek Manor, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Poltergeist and The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980) are that ghosts are agents of morality and reminders of the repressed injustices and illegalities of the past.

The idea of the ghostly is fundamental to narratives of detection and historical reconstruction. From their earliest days films have dealt in time travel, flashbacks and various forms of substitution, morphing and transformation. Film conjures inevitable engagement with the primal scene, with the possibility of re-editing life in ways analogous to re-editing the film text. In The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985), Minority Report (Stephen Spielberg, 2002) and The Butterfly Effect (Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, 2004) the exchange between future and past creates figures out of time that share with ghosts both insubstantial presences and missions of restorative justice or revenge. The imaginative investment in

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various scenarios of the past and the perpetual reappropriation of objects, lifestyles and properties through revivals and reenact -
ments seems to leave the present particularly vulnerable to reactivating unforeseen meanings and emotions in the hallucinatory phantasmagoria of historical reconstruction.

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conclusion

Ghosts and haunting in the nineteenth century were radically re-imagined in ways that shaped ideas about the afterlife and the possibility of thinking beyond death. Ghosts were secularized, although they retained a close connection with retribution and redemption. Forms of haunting became closely related to technologies of communication and recording, and to the fantasies that accompanied them. The locations of haunting responded to new concepts of privacy, withdrawal and heritage but they also found modern forms for older ways of figuring hell and routes back to subconscious fears. Memories of childhood have become intimately associated with the capacity of haunting to animate objects and find worrying forms for what is obscured, or just out of sight. The invocation of the child in haunted house films is not surprising because it is as children that we have the most intense relationships to spaces and their mysteries and are deeply fascinated by the unknown – as Adam Phillips suggests, adult-hood is the ‘afterlife’ of childhood’.1 The ghosts in the house are frightening, but they also restore something that has been lost.

One of the influential factors in the imaginative construction of the modern ghost is the widespread experience of disembodiment so complexly explored by Jonathan Crary in his studies of attention and spectating.2 Cinema in particular provided a

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continuum of views instead of the more familiar securely framed image, and in the process created new relationships between the subjectivity of the spectator and the virtual environments they encounter. As I have tried to suggest, there were many opportunities to experience this etherealization before the particular confrontation of audience and alter ego that took place in 1895
with the first screening of films to a paying audience.

The ‘haunted house’ has become a complex metaphor for Hollywood itself and for a number of episodes in the history of cinema as a business, entertainment and experience. Here the anxieties of a culture could be expressed in the form of entering, exploring, excavating and tolerating the shock revelations of an unfamiliar and often incoherent architectural space. The ‘haunted’ metaphor is perhaps too ubiquitous to be comprehended in any book. If it stands for what is repressed and must be encountered and understood, then it applies to all hermeneutic enterprises, as Nietzsche suggested and Derrida more recently and extensively affirmed.3 The ghosts begins to appear everywhere when the archives are full, as if there is no more room for them to be confined safely away from the world of the living. Although the ghost is the ‘other’ to the zombie – all spirit and no body – there are ways in which the proliferation of zombies as a ‘modern myth’ (‘the only modern myth’ according to Gilles Deleuze4) has re-invoked the ghost as a metaphor for empty lives and the nightmarish persistence of the death drive. The term ‘ghostly’

has been used to describe an increasing sense of the dissolution of boundaries between reality and virtuality as well as the range of marginalizations that follow from the ‘melting into air’ of a late

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capitalist culture and the capacity of information storage to perpetually re-circulate and superimpose the growing archive of texts. A sense of being haunted, of being accompanied by ghosts, revenants and inspirational muses, is an understandable consequence of sharing our lives with a myriad of screens, reflections, projections and superimpositions, from Imax to mobile phones. A virtual world is now increasingly ‘haunted’ by the real. A recent news item reported a plan by an Italian minister to build a campaign headquarters in the virtual reality community ‘Second Life’; it was opposed, and a spokes-avatar, dressed in black velvet, told a reporter from La Stampa: ‘It doesn’t seem right to make this a photocopy of real life, we have enough politics there already.’5 In another domain, virtual shots were fired as anti-racist avatars besieged the virtual office of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

One of the most immediately relevant applications of the idea of haunting and place is to evoke the experience of entering an unfamiliar culture. In Donald Weber’s account of Jewish immigration in the early twentieth century the metaphor is invoked to describe the entire project of leaving a restrictive culture to ‘free the spirit’.6 He quotes one response to critical racial purists that suggested: ‘The ghost of the Mayflower pilots every immigrant ship.’ However, the haunting is more conventionally one that keeps returning images of the ‘old home’: ‘in your solitude, images will rise up and stare in your face with eternal sorrow.’ The most familiar sense in which this haunting is present for those living between two cultures is expressed by Horace Kallen, who introduced the term ‘cultural pluralism’ in 1915 to express the dilemma of being ‘disjoined from the old ways and values, and not yet at

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home in the new’ . 7 The plight of the immigrant is to experience two kinds of haunting – the ‘childhood’ familiarity with spaces and objects that perpetually return and are projected onto new contexts, and the more familiarly represented sensation of exploring an unfamiliar space that is experienced as simultaneously abject and aristocratic. The overlooked are in danger of becoming ghostly to themselves. In Ralph Ellison’s account of racial dis -
crimination, Invisible Man, the invisibility is generated by the over-visibility of the black author’s attributes: the metaphoric hall of mirrors that he is forced to inhabit which reflects other peoples’

fantasies and figments. The prologue establishes his struggle with ghostliness: ‘I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe, nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms.’8

Different attitudes to the spirit world have been exemplified by recent Asian cinema and the considerable success of films such as The Ring ( Ringu, Hideo Nakata, 1998; us version by Gore Verbinski, 2002), The Grudge ( Ju On, Takashi Shimizu, 2003; us version also by Takashi Shimizu, 2004), The Eye ( Ging-wai, Danny and Oxide Pang, 2002; us version by David Moreau and Xavier Palud, 2008) and The Ghost of Mae Nak (Mark Duffield, 2005). A number of films from Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Thailand have been hailed by Western critics as close in mood to the ‘tales of terror’ of writers like H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James. It is difficult to establish a distinctive ‘Asian’ style, because of a long tradition of interchange between cultures, and the agency of Lafcadio Hearn (a.k.a Koizumi Yakumo), a cosmo-politan Greek/Irish/American immigrant in Japan. Hearn interpreted older tales and legends and published them in 1904 –

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a time when cinema was beginning to make a popular impact – as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. These stories had a direct and persistent influence on Japanese cinema. Elements of traditional ghost tales, sometimes mediated by Hearn, are present in films about haunting, notably Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo, 1953), Tales of Ugetsu ( Ugetsu monogatari, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953) and Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1964). Akira Lippit, in his study of the thresholds of visibility, which comprise a fascination with the ghostly invisible and the dramatic enlightenment provided by x-rays and atomic blasts, makes a convincing argu-ment for a complexly interrelated subtext of traditional elements and technological anxieties in Japanese films.9

However, there is something distinctive about the new wave of Asian films and the interest that they have aroused, an interest evidenced by the American remakes of some of the key texts. There are complex and substantial national differences, particularly in the affinity of Asian ghosts to a spirit world of ancestors, acknowledged to be in a relationship of mutual obligation to the living, which differs substantially from the aristocratic and abject revenants of the Gothic tradition. There are a number of recurring themes in the films – often locating long hair, water and the combination of ancient myths with new technologies as threats to the living. The Japanese term for ghost, ‘bakemono’, suggests ‘a transformed thing’, indicating something mediated and mobile between natural and supernatural levels.

There is a particularly strong iconography of the vengeful female ghost that has been interpreted as an aspect of the traditional subjection of women and the anxieties and guilt

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aroused by their suffering. The iconography of the Japanese woman and descriptions in novels such as those of Junichiro Tanizaki emphasize the gestalt of the face, often surrounded by dark hair and shadows. Elsewhere he comments on the ‘magic of shadows’ in Japanese culture and iconography, especially in the image of women: ‘her face the only sign of her existence’, who

‘shared domestic darkness with ghosts and monsters’.10 The emphasis on the ghastly white mask of the revenant framed and partly obscured by black hair is common to a number of films and is often rendered schematic by being mediated imperfectly on television or cctv monitors. The ghosts are forms developed in traditional theatre, blurred, agitated and reframed by traumatized mediation. The idea of the ‘yurei’ – a predatory ghost who has died while in the grip of love, hate or jealousy, or whose death was not accompanied by appropriate rituals – is similar to the pre-modern Western ghost, and is similarly attached to place.

What is particularly distinctive in the new Asian ghost films is the sparseness of the mise en scène. The haunting takes place in mundane houses, often on the outskirts of the city. A theme of relentless nemesis and the half-glimpsed nature of ghostly forms is constructed cinematically by constricted points of view, often discovered lurking behind displaced panels, or visible through openings into obscure spaces.

In The Grudge (2003) the slow exploration of a real, modestly proportioned house comes to an end in a taped-up cupboard, but the haunting is manifested by disorder and a range of subhuman noises that climax in the slow advance of the disarticulated, kabuki-trained female actress/‘ghost’ advancing down

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the stairs to a confrontation in the cramped hallway. In Dark Water the apartment haunted by the ghost of a drowned child is a grim 1970s concrete block on the margins of town. The new home of a recently divorced mother and her daughter, the apartment is penetrated by the seepage that transmits a ghost child’s jealous spirit from the abandoned water-filled apartment above.

As in The Grudge the elevator is a particular site of anxiety, as it passes between floors and eventually becomes the claustrophobic space in which the ghost claims its victim.

The theme of contamination is particularly strong in the first film of the Ring cycle, The Ring, and is present as a leitmotif in the subsequent films that were inspired by it. The ghosts are imprinted and disseminated through electronic media that effectively combines the idea of a relentlessly vindictive spirit with anxieties about infection and the transferability of information through different media and terminals. The ‘ring’ of the title not only describes the shape of the well from which the vengeful ghost issues, but also the sound of the telephone call that confirms the imminent death of its next victim, the relentless circle of contamination, the circulation of rumours and ‘urban myths’ that the subject of the film relates to, and the endless recycling of the film, its versions, sequels and remakes. In The Grudge the ghostly dark stain is seen on a cctv screen, first engulfing a security guard and then taking on a rough human form before it looms into and fills the frame of the tv and cinema screen in a terrifying moment of mutual surveillance. In The Ring 2 (Hideo Nakata, 2005) the ghost’s point of view from within the television is shared by the audience, as it reaches out

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to draw a victim through the screen, while the ghost in The Ring crawls from inside the screen into the room to share space with the terrified viewer. In the South Korean film Phone (Ahn Byeong-ki, 2002) the ghost of a dead lover is transmitted in an act of telephonic possession, and in Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001) the menacing spirits become waves capable of manifesting in any form of receiver. The Eye implicates the viewer in a shared corneal graft with the heroine which causes her to see ghosts and in The Eye 2 (Danny and Oxide Pang, 2004) a ghost is reborn in the heroine’s womb and is visible in the partial and distorted image of an antenatal scan. As in other films made in the early twenty-first century, the merging of a spirit world and the apparently boundless and wireless communications media enable the narratives to rediscover and revive anxieties about thresholds and domains in a promiscuous flow of information and contamination.

Phone: the origins of the haunting transmissions buried in a wall .

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Eye 2: a ghost invades the womb; ante-natal scan – the ghost foetus looks back.

The impact of these films and the generally disappointing attempts to translate them into Hollywood movies has revealed how crucial to Western ideas of haunting is the exorcizing theme

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of research into causes, and the need for explanation and resolution. The more coherent narratives of remakes bring with them an emphasis on the investigation of origins and protocols for eliminating the spirit and sealing off its world. This may be a lingering trace of Enlightenment ambivalence present in the early nineteenth century ‘Phantasmagoria’, which enabled audiences to experience the fear while claiming it as a ‘scientific’ illusion. The

‘look’ of Asian ghosts is associated with an episodic and unresolved nature, suggesting a cultural willingness to acknowledge a world of spirits that is continuous with the mundane reality of ordinary life. The remakes reinforce the explanatory element of the narratives, and use the musical score in ways that direct and structure audience response. Significantly, the remake of The Grudge (2004) for Western consumption by its original director, Takashi Shimizu, required a set that duplicated the original house, expanded the scale and then reduplicated the second floor in order to provide more scope for fluid camera movement. The result is a more conventional and less troubling rendering of space that, in the confinement of the original, is a warren of openings and occlusions negotiated by camera movement and editing.

Shimizu speaks of the anxiety of failing to notice threatening presences in such constricted and familiar spaces as ‘where people miss each other’, which is at the heart of the haunted experience, the horror of presence and absence compounded.

Nick Broomfield’s part fictionalized film Ghosts (2006) is about the drowning of Chinese cockle pickers in Britain’s Morecambe Bay. The plight of immigrants living clandestinely, separated from the visited culture by language barriers, illegality

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and exploitation, is rendered as a kind of half-life. One review makes the link with more conventional ghost films by claiming that the final sequence is ‘as horrifying as anything in the work of Hideo Nakata’ . 11 The metaphor of spectrality applies to the lives of the dispossessed and the overlooked, but ‘ghost’ is also a term used by the Chinese workers to describe their rapacious soulless exploiters. In the anthropologist Erik Mueggler’s study of provincial life in twentieth-century China, the theme of the hungry, marauding ghost is used by the victims to describe a particular kind of relentless savagery characterized by an insa-tiable appetite for money, food, sexual favours – a demonic force that can be only partially satisfied by endless propiti ation.12

Zygmunt Bauman has commented on the constant haunting of the performance of assimilation by the spectres of shame and alienation.13

The sense of being haunted is associated with disorientation in space and time. A trope of many haunted house films is the moment of waking and the need to negotiate this liminal moment between the clairvoyance of sleep and the re-entry into the material world by seeking reassurance that the vectors of time and space are still in place. Proust describes the vertiginous relation between consciousness and the rooms in which mem -
ories are stored as he wakes to ‘a whole series of rooms . . . while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness’.14 Ghosts, as avatars of memory, have the potential to renegotiate spatial coordinates in ways that are dramatized in the labyrinthine narrative quests of haunted house

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films. The haunted house has life independent of the functional-ity of mundane houses. Swann’s Way ends with Proust’s affirma-tion of the relativity of space and time: ‘remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment: and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.’ Haunting is the result of an excess of meaning that demands to be revisited in order to reveal the overlooked or previously obscured.

The journey through the haunted house is a way of negotiating irrational and demonic elements that persist in an otherwise familiar modern environment shaped by boundaries installed by Enlightenment thought. Ghosts and new technologies have been co-dependent for more than 200 years. The convenience offered by any advancement in technology is always haunted by the frailty and incapacity that makes it necessary and welcome. But ghosts are also emblematic of continuity. The pivotal year of 1895 was the founding year of the National Trust in Britain, an institution responsive to anxieties about the encroachment of the modern world. It sought to preserve houses steeped in family histories at a time when they had outlived their purpose and function, and the theme of haunting is closely associated with the iconography of the ‘stately home’. The proliferation of ‘most haunted’ television programmes testifies to the idea of haunting as a popular form of access to history.

Haunted houses are metaphorically complex because, as Deborah Cohen has suggested, they interact with a mythos of desirable domestic space.15 Old, familiar houses offer an interface with fascinating pasts, and are textured palimpsests of previous lives, capable of enriching the status of those who inherit or

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obtain them. Houses have histories that are becoming increasingly accessible through Internet searches and databases, so the humble can aspire to the kinds of lineages that used to be associated with aristocratic status. Julie Myerson’s Home investigates the lives of previous inhabitants of her own house, reaching further and further back into an increasingly mysterious past.16

This kind of research and the fantasies that accompany it usually configure benevolent ghosts. Other kinds of dark places have featured in the exploitation of grisly examples of ‘bad house-keeping’. The house of Ed Gein was the original inspiration for the locations of a number of films from Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) onwards and the remote shack or the quiet decaying house in an otherwise unexceptional street have also become anxiogenic. It is these suburban crimes that create a particular kind of haunting sustained by a sense of their ordinariness and closeness to home. Freud’s idea of the ‘uncanny’ relates closely to the spaces of ‘suburbia’ as an area beyond the city walls, originally a place of banishment, quarantine and incarceration that might lead us to expect to find kinds of haunting there. Plans for

‘congenial cities’ and ‘sustainable suburbs’ are dedicated to squeezing out the dark places and replacing them with a cocktail of heritage, restoration and newness that constitutes an inno -
vative breeding ground for new formulations of the uncanny.

The haunted house can appear in many forms and locales.

Its connections with the past and its overflowing capacity to signify renders it the shadow and supplement of the ‘dream house’. Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin have provided terms for describing the way that historical conjunctures ‘leap up

2 1 8
at moments of danger’ or ‘pass through walls, these revenants, day and night they trick consciousness and skip generations’ . All explorations of haunted houses end in some kind of confrontation with an iconography of death that is lacking in the tangible experience of everyday modern life and yet is so abundant in its imaginary realms.

Haunted house films reconnect the fact of death, and the unsettled business that this disturbingly implies, with the desirable safety of the home and the disturbing paradox of the uncanny. Reading for ghosts and haunting is a similar strategy to reading for significant absences. In many cases it is a way of recognizing what has been obscured or omitted from the record of history. The repetitions of the tropes of sadness and revenge signal the return of what has been repressed or dispossessed.

The cinema of the haunted house has created a secular space somewhere between the cemetery and the sitting room where the unresolved issues of the past can be negotiated and symbolically resolved.

references
introduction

1 Walter Kendrick, The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment (New York, 1991).

2 See ‘A Home to Make You Green with Envy’, in Sunday Times Magazine (4 November 2007), pp. 54–5. The article is about the ‘Phantom House’, a project by architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro.

3 Sigfried Giedion quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, ma, 1999), p. 407.

4 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations (London, 1970), p. 241.

5 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, ma, 1992).

6 Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare (London, 1949), p. 100.

7 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Idea of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford and New York, 1990), introduction by Adam Phillips, p. xxiii.

8 Gilles Deleuze quoted in Ryan Gilbert, Groundhog Day (London, 2004), p. 88.

9 John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London 1982), p. 58.

10 Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (New York, 1999) 11 The term ‘conjurer’ retained a supernatural meaning with an implication of raising spirits until the late eighteenth century, when it began to be used to describe one who uses ‘sleight of hand’.

12 Norman Klein, 7 Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon (London, 1993).

13 In Rudyard Kipling’s 1904 story ‘Wireless’, Scribners Magazine, August 1902, www.beulo.com/ham/wireless.html., a young consumptive radio operator is channelled by the ghost of John Keats.

14 See Elizabeth Tallents, ‘The Trouble with Postmortality’, The Threepenny

2 2 0

Review (Spring 2005), www.threepennyreview.com/samples/tallent_
spo5.html.

15 Matt Houlbrook, Queer London (Chicago, il, 2005) p. 48.

16 See in particular Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, ma, 1990), p. 136, in which he describes the move to what he terms ‘fully embodied vision’.

17 A term coined by Jacques Aumont. See ‘The Variable Eye or The Mobilization of the Gaze’, in The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography, ed. Dudley Andrew (Austin, tx, 1977), p. 246.

18 Wolfgang Schivelbusch makes these claims in The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, ca, 1986).

19 John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air (Chicago, il, 2000), p. 39.

20 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, ca, 1999), p. 10.

21 Collected in The Virago Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, ed. Richard Dalby (London, 1988).

22 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, mn, 1997), p. 6.

1
the haunted house

1 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London, 1955), ‘A Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy’, vol. x, p. 122.

2 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, ma, 1969), p. 5.

3 Ibid., p. 8.

4 Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago, il, 2003), p. 40.

5 See P. G. Maxwell Stuart, Ghosts: A History of Phantoms, Ghouls and Other Spirits of the Dead (Stroud, 2006).

6 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century England (London, 1971).

7 John Ruskin, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 1, The Poetry of Architecture, at www.gutenberg.org.etext/17774.

8 Rudolph Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (London, 1956).

9 Walter Benjamin registers the fear represented by ‘doors that won’t close’

in The Arcades Project (Cambridge, ma, 1999), p. 409.

10 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. John Sturrock

2 2 1

(London, 1997), p. 37.

11 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, ma, 1999), p. 391.

12 Quoted in Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, ma, 2002), p. 102.

13 Quoted in J. Mordaunt Crook, The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches (London, 1999), p. 1.

14 Ibid., p. 19.

15 Georges Bataille in a fantasy of the triumph of dust sees its early encroachment as gaining ground over the servants. Quoted in Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, ma, 1992), p. 218.

16 John Ruskin, from ‘The Lamp of Memory’, in Selected Writings, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford, 2004), p. 21.

17 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 13.

18 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), Standard Edition, vol. xvii, p. 237.

19 Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London, 2006).

20 Slavoj Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (London, 1992), p. 232.

21 Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood (London, 2002), p. 211.

22 For comments on the camera’s role, see Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London, 2006), pp. 86–9.

23 Leni had previously designed sets for Max Reinhardt and directed the dreamlike film Waxworks (Paul Leni, 1924), establishing a number of key cinematic elements that have recurred as subsequent effects.

24 David Caute, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life (London, 1994), p. 10.

25 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1912/13), in Standard Edition, vol. xiii, p. 85.

26 Roger Dadouin, ‘Fetishism in the Horror Film’, in Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James Donald (London, 1989), p. 52.

27 Steve Connor, ‘Dickens, the Haunting Man’. This extended version of a paper given at ‘A Man for all Media: The Popularity of Dickens 1902–2002’, Institute for English Studies, 25– 27 July 2002, is available at www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/haunting/.

28 Stuart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (New York, 1994).

29 Neil Harris, Building Lives (New Haven, ct, 1999), pp. 128‒9.

30 Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography

2 2 2

(London, 2006), pp. 111–42.

31 Stephen King quoted in Joseph Grixti, Terrors of Uncertainty (London, 1989), p. 58.

32 Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, ma, 2004).

2
gothic and the uncanny

1 David Punter, Gothic Pathologies:The Text, The Body and The Law (London, 1998), p. 216.

2 Quoted in Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (London, 1998).

3 Martin Myrone, ed., The Gothic Reader (London, 2006), p. 39.

4 John Summerson, The Unromantic Castle and Other Essays (London, 1990), p. 14.

5 See Alberto Manguel, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (London, 1999), p. 205.

6 W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (London, 2001), p. 24.

7 Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt [1952] (London, 1965).

8 Paul Rotha, Celluloid: The Film Today (London, 1931).

9 Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford, 1995), pp. 125‒6.

10 Punter, Gothic Pathologies, p. 221.

11 Timothy Mowl, William Beckford: Composing for Mozart (London, 1998), p. 110.

12 Quoted from the 1925 Surrealist Manifesto by Daniel Cottom in Abyss of Reason (Oxford, 1991), p. 164.

13 Ivan Chtcheglov (Gilles Ivain) in ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, ca, 1981), p. 1.

14 ‘Hocus pocus’ is said to be a reference to ‘corpus est meus corpum’.

15 Barbara Stafford, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on Screen (Los Angeles, ca, 2001), p. 51.

16 Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (Exeter, 2000), pp. 30–31.

17 In 1809 Heinrich Bossler warned that the glass harmonica could have deleterious effects on the nerves and was capable of plunging player and

2 2 3
listener into dark and melancholy moods which could result in suicide.

18 Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow.

19 Quoted by Tristram Hunt in his review of Liza Picard’s Victorian London:The Life of a City, New Statesman (15 August 2005), available at www.newstatesman.com/200508150034.

20 Quoted by Grahame Smith, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (Manchester, 2003), p. 32.

21 See Jonathan Glance, ‘Fitting the Taste of the Audience Like a Glove: Matthew Lewis’s Supernatural Drama’, on the Literary Gothic website, at http://litgothic.com.

22 See Marjeane D. Puriton, ‘Science Fiction and Techno-Gothic Drama’, at www.erudit/org/revue/ron/2001/v/n21/00596ar.html (accessed 1 July 2008).

23 Cecil Hepworth, Came the Dawn (London, 1951).

24 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, ma, 1990).

25 Quoted by John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air (Chicago, il, 2000), p. 143.

26 Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (Oxford, 2005), pp. 5‒6.

27 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London, 1995).

28 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London, 1955), vol. xvii, p. 242.

29 Punter, Gothic Pathologies, p. 216.

30 Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago, il, 1997).

31 Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London, 2000).

32 Iain Sinclair, London Orbital (London, 2002).

33 Iain Sinclair, ed., London: City of Disappearances (London, 2006) 34 William Paul, Laughing Screaming (New York, 1994).

3
film: a ‘fragile semblance’

1 Christian Metz, ‘Photography and Fetish’, October, vol. xxxiv (Fall 1985), p. 84.

2 2 4

2 Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Princeton, nj, 1969), p. 21.

3 See Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes’, in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Piesrce, eds Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok (Bloomington, in, 1983).

4 André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in André Bazin, What is Cinema? , vol. i (Berkeley, ca, 1967), pp. 9–10.

5 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, 1978), p. 15.

6 Sigmund Freud, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London, 1955), vol. xiv, p. 293.

7 Steve Connor, ‘Transported Shiver of Bodies: Weighing the Victorian Ether’: paper for the British Association of Victorian Studies Conference, 3 September 2004. Available at www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/ether.

8 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, ca, 1999), p. 13.

9 Quoted in Robert Rydall and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna (Chicago, il, 2005), p. 39.

10 Tom Gunning, ‘Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations’, in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video ed. Patrice Peto (Indianopolis, in, 1995), p. 64.

11 Greil Marcus, review essay, New York Times (28 November 1999), section

‘Arts and Leisure’.

12 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London, 2006), p. 31.

13 Jacques Derrida, quoted in Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, ma, 1993), p. 163.

14 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, p. 31.

15 Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (Exeter, 2000), p. 416.

16 Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (Baltimore, md, 1998), p. 336.

17 Jean Goudal, ‘Surrealism and Cinema’, in Paul Hammond, The Shadow and Its Shadow (London, 1978), p. 52.

18 Bertram Lewin, ‘Inferences from the Dream Screen’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, issue no. 4, vol. xxix, p. 224.

19 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford, 1965), p. 45.

20 Barbara Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder (Los Angeles, la,

2 2 5

2001), p. 52.

21 Perez, The Material Ghost, p. 429, n. 5.

22 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston. ma, 1969), p. 222.

23 ‘The condominium is the last incarnation of the baronial manor’, Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, ma, 1999), p. 407.

24 Gary Cross and John Walton, The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Palaces in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2005).

25 Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography and Film around 1900 (New Haven, ct, 2007).

26 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations (London, 1970), p. 238.

27 Louis Aragon, ‘On Décor’, quoted in Paul Hammond, The Shadow and Its Shadow, p. 29.

28 Vicky Lebeau, Childhood and Cinema (London, 2007).

29 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century England (London, 1971).

30 S. S. Prawer, Caligari’s Children: The Film as a Tale of Terror (Oxford, 1980), p. 109.

31 Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt [1952] (London, 1965), p. 9.

32 Goudal, ‘Surrealism and Cinema’, in The Shadow and its Shadow, ed. Paul Hammond (London, 1978), p. 52.

33 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, ny, 1975).

4
unreal estate

1 Fredric Jameson, ‘Architecture and Speculation’, in New Left Review, 228

(March–April 1998), p. 45.

2 Ibid.

3 Martin Pawley, Terminal Architecture (London, 1998), p. 139.

4 Fred Davey, ‘Cyberurbanism as a Way of Life’, in Architecture of Fear, ed. Nan Ellin (Princeton, nj, 1997), p. 272.

5 William J. Mitchell, e-topia (Cambridge, ma, 1999), p. 82.

6 Walter Benjamin writes of the child’s ability to imaginatively dematerialize in the intimate withdrawn spaces of the house, to assimilate into the concealing curtain to become something ‘floating and white like a ghost’.

2 2 6

See ‘Child Hiding’, in One Way Street (London, 1979), p. 74.

7 Walter Benjamin, ‘Lost Property Office’, in One Way Street (London, 1979), p. 78.

8 Anne Troutman, ‘Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings’, in Architecture of Fear, ed. Ellin, p. 145.

9 Hermann Muthesius, The English House (London, 1904), p. 79.

10 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (London, 1993), p. 65.

11 Roger Callois, Minotaure No. 7 (Paris, 1935).

12 Stuart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (New York, 1994), p. 7.

13 Mary Douglas, ‘The Problem of Evil’, in Natural Symbols (London, 1970), p. 108.

14 Barbara Creed, ‘Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection’, in Formations of Fantasy (London, 1989).

15 Katherine Schonfield, Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City (London, 2000), p. 24.

16 Steve Pile, Real Cities (London, 2005), p. 164.

17 Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well Tempered Environment (London, 1969).

18 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, ma, 1999), p. 219.

19 Sharon Marcus, ‘Placing Rosemary’s Baby’, in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (1993) v/3, pp. 121–40.

20 Supplied by the voice of Mia Farrow.

21 Katherine Fowkes, Giving Up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts and Angels in Main-stream Comedy Films (Detroit, mi, 1998).

22 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’ in Illuminations (London, 1970), p. 84.

23 Mark Wigley, ‘The Electric Lawn’, in The American Lawn: Surfaces of Everyday Life, ed. Georges Teyssot (Princeton, nj, 1999).

24 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York, 1957), p. 274.

25 Roger Dadouin, ‘Fetishism in the Horror Film’, in Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James Donald (London, 1989), p. 52.

26 Quoted in Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins (London, 2005), p. 152.

2 2 7
conclusion

1 Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (London, 1999), p. 6.

2 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, ma, 1990) and A Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, ma, 1999).

3 Jacques Derrida, The Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (London, 1994).

4 Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis, mn, 1983), p. 335, where zombies are described as ‘mortified schizos’.

5 Guardian (5 March 2007).

6 Donald Weber, Haunted in the New World (Bloomington, in, 2005), p. 2.

7 Horace Kallen quoted in ibid. p. 3.

8 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (London, 1965), p. 7.

9 Akira Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis, mn, 2005).

10 Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (London, 2001), p. 53.

11 Xan Brooks, Guardian (24 October 2006).

12 Erik Mueggler, The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence and Place in South West China (Berkeley, ca, 2001).

13 See Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Haunted House’, in New Internationalist (April 1997), p. 1.

14 Marcel Proust, cited in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, ma, 1999), p. 403.

15 Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: A History of the British and Their Possessions (New Haven, ct, 2006), pp. 165‒7.

16 Julie Myerson, Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House (London, 2004).

2 2 8
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Singer, Ben, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts (New York, 2001)

Smith, Graham, Dickens and the Idea of Cinema (Manchester, 2003) Spooner, Catherine, Contemporary Gothic (London, 2006) Stafford, Barbara Maria, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Cambridge, ma, 1999)

———, and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles, ca, 2001) States, Bert O., Seeing in the Dark: Reflections on Dreams and Dreaming (New Haven, ct, 1997)

Steinmeyer, Jim, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Elephant and Learned to Disappear (London, 2004) Taylor, Mark, Hiding (Chicago, il, 1997) Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century England (London, 1971, repr. 1997) Twitchell, James, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (Oxford, 1985)

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Vidler, Anthony, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, ma, 1992)

———, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, ma, 2000)

Warner, Marina, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, 2006) Woodward, Christopher, In Ruins (London, 2001) Wigley, Mark, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, ma, 1993)

Williams, Rosalind, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society and the Imagination (Cambridge, ma, 1990) Williams, Gilda, ed., The Gothic (London, 2005)

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acknowledgements

Thanks and love to Claire Pajaczkowska for her intellectual and emotional support through haunted times. Profound love and indebtedness to Aldo Curtis for his cool, perceptive wisdom and mastery of the electronic uncanny and Theo Curtis for witty and inspirational insights – they have been my everyday mediums and exorcists. Affectionate regards to Lisa Tickner for comments and encourage-ment on a crude early draft. Respect and gratitude to Steve Connor, Patrick Wright and my colleagues and students at the London Consortium for their brilliance, intellectual courage and good humour. Mick Corton has invigorated me with supportive emails and James and Fiona Compton with convivial evenings.

Thanks also to Stephen Barber, and to Vivian, Michael and Martha at Reaktion for contributing the stimulus and expert feedback necessary to keeping the book on track.

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photo acknowledgements
abc Television Network: pp. 51, 52; Applause Pictures: p. 213; Artisan Entertainment: p. 111; Castel Film Romania/Eskwad/France 3 cinéma/h Factory: p. 20; Chemical Films: p. 9; Cineguild: p. 62; Columbia Tristar Motion Picture Group: pp. 50, 138, 163, 190; Columbia Tristar Motion Picture Group/Marvel Studios: p.

29; Compass International Pictures: p. 32; Corus Entertainment: p. 136; Daiei Eiga: p. 23; Dark Water Film Partners/Oz Company (Japan): p. 189; Deltamac: pp. 195, 196; Dimension Films: p. 125; Dimension Films/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.: p. 16; Dreamworks/20th Century Fox: p. 127; Ealing Studios/Eagle-Lion Films Inc.: p. 45; Eskwad/Canal Plus/Castel Films: p. 54; Filmax Group: p. 56; Filmwerks: p. 114; Interbest American Enterprises: p. 37; Jofa-Atelier Berlin-Johannisthal: pp. 11, 82; Lionsgate: p. 198; Mdp Worldwide Entertainment: p. 121; Mercury Productions, Inc./rko Radio Pictures, Inc.: p. 147; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc./Argyle Enterprises: pp. 8, 64, 67; Millennium Films, Nu Image Entertainment: p. 149; Miramax Films/Las Producciones Del Escorpion: pp. 133, 134; Omega Project/Kadokawa Shoten Publishing Company: p. 19; Paramount Pictures, Inc.: pp. 73, 74, 171; PorchLight Entertainment: p. 57; Propaganda Films: p. 107; Rogue Pictures/Focus: p. 58; Rolin Films: p. 159; Scout Productions: p. 117; Screen Gems: pp. 162, 177; Sean S. Cunningham Films/New World Pictures: p. 38; Silent Hill dcp Inc.: p. 113; Silver Nitrate Pictures: p. 132; Toilet Pictures: p. 212; Touchstone Pictures: p. 186; Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation: p. 37 (foot); United Artists Films: p. 200; Walt Disney Pictures: p. 49; Warner Bros. Pictures: pp. 126, 172, 173, 174; Zentropa Entertainment: p. 115; Zocotroco Productions: p. 70.

2 3 5
index

4th Floor, The (1999) 148–9, 149

Block, Ernst 71

Blue Velvet (1986) 194

Ackroyd, Peter 119

Bogeyman, The (1980) 36, 37

Arachnophobia (1990) 184

Booth, Walter 103, 153

Aragon, Louis 155

Borges, Jorge Luis 146

Alien (1979) 19

Brady, Matthew 131

Amityville Horror, The (1979) 16, 48, Brand, Stewart 63, 180

54

Broomfield, Nick 214

Archer, John 42

Browning, Tod 83

Arnheim, Rudolph 36

Bunker, The (2001) 193

Augé, Marc 107

Buñuel, Luis 141–2

Burke, Edmund 15, 16, 27

Bachelard, Gaston 32, 42, 44, 68, 148

Butterfly Effect, The (2004) 203

Back to the Future (1985) 22, 203

Banham, Reyner 188

Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The (1919) 158

Barnum, P. T. 97

Callois, Roger 179

The Bat (1926) 146

Candyman (1992) 105–6, 107

Batteries Not Included (1987) 158

Carlyle, Thomas 40

Baudrillard, Jean 13

Castle, Terry 84

Bauman, Zygmunt 215

Cat and the Canary, The (1927)

Bazin, Andre 129, 148

58–60, 59

Beckford, William 86

Chtcheglov, Ivan 87

Beetlejuice (1988) 175

Citizen Kane (1940) 10, 145–7, 147

Benjamin, Walter 40, 47, 129, 148,

Closet, The (2007) 194–5, 195, 196

154, 169, 217

Cohen, Deborah 216

Big Sleep, The (1946) 71

Cold Creek Manor (2003) 48, 185–6, Blade Runner (1982) 74–5

186, 203

Blake, Jeremy 53

Connor, Steve 63, 129

2 3 6

Corman, Roger 77–8

Ellison, Ralph 208

Coward, Noël 14

Ernst, Max 40

Crary, Jonathan 103, 205

E.T. (1982) 158

Creed, Barbara 187

Exorcism of Emily Rose, The (2005) Cross, Gary 151

161–2, 162

Crowe, Catherine 96

Exorcist, The (1973) 21

Eye, The (2002, 2008) 208

Dadouin, Roger 62, 202

Eye 2, The (2004) 212, 213

Daguerre, Louis 95

Dali, Salvador 40

Fear Dot Com (2002) 120–21, 121

Darkness (2002) 124–5, 125

Fog, The (1980) 203

Dark Water (2002, 2005) 187, 189

Fog, The (2005) 164

Davenport Brothers 97–8

Fontana, Giovanni da 90

Davey, Fred 167

Foucault, Michel 144

Dead Birds (2004) 131–2, 132

Fowkes, Katharine 192

Dead End (2003) 198–9, 199

Fox Sisters 95, 95

Dead of Night (1945) 46, 46

Fragile (2007) 56, 114–5

Deathwatch (2002) 193

Freud, Sigmund 11, 24, 28, 31, 33,

De Certeau, Michel 202

44, 50, 108–9, 127, 129, 150, 170,

Deja Vu (2006) 160

217

De Quincy, Thomas 94

Frighteners, The (1996) 21, 144

Deleuze, Gilles 206

Fuseli, Henry 76

Descent, The (2005) 193

Devant, David 153

Galton, Francis 129–30

Dickens, Charles 61, 63, 100

Gaslight (1944) 148

Dimendberg, Edward 71

Giedion, Sigfried 8, 9

Disney 47, 48, 91

Ghost (1990) 48, 192–3

Disneyland 48

Ghostbusters (1984) 21

Disraeli, Benjamin 41

Ghost Catchers, The (1944) 159

D.O.A. (1950) 71

Ghost Dance (1983) 139

Douglas, Mary 181, 188

The Ghost of Mae Nak (2005) 208

Dracula (1931) 83–4

Ghosts (2006) 214

Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928) 153

Edison, Thomas 135

Glasser, Mervin 165

Eisner, Lotte 80, 157, 164

Godsend (2004) 195

Ellis, John 176

Gothicka (2003) 116

2 3 7

Goudal, Jean 142

Ils (Them) (2007) 21, 53

Great Expectations (1946) 61–2, 62

In A Lonely Place (1950) 71

Griffiths, D.W. 159

Inexplicable (see Moberley) 108–9

Groundhog Day (1993) 22, 175

Infection (2005) 114, 114

Grudge, The (2003, 2004) 208, 210–11, Inhabited, The (2003) 57, 194

214

Invisible Man, The (see Ellison) Gunning, Tom 131, 141

Jacobsen, Arne 7

Harris, Neil 63

Jackson, Shirley 12

Harsnett, Samuel 89

James, M. R. 208

Halloween (1978) 32, 50

James, William 25

Harrison, Robert Pogue 33

Jameson, Frederic 167

Haunted Mansion, The (2003) 47–9, Jeepers Creepers (2001) 199–200, 200

49, 164

Jolly, Martin 67, 131

Haunted Palace, The (1963) 77–9, 164

Jones, Ernest 14

Haunted Screen, The (see Eisner) 80, Jung, Carl 124

164

Haunted Spooks (1920) 158, 159

Kallen, Horace 207

Haunting, The (1963) 8, 12, 64, 65–6, Kansen (see Infection)

67

Killers, The (1946) 71

Hearn, Lafcadio 208

King, Stephen 67

Heirloom, The (2006) 69, 70

Kingdom, The (see Riget) Hepworth, Cecil 102, 155, 156

Kirchner, Athanasius 90

Hide and Seek (2005) 37, 124, 176–8

Kiss Me Deadly (1955) 71

Hider in the House (1989) 184

Kittler, Friedrich 26, 130, 160

Hitchcock, Alfred 55

Klein, Norman 21

Hills Have Eyes, The (1977) 197–8

Kneale, Nigel 87

Holmes, Oliver Wendell 103

Kracaeur, Siegfried 143, 165

Hollywood: The Haunted House (see Mayersberg) 165

Lang, Fritz 72

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) 194

Laski, Marghanita 45

House (1986) 38, 39

Last House on the Left (1972) 54

House by the Cemetery, The (1981) 54

League of Gentlemen (1999) 181

House of Voices, The (2004) 20, 116

Lebeau, Vicky 155

House on Haunted Hill, The (1959) 54

Le Corbusier 7, 8

House Next Door, The (2002) 182

Lefebvre, Henri 71, 187

2 3 8

Leni, Paul 72, 159

Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) 201

Lewin, Bernard 143

Night Side of Nature (see Crowe) 96

Lippit, Akira 209

Nosferatu (1922) 10, 11, 81–3, 82

Loach, Ken 105

Long Time Dead (2002) 120

Ochiai, Masayuki 114

Losey, Joseph 61

Old Dark House, The (1932) 60

Lovecraft, H. P. 77, 208

Onibaba (1953) 209

Out of the Past (1947) 71

Mannoni, Laurent 93, 141

Others, The (2001) 132–3, 133, 134

Madhouse (2004) 116

Marcus, Sharon 192

Pacific Heights (1990) 175, 182–4

Marx, Karl 29, 33, 121, 168

Panic Room (2002) 10, 162–3, 163, Material Ghost, The (see Perez) 163

184

Matrix, The (1999) 137

Pawley, Martin 167

Mayersberg, Paul 165

Perec, Georges 36

Méliès, Georges 94, 152–3

Pepper, John Henry 100, 100

Messengers, The (2006) 176, 177

Perez, Gilbert 142, 163

Metz, Christian 123, 142–3

Peters, John Durham 26, 104

Minkowski, Eugene 179

Phillips, Adam 205

Minority Report (2002) 215

Phone (2002) 212, 212

Mitchell, W. J. 168

Pile, Steve 188

Moberley, L. G. 108

Pleasantville (1998) 175

Monster House (2006) 50, 50, 144

Pliny the Younger 33

Morton, Henry 100

Plutarch 33

Mueggler, Erik 215

Poltergeist (1982) 54, 97, 158, 178, 203

Mulvey, Laura 54, 135, 140, 162

Prawer, S. S. 156

Murnau, F. W. 72, 81

Prestige, The (2006) 93

Muthesius, Hermann 169

Proust, Marcel 215

Myerson, Julie 217

Psycho (1960) 54–6, 60, 217

Pulse (2001) 20, 22, 138–9, 160

Nadar, Felix 128

Pulse (2006) 23, 23

National Trust, The 216

Punter, David 76, 85, 118

Nead, Lynda 153

Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) 175

Net, The (1995) 137–8, 138

Nietzsche, Friedrich 206

Rank, Otto 157–8

Night at the Museum (2006) 45

Rebecca (1940) 145–6

2 3 9

Return, The (2007) 57, 58, 160

Stewart, Susan 175

Repulsion (1965) 144, 188

Stir of Echoes (1999) 109–10, 111

Richards, J. M. 79

Stoker, Bram 81–2

Richter, Hans 153

Stone Tape, The (1972) 87–8

Riget (1994) 115–16, 115

Student of Prague (1913) 157

Ring, The 19

Summerson, John 77

Ringu ( The Ring) (1998) 20, 208, 211

Sunset Boulevard (1950) 72–3, 73, 74

Ring 2, The (2005) 211

Surrealists, The 47, 87

Robertson, Etienne Gaspar 90–93, 92

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) 10, 21, 183, Tales of Ugetsu (1953) 209

191–2

Tanizaki, Junichiro 210

Rose Red (2002) 51–3, 51, 52, 144, 175

Terminator, The (1984) 22, 203

Ruskin, John 35, 43, 79

Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) 10, 198, 203

Safe (1995) 9, 9

Them ( Ils) (2007) 21, 53, 54

Scott, Sir Walter 156

They (2002) 110

Scooby Doo 156

Thomas, Keith 34, 156

Secret Window (2004) 124

Thir13en Ghosts (2001) 21, 189, 190, Session 9 (2001) 116–19, 117

191

Servant, The (1963) 61

This Happy Breed (1944) 14

Shimizu, Takashi 214

Todorov, Tzvetan 161

Shining, The (1980) 21, 125, 126, Toland, Greg 146

172–4, 172, 173, 174

Town Called Eureka, A (2006) 160

Shonfield, Katherine 188

Troutman, Anne 169

Silence of the Lambs (1991) 104

Truman Show, The (1998) 175

Silent Hill (2006) 112–14, 113

Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990) 145

Silly Symphony (1929) 90

Sinclair, Iain 119

Urban Ghost Story (1998) 105

Sixth Sense, The (1999) 133–4

Uninvited, The (1944) 170–72, 171

Skeleton Key (2005) 68–9

Smollett, Tobias 76

Victorian Chaise Longue (see Laski)

Smith, G. A. 94, 152

45

Soane, Sir John 44

Vidler, Anthony 12

Spider Man 3 (2007) 29–30, 29

Village, The (2004) 125–6

Spooner, Catherine 47

Stafford, Barbara 89, 144

Walton, John 151

2 4 0

Webb, Sydney and Beatrice 41

Weber, Donald 207

Welles, Orson 146–7

Wertheim, Margaret 19

What Lies Beneath (2002) 126, 127

White Noise (2005) 9, 135–7, 136, 176

Wicker Man, The (1973) 181

Wigley, Mark 193

Wilde, Oscar 124

Williams, Randall 101

Williamson, James 154

Winchester Trilogy (2002) 53

Winnicott, D. W. 142

Wisconsin Death Trip (1999) 134–5

Wishing Stairs (2003) 144

Wollen, Peter 55

Zˇizěk, Slavoj 55

Document Outline

- Imprint
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: the haunted house
- Chapter 2: gothic and the uncanny
- Chapter 3; film: 'a fragile semblance'
- Chapter 4: unreal estate
- Conclusion
- References
- Select Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Photo Acknowledgements
- Index

Table of Contents

- Imprint
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: the haunted house
- Chapter 2: gothic and the uncanny
- Chapter 3; film: 'a fragile semblance'
- Chapter 4: unreal estate
- Conclusion
- References
- Select Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Photo Acknowledgements
- Index