Film Fatale: House of the Devil, Haunted Homes and Liminal Spaces
Make it stand out
Being home alone is an underrated bliss - to sit in your underwear and watch Pretty Little Liars without judgement is a rare luxury when you have housemates, a partner or live in a busy family home. But then, inevitably, there is a vibe shift. A squeaking floor board, a gust of wind slamming a window shut, the power going off. Suddenly you’re a final girl in your own home. Is there someone behind the curtain? Is that the reflection of my own face in the window, or someone else's? The photograph of your family sitting above the fireplace becomes a pack of snarling dogs, the washing machine a growling menace under the stairs.
The fear that ensues while being home alone at night, or being in a building that just feels off, is a universal experience. The haunted house genre has been around in literature since at least the Roman Empire with writer and politician Pliny the Younger writing of a haunted home in Athens in his letters. The genre can be traced to early cinema, too, with the 1896 silent short film The House of the Devil by Georges Méliès, another haunted castle flick. The format’s popularity makes sense; take the thing that is most sacred to a person (the home) and make it unlivable. Provoke the feeling of having nowhere to go, of having what's yours taken from you, and you will strike fear into the viewer.
These feelings bleed into life today more than ever, with the growing housing crisis it can be both escapist and realist to watch a horror that revolves around a cursed home. To live in the 1979 Amityville Horror house, a huge Dutch style home on the outskirts of New York, would be a blessing to many. I can deal with mould, I can deal with abusive neighbours, and I can deal with an invasive landlord. I could probably handle a haunting for such a bargain. Watching this genre is like a celebrity Architectural Digest tour, but with an added schadenfreude.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
The haunted house genre intersects with class, as homes and land are one of the most valuable and most expensive investments, and a consistent theme is a character saying yes to a suspicious job or family saying ‘I’ll buy it!’ to a worryingly cheap house that has a murky past. One of my favourite examples is Ti West’s House of the Devil (2009): The babysitter-horror follows Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) as she gets a job to look after a couple's child in their large rural home. Upon arriving it turns out that she was lied to, and she is looking after the wife’s elderly mother. It turns out (spoiler) that the couple are Satanists and she is the ritual’s victim during the lunar eclipse taking place that night.
“The haunted house genre intersects with class, as homes and land are one of the most valuable and most expensive investments, and a consistent theme is a character saying yes to a suspicious job or family saying ‘I’ll buy it!’ to a worryingly cheap house that has a murky past.”
The job Samantha takes is clearly suspicious, but as we hear whilst she chats to her (rich) best friend played by Greta Gerwig, she really needs the money for rent and for college. She shakes off all the clear warning signs; the terrifying man who hires her, his secretive nature and the remote location. Even after Gerwig’s character attempts to persuade her to not take the job, Samantha stands her ground because she’s unable to reject $400 for four hours of work. Something her wealthy friend cannot understand.
Although Gerwig’s presence in this film is (again, spoiler) cut short, her and Donahue’s costume and hair in this film does an excellent job at making you forget this film was made in 2009. House of the Devil pays homage to the era that the haunted house genre had heightened popularity in, due to The Amityville Horror and its sensational ‘true story’ claims. The genre never lost momentum, currently it is living and breathing within the internet’s fascination with liminal space. Users are obsessed with unnerving pictures of dimly lit backrooms, vacant swimming pools and empty hallways. These are simply rooms, but even when laughing at kids on the internet for scaring themselves silly from a badly lit photograph from RightMove, you can still see where they are coming from. It can unearth the feeling of being a child, alone and sensing there is something behind you in the kitchen at 2am.
The liminal space phenomenon is not just a special interest of TikTok and YouTube browsers. Most famously, and most horrifically, liminal space takes centre stage in the 2000 novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. The experimental horror novel follows Johnny Truant, a family man who moves into a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Camcorder in hand, he crawls through the never ending maze through the mouth of a closet door, and things become surreal. A scroll through the subreddit dedicated to the book shows the commitment to this story of complex terror that begins in a family home, only getting more love 23 years on.
To take this to the screen, Barbarian (2022) directed by Zach Cregger has a House of Leaves flavour. We follow a young woman who stays at a ‘double booked’ Airbnb as she ventures into the obviously cursed basement. As she gets further down into the property, the more grotesque the situation becomes. The abnormality of the amount of space under the house is a monster itself, representing a type of hell in the place of a 5-star Airbnb.
As a child, I pictured a miscellaneous ghoul chasing me up the stairs at night as I went to get a glass of water. I sprinted from the bathroom to the bed, ensuring my ankles were not exposed for any longer than they had to be. This nondescript creature - more a ‘vibe’ than a being - became even more feasible when home alone during night. Filling in the blanks of pitch black hallways and bedrooms, my eyes assembled the nighttime fuzziness into otherworldly figures. A demon, the grim reaper, a looming home invader. These stories take pieces of these innate fears and sprinkle it into our adult lives. Skinamarink (2023) being a prime example with its experimental replication of the feeling of being a child wandering downstairs in the dark. The film gained a semi-virality during its release, which normally would be peculiar for a film with little plot, but it seemed audiences came together with their common ground: childhood fears.
Horrors set in the domestic sphere will never get old. Partly due to our longing to see homes that are homes, not new-builds that are falling apart or damp house share neglected by vampiric landlords, and partly due to the memories of our first encounters with the dark and coming to terms with the lack of safety in our own homes as children. Whether that be sitting at the top of the stairs listening to parents fight over finances, or seeing a shadowy figure materialise in the depths of your closet.
Words: Charlotte Amy Landrum