Every House is Haunted:
Horror, Homeownership, and the Domestic Ideal
december 2017Horror, Homeownership, and the Domestic Ideal
In 2007 and 2008 the world began to experience one of the worst financial disasters in modern history. As journalists, regulators and CEOs scrambled to trace the many causes of the crisis, a few narratives emerged. A reigning in of financial regulations, exemplified by the repeal of the Glass—Steagall legislation in the 1990s encouraged and allowed for more aggressive and riskier behaviour on the part of commercial banks. Conflicts of interest and corruption within ratings agencies and lenders allowed early warning signs to go unnoticed. Low interest rates in the early 2000’s encouraged borrowing on the part of consumers. And while the structures and incentives of financial capitalism undoubtably tend towards cycles of booms and busts, at the core of this particular bust lies the aspirations of millions of Americans to participate in a central tenet of the American dream, homeownership. Out of greed and ignorance creditors preyed on these aspirations by granting an abnormal amount of high risk, sub-prime mortgages which were then put to work in the market—packaged together and subjected to financial speculation. As interest rates rose, the rate of mortgage defaults skyrocketed, sparking a global crisis and turning roughly 10 million American families’ dreams of homeownership—into nightmares (NCPA, 2015).
This essay is about homes. Not any real or particular home, but about a kind of collective cultural dream-home, and what our collective nightmares may be able to reveal about this imaginary home. The home occupies a special place in the imagination—as well as the economies—of Western capitalist countries. On a strictly material level, a home is the only significant unit of capital that the average consumer can hope to accumulate in their lifetime, a hope that seems increasingly diluted to our younger generations. In countries like the United States, where private property rights are synonymous with—or arguably prioritized above —human rights, owning property is incredibly important to perceiving oneself as a successful subject under capitalism. Acquisition of property becomes associated with the acquiring of a fully mature personhood. But like the history of property rights and classifications of personhood, the constructed ideal of home ownership is inherently exclusionary.
The dream of home ownership in the United States is built upon the ideological bedrock of gendered, racial, and class hierarchies. In order to critique the dominant cultural image of the American dream-home, we must first look back to the historical and political forces which shape it. Namely, the Cold War period in which the suburban home was popularized. While aspirations of home ownership have been central to the American imagination virtually since the country’s inception, during the Cold War these aspirations took on specific exclusionary fetishistic qualities as part of the broader project of postwar “containment”. And yet, the “crisis of confidence” of the 1970s resulted in the production of particularly confrontational cultural artifacts—particularly within horror cinema. The horror genre’s depiction of the home and family during these years displays the uncanny violence which underpins these institutions.
Many horror films produced in this period of ideological crisis reveal the hegemonic ideal of homeownership as an insidious assemblage of private property and white patriarchal power. They function both as a revelation of the ideological unconscious of the time, and an broader critique of the economic and social relations of homeownership. The films analyzed here include: Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972), Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Stuart Rosenburg’s The Amityville Horror (1979), Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). The home, and its idealized white, middle-class residents are depicted as the site and source of violence and deformity in American life. The domestic ideal that has been constructed is both inherently violent to those who are excluded from it, and inherently repressive in its prescribed social roles. As events like the 2008 housing crisis demonstrate, these depictions mirror the actual racial, patriarchal, and economic violence which still haunts dreams of homeownership today.
The home is often thought of as a place of comfort, privacy and security and in the years following the Second World War, these qualities would become available to an unprecedented number of Americans. During these years the United States experienced an unprecedented economic boom. The successful transition from a productive wartime economy to an economy based on consumption bolstered the country’s GDP while programs and incentives for veterans made obtaining a mortgage possible for more families than ever. These more recent developments had been supported by the New Deal government spending of previous decades (Cohen, 63). As a result the country saw an unparalleled increase of suburbanization. “Between 1950 and 1955, the population sections of metropolitan areas lying outside the central cities grew seven times as fast as those of central cities.” (Tobin, 1). But this increase in suburban and semi-rural housing was not equally distributed. And despite the widespread economic boom, people of colour were still largely excluded from these expanding suburban communities (May, 6). While this kind of marginalization is not uncommon throughout American history, during the Cold War it was fuelled and rejuvenated by specific political motives. As Elaine Tyler May writes in her book, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, “The context of the Cold War points to previously unrecognized links between political and familial values.” (May, 11). These links would prove immensely influential in determining prospects of homeownership for years to come.
In 1946 the American charge d’affaires in Moscow, George F. Kennan, sent an 8,000 word telegram describing what he had learned about Soviet foreign policy while occupying his position. He wrote, “the main element of any United States policy towards the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies” (Kennan, 1946). As May notes, ’containment’ would become the dominant metaphor of the political, technical and cultural policies of the United States throughout the Cold War, “containment in foreign policy… containment of atomic energy in the hands of the U.S. or through ‘peaceful applications’, and ‘domestic anticommunism’ as ideological containment” were all crucial to the American narrative of national security (May, 16). While each of these examples of containment had immense consequences—including the US involvement in proxy wars in South East Asia and South America, and the tolerance and even romanticization of atomic technologies—the notion of domestic, ideological containment had the greatest influence in constructing postwar notions of the home and family.
In 1959, then Vice-President Richard Nixon travelled to Moscow to meet with Premier Nikita Khrushchev for the American National Exhibition. The exhibition was part of a diplomatic agreement meant to promote understanding among the two modern empires. The Soviets had held a similar event in New York City one month earlier. At the grand opening of the exhibition Nixon toured Khrushchev around models and demonstrations of America’s latest technologies and designs. Their interaction, which came to be known as “the kitchen debate” is perhaps one of the best examples of the importance of the suburban home to America’s broader cultural, political, and militaristic concerns. As May writes,
“What was remarkable about this exchange was its focus. The two leaders did not discuss missiles, bombs, or even modes of government. Rather, They argued over the relative merits of American and Soviet washing machines, televisions, and electric ranges” (May, 19).
The focus of the meeting on seemingly trivial consumer products served two primary purposes. It allowed Nixon to divert attention away from America’s then inferior rocket technology, and more importantly, it allowed for conflict and debate within a domain which was thought to lie as far away from military action as possible—the home. As May notes, the promotion of a very specific form of American home and family life was deeply tied to efforts of international propaganda,
“In the propaganda battles that permeated the Cold War era, American leaders promoted the American way of life as the triumph of capitalism, allegedly available to all who believed in its values. This way of life was characterized by affluence, located in suburbia, and epitomized by white middle class nuclear families” (May, 8)
This image of ideal American domesticity and the illusion of its universal attainability was crucial to creating a sense of national strength and stability. Social strife along race, gender and class lines was perceived to leave the country vulnerable to communist subversion.
The stability of this particular image of suburban living and family life was considered not only a moral imperative, but was widely considered to be the best source of security by politicians and citizens alike. As Diane Harris writes in her book Little White Houses, “owning a house was the surest way to cement one’s (and one’s family’s) inclusion in the nation.” (Harris, 17). To be a non-homeowner, or to be excluded from the prospect of homeownership was to be considered outside or on the margins of the nation. This link between citizenship, security and suburban living meant that any individual or lifestyle which represented an alternative to the white middle class nuclear family was viewed as potentially dangerous and was often treated equally, if not more harshly than those accused of having Communist sympathies. Accompanying the ‘red scare’ was the so called ‘lavender scare’ in which gay men and lesbians faced overt legal oppression and risked loosing their jobs if their sexuality was discovered, consequently losing their economic prospect of homeownership. Their sexuality was seen to place them outside of the parameters of the nuclear family whom the suburban home was reserved and not useful to capitalist processes of social reproduction. The kitchen debate was therefore not only about the functionality of appliances, but about the social roles of the individuals who used them. The housewife functioned as a trophy of American capitalism. Conversely, as May notes, to be a self-sufficient working women was to be un-American, “anti-communist crusaders viewed women who did not conform to the domestic ideal with suspicion” (May, 22). Regarding a demonstration of modern American washing machines, Nixon said to Khrushchev,
“To us diversity, the right to choose, is the most important thing. We don’t have one decision made at the top by one government official… We have many different manufacturers and many different kinds of washing machines so that the housewives have a choice.” (May, 20)
Middle to upper class white housewives could have their pick of various glamorous and modern domestic technologies. They could not however, choose not to be a housewife at all, at least without significant social and economic consequences. The conservation of constrained gender roles and rampant consumerism became key components of the ideological war with the Soviets, and the domestic culture of containment in the United States. Those mainly white, heterosexual and middle-class individuals to whom suburban living was available then faced immense pressure to conform to a virtually unattainable ideal while others where excluded from that dream altogether.
The U.S. policy of containment concerned with reducing social conflict in order to maintain the hegemony of the white middle-class nuclear family included a two fold approach of repression and appeasement. In order to project the superiority of American consumer capitalism, it was important for it to appear as though the American dream was available to as many citizens as possible. The economic prosperity of the postwar years meant that many European ethnic minorities could afford to move out of relatively segregated urban communities and into the suburbs. Ethnic minorities such as Jews, the Irish and Italians could largely learn to assimilate and negotiate their whiteness within these communities (Lipsitz, 7). But while concessions were granted to black Americans in the form of school desegregation and access to public transportation during the post war years, there was a marked hesitance to change any laws or policies which could have been seen to alter established conventions of private property rights. As May points out, well into the 1960s—while some civil rights battles were being won for black Americans—racial segregation was allowed to prevail in the suburbs, “where the Federal Housing Authority and lending banks maintained redlining policies that prevented black Americans from obtaining home mortgages.” (May, 10). Despite the importance of mitigating racial strife to maintaining the appearance of national stability (the Soviet Union often pointed to the circumstances of African Americans as proof of American’s hypocrisy) white Americans and politicians were not prepared to grant equality in the realms of homeownership and property rights. Between 1934 and 1962 the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration financed more than $120 billion in new housing, “but less than 2 percent of this real estate was available to nonwhite families” (Lipsitz, 6). Even if Black Americans could afford a house in the suburbs, white homeowners would often refuse to sell to them or exclude them from the community. At the heart of this exclusion is the denial of citizenship and full participation in the American economy. As George Lipsitz points out in his book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, racial categories are intimately tied to notions of property and accumulation. Lipsitz writes,
“white supremacy is usually less a matter of direct, referential, and snarling contempt and more a system for protecting the privileges of whites by denying communities of colour opportunities for asset accumulation and upward mobility.” (Lipsitz, viii).
Policies and ideologies regarding who the prospect of homeownership is available to are directly related to racial oppression. Diane Harris takes this argument a step further, positing that postwar discourses regarding home ownership and suburban living constituted a lexicon of whiteness which tied ideas of citizenship, whiteness, and homeownership tightly together. To exclude a portion of the population from any of these categories was to exclude them from all of them. The vernacular and design of suburban living became synonymous with whiteness, “words such as informality, casual lifestyle, leisure, individuality, privacy, uncluttered, and even clean constituted a lexicon for whiteness and middle-class identity” (Harris, 60). This language circulated in advertisements, entertainment and magazines providing “articulations of the expected and hoped-for occupants for postwar housing.” (Harris, 17).
It is important to remember that discourses of who houses are for and the racial codification of property rights both predate and outlast the postwar period. The political and cultural pressures which I have been describing simply make the early Cold War years exemplary of the explicit and implicit connections between homeownership and identity. These policies had—and continue to have—long term effects which are still observable today. Lipsitz writes, “by 1993, 86 percent of suburban whites still lived in places with a black population below 1 percent.” (Lipsitz, 7). The image of the suburban home as being occupied by a white, middle-class, heteronormative nuclear family is therefore both historically tied to the postwar period and hugely influential in shaping the realities and dreams of home ownership today. In Marxist terms the commodity of the suburban home was ascribed fetishistic qualities based on racial, gendered, and class based social relations. It is also important to note that the rhetoric of domestic containment recurs frequently in periods of economic uncertainty or political instability. This is exemplified by the Reaganite return to traditional values of the 1980s, as well as in post-911 language surrounding the family as a source of stability, and the importance of mass consumption to stabilizing the American economy and identity. This simultaneous temporal dislocation and localization also applies to the representations of houses and families which appear in the films analyzed below. Each film tells us something about the time in which they were made, but are also relevant to the idea of the home and family more broadly. But just as it was important to understand the historical context of the time in which the suburban home was popularized, we must also attempt to understand the historical circumstances which contribute to the relevance of 1970s horror cinema to the project of critiquing the institutions of homeownership and the nuclear family.
While containment would serve as the guiding mandate throughout the Cold War, it nonetheless remained an impossible ideal. The complete homogenization and stabilization of the social and economic lives of Americans was unrealistic and unattainable. Cracks in efforts of post-war containment would soon begin to manifest closest to home. As Barbara Ehrenreich argues, men felt a deep conflict between masculine notions of adventure, individuality, and sexual promiscuity—and the responsibilities of being a breadwinner, provider, and father. And as Betty Friedan helped bring to light, the prescribed gender roles of the home produced deeply troubling feelings of boredom, depression, anxiety, and unfulfillment for many American housewives. From their relative positions of privilege, men and women who were subjected to the social and sexual repression of the domestic ideal began to rebel. And despite the general economic prosperity of the postwar years, those populations which were most oppressed soon became increasingly vocal. May writes, “Ultimately, containment proved to be an elusive goal. But it held sway on the diplomatic and domestic levels well into the 1960s, when it collapsed in disarray.” (May, 17). The events of the 1960s and early 1970s would put irreconcilable cracks in the foundation of the American dream, rendering many of its core institutions terrifyingly uncanny.
In November of 1963, many American families would turn on their televisions to find that their young, progressive President, John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed in public. Six months earlier civil rights activist Medgar Evers had also been murdered. These violent deaths would mark the beginning of a decade of shocking and disheartening assassinations including the killings of Malcolm X in 1965, and Senator Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Beyond politicians and civil rights leaders, the 60s were also home to sensationalistic and violent crimes that would seem unprecedented to many middle-class Americans. In 1966 Charles Whitman climbed the steps of a tower at the University of Texas and begin to open fire. That same year Richard Speck raped and murdered eight student nurses in Chicago. These seemingly random and brutal acts were committed by relatively average looking white men and directed towards regular citizens who by all accounts had done nothing to deserve their fate. Thanks to the recent popularization and domestication of television, events such as these were beamed into suburban living rooms, invading the nuclear family’s private sphere of comfort and security. And as violence seemed to erupt in American cities, attempts at the global containment of communist influence would pull the country deeper into a confused and morally bankrupt proxy war in Vietnam.
In 1968, the same year Bobby Kennedy and MLK Jr. were assassinated, Walter Cronkite would declare that the American war in Vietnam was “unwinnable". One year later the American public would learn of an the event that would come to be known as the My Lai Massacre. American troops had raped, tortured, and murdered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians. As Linnnie Blake writes in her book The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma, and National Identity,
“Broadcast across the news media, pictures of the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai and the murder of American students at Kent State provided the nation with haunting images of the utter degeneration of the American ideal of freedom.” (Blake, 73)
Events such as these forced many Americans to question the notion that their country was a force for good in the world. The eventual defeat of the US military in Vietnam would also cast doubt on the country’s strength and authority on the global stage. For all of the social and political upheaval of the 1960s, the “love generation” was still largely characterized by an energetic optimism for most of the decade. But directly following the so called “summer of love” in 1967, the hippie followers of Charles Manson would go on a killing spree. The early 70s witnessed the embarrassment and impeachment of the country’s foremost patriarchal authority by way of the Watergate scandal, and the oil crisis would bring about the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Closer to home, divorce rates rose as second wave feminism and the sexual revolution worked to change gender dynamics in the home and the workplace. All of this would contribute to what President Jimmy Carter would later call, “the crisis of confidence” in the established and institutionalized authorities of the country. These authorities were invariably white, patriarchal and built upon a belief in the benevolence of consumer capitalism. Blake writes, “the gulf between the nation’s foundational mythology and its contemporary realities perceptibly widened.” (Blake, 72). It is this chasm between the mythology of America’s foundational ideals of freedom and the ‘good life’, and the realities of the country’s ongoing racist, colonial, and patriarchal project which come to light in the cultural products of the 1970s, perhaps most vividly in horror cinema.
The tumultuous cultural and political circumstances of the 1960s and early 1970s contributed to a widespread questioning of the country’s role in the world and of the legitimacy of its central institutions, including the home and family. Films like Easy Rider (1969), Little Big Man (1970), and Midnight Cowboy (1969) depicted a darker and more ambiguous vision of American myths of Western expansion and manifest destiny, but most mainstream cinema located the country’s decay within urban centres. And while this period led to the production of much interesting and unconventional film, music, and writing—often characterized as what Robin Wood might call “incoherent texts”—it was within the horror genre that some of the most scathing and disturbing critiques of the country’s norms would manifest. As Wood writes,
“The great period of the American horror film was the period of Watergate and Vietnam: the genre required a moment of ideological crisis for its full significance to emerge, the immediate cultural breakdown calling into question far more than a temporary political situation” (Wood, 133)
Here Wood touches upon both the very specific temporal circumstances which led to the production of some of the most distinctive films in the horror genre, while simultaneously acknowledging the ability of these films to comment on the political violence on which this country was based, and which still haunts it today. Arguably beginning in the 1960s, the family and the home become increasingly prevalent subjects of horror cinema. And as Wood argues, this transition correlates to the genre’s gradual shift away from its gothic European roots. “The process whereby horror becomes associated with its true milieu, the family is reflected in its steady geographical progress toward America.” (Wood, 85). It is posited that the family is the true home of the horror genre, and that there is something distinctly American about this relationship.
The structures of suburban living and family life which were established in postwar America put immense pressures on white middle-class men to fit into the role of breadwinner—acquiring what would likely be the family’s only inheritable asset, the home. The pressure placed on their female counterparts was exponentially more severe, and those who were excluded from the prospect of suburban home ownership and traditional family life altogether were subjected to to an even greater degree of violence and marginalization. The genre’s gravitation towards the family and the domestic sphere appears quite natural given the layers of oppression, and bundles of anxieties which reside there. The prevalence of protest and criticism in this period is also compatible with one of the horror genre’s central appeals, the “fulfillment of our nightmare wish to smash the norms that oppress us and which our moral conditioning teaches us to revere.” (Wood, 80). There are few American institutions which are more revered than the nuclear family, and more respected than aspirations of homeownership.
The films discussed below each deal with one or more of these subjects to varying degrees. These films also either explicitly or implicitly comment on the time in which they were made. Before I begin my analysis of the texts, I would like to make a brief note regarding scope and methodology. Apart from their classification as horror films, the themes and events of the films discussed below may sometimes appear dissimilar. The earliest was made in 1972, while the most recent was released in 1982. As a result each film’s treatment of the home and the family often widely varies and one can observe a visible trend towards conservatism and simplicity as the decade goes on. As a result some films may appear to offer a more overt critique of traditional institutions, while others may offer something more like a demonstration of the violence these institutions perpetuate. Authorial intention, or the overt politics of the films’ creators are of little interest to this project. Of primary interest is what the narrative and generic conventions of the horror genre can reveal about the ideal of homeownership and family life through the visual medium of film. As such, full narrative arches and singular images will be given equal weight in my analysis. Also of note is the question of theoretical framework. Much of the contemporary film criticism on the horror film utilizes theories of psychoanalysis. While these kind of analyses undoubtably contribute valuable insights to the field, for the purposes of this project I would like to focus on the material relations between workers, men, women, families, and homeownership as it is depicted in the texts. My analysis leans more towards Stuart Hall’s notion of an “ideological unconscious”, where deeply historicized structures manifest themselves in the grammatical and formal assumptions of cultural utterances (Hall, 70). This being said, the psychoanalytic concept of the “uncanny” is useful in illuminating the particular kind of horror which these films evoke.
In a self acknowledged departure from much of his other work, Freud turns to literature and aesthetics in order to formulate what he calls, a “theory of the qualities of feeling.” (Freud, 219). The feeling about which Freud sets out to theorize is that of the uncanny. He notes that the uncanny is undoubtably akin to feelings of “dread and horror” but insists that it contains something more distinct. Freud points to the German etymology of the word. “Heimliche" denotes feelings which are “friendly, intimate, and homelike”. “Unheimliche” or uncanny therefore denotes a feeling of unease, inhospitableness, malice, or fear. But the feeling of the unheimliche is not the result of the introduction of something strange or terrible into a familiar setting. Freud writes, “the uncanny in reality is nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only through the process of repression” (Freud, 124). Here Freud uses a few terms relevant to our discussion of homeownership and horror, namely “foreign”, and “estranged”. An antonym of foreign is obviously domestic, bringing to mind both the home itself as a domestic space, and the ideologies of domestic containment which characterize the fetishistic nature of the suburban home as a commodity. The second term, “estranged” recalls Marx’ diagnosis of private property—the foundation of homeownership—as the product of “estranged labor” (Marx, 117). On the process of production and alienated labor Marx writes that, “the life which [the worker] has conferred on the object [of his labor] confronts him as something hostile and alien” (Marx, 108). Marx’ description of estranged labor, and its product—private property, commodities—bares a striking resemblance to Freud’s explanation of the uncanny. That which should be familiar reveals itself as something “hostile” and “alien”, even horrifying. Marx also notes a difference in perspective or experience between the capitalist and the estranged worker,
“It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things—but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty—but for the worker deformity.” (Marx, 110) (emphasis added)
Perhaps some of the work done in these films, in rendering the white middle class family home uncanny, has to do with visualizing the violent and exploitative systems on which that institution is based. Displaying it in all its hostility and deformation. The feeling evoked by these horror films set in family homes, in quaint suburbia, the idilic upstate countryside, or the beautiful Colorado mountains does not stem from an invasion of horror into these spaces. Instead, an uncanny horror radiates from the spaces themselves, and from the people and commodities which occupy them.
“And the Road Leads to Nowhere”, Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972)
I see the 50s apartment house
Bleak in the morning sun
But I still love the 50s
And I still love the old world
I wanna keep my place in the old world
Keep my place in the arcane
Cause I still love my parents and I still love the old world
—Jonathan Richmond & the Modern Lovers (1972)
Directed by Wes Craven and released in 1972, The Last House on the Left provides a scathing commentary on the failure of traditional authority figures and the violent potential of the nuclear family and their quaint family home. It is the eve of Mari Collingwood’s seventeenth birthday. She’s on her way to attend a rock concert with her friend Phylis as her loving parents John and Estelle prepare a surprise party in their secluded country home. While attempting to buy drugs the girls are captured by a group of escaped criminals who eventually rape and murder them in the woods outside Mari’s house. Seeking shelter for the night, the criminals are unknowingly taken in to the Collingwood’s home. When they discover what their new house guests have done to their daughter, the Collingwoods proceed to methodically and elaborately murder the criminals. The film reaches its climax when John Collingwood butchers Krug, the leader of the band of criminals, in his living room with a chainsaw. While many of the films analyzed below comment on the historical trauma and cultural disillusionment of the early 1970s, Last House does so most directly.
As John Collingwood reads the newspaper towards the beginning of the film, his wife asks, “What’s new in the outside world?”. He replies, “Same old stuff, murder and mayhem.”. In what can be observed as a common occurrence throughout these films, images or messages of violence and chaos are transmitted into the domestic sphere via mass media—invading the white family’s private, segregated world. Later, the girls will learn of the escaped murderers on the car radio. This also helps to place the film within the 1970s moment in which “murder and mayhem” appears to be the cultural norm, at least outside of the home. The band that Mari and Phylis are supposed to see is called Bloodlust, and is known for dismembering chickens live on stage. Mari’s mother asks her rhetorically, “all that blood and violence. I thought you were supposed to be the love generation?”. As an early birthday present her parents give her a necklace with a peace sign pendent. The hope and optimism of the love generation has faded giving way to feelings of ubiquitous, arbitrary violence. The music played in the beginning of the film oscillates between lighthearted and folksy, and darkly psychedelic. The recurring lyrics echo feelings of 70s disillusionment following the tumultuous but sanguine mood of the 1960s. “And the road leads to nowhere” sings a drawn out, reverberating voice. But for all of its bleak 70s malaise, much of the film reinforces the Collingwood’s belief that the “the outside world” is indeed the only site of murder and mayhem, while at the same time, quietly suggesting that this assertion will soon be undercut.
When the two girls are first trapped by Krug and his perverse chosen family of criminals, they are drawn into their motel room in town by the promise of buying marijuana. Things soon take a disturbing turn as the girls are threatened at knifepoint and Phylis is sexually assaulted. This scene is intercut with images of John and Estelle Collingwood decorating the house for Mari’s birthday, and baking a cake while uncomfortably jovial music plays. Upon first viewing the editing of these scenes may suggest a stark contrast between the hospitable and loving atmosphere of the home, and the violence and depravity occurring at the motel. In hindsight however, it is more likely that the intercutting between these two scenes is meant to foreshadow the domestically bound violence to come. From a broader perspective the general trajectory of the film is a topological enclosing of violence on the site of the home. The brutality creeps from the motel, to the woods across from the Collingwood’s house, where the girls are killed. Later, while the Collingwood’s are enacting their revenge, Estelle will seduce one of her daughter’s killers, first drawing him outside of the domestic space—to the “outside world”—where she is then able to humiliate, castrate, and kill him. Finally, in a patriarchal struggle Dr. Collingwood overpowers Krug, disembowelling him with a chainsaw in their living room. This display of deranged violence not only takes place in the family home, but is perpetrated by the family, rendering both uncomfortably uncanny. The immense moral weight placed on the protection of the family and the home is taken to its extreme conclusion in the Collingwood’s revenge. Despite the abhorrent and disgusting actions of Mari’s assailants, the depravity demonstrated by the Collingwoods nonetheless leaves the viewer disturbed. But the uncanny does not only stem from their actions, it can also be observed in the juxtaposition between the Collingwood’s traditional nuclear family and the perverted and fragmented family of criminals.
Krug Stillo is the figurative patriarch of his band of rapists and murderers. They consist of his fellow escapee, Weasel, his heroine addict son Junior, and his girlfriend Sadie. The group presents as an uncanny double of the Collingwood’s loving and protective nuclear family. In Michael Fiddler’s essay Playing Funny Games in The Last House on the Left, he asserts that in the home invasion genre it is the responsibility of the father to bring the home back to a state of “purity” once it has been invaded. This rhetoric of purity recalls what Diane Harris calls the “lexicon of whiteness” which is constructed in conjunction with the suburban home. Although Krug’s “family” does not represent a racial other, their class position, criminality, and potentially their sexuality, code them as an undesirable ‘other’ which does not belong in the white middle class family home. Sadie is referred to as a “dyke” throughout the film and she shows an interest in the sexual assault of the girls. When she calls Krug a “male chauvinist dog”, Krug asks if she has been reading “those creep women’s lib magazines.” When she first enters the Collingwood home, Sadie says to the men, “Being in this house makes me wish I was a lady.”, demonstrating an acknowledgment that for a women to occupy the domestic sphere they must adhere to a feminine ideal exemplified by the dutiful housewife. At the dinner scene the group resembles a parody of the middle-class family. They wear dishevelled formal wear and when asked what they do, Weasel answers that they are plumbers—a job he sees as respectable and high paying—while Sadie says they are in insurance, recognizing the importance of white collar work to conforming to the middle-class ideal. Mr and Mrs Collingwood have already displayed hints of classism in their suspicion of Phylis who comes from a working class family and lives in a “bad neighbourhood”. All of this contributes to marking Krug’s “family” as an impurity that must be purged from the home, and it is the father’s responsibility to do so.
The father’s relationship to the home is one of deep ambivalence. Many of the oppressive social ideologies deployed under the mandate of containment functioned to maintain the primacy of the white middle-class father as the rightful property owner. Consequently to say that the capitalist class has historically been near synonymous with the category of white fathers is far from an overstatement. This however also puts immense pressure on men to assume their prescribed role as breadwinner, provider and protector. And while the male breadwinner takes on the financial responsibility of homeownership, the home itself is coded as a feminine space which is often depicted as having emasculating effects. The early depictions of John Collingwood are noticeably feminized. He helps his wife bake a birthday cake and wears a pink dress shirt. But later in the film the house itself becomes his weapon, and while he is physically weaker than the controlling and aggressive Krug, it is his possession and mastery of the home which gives him the upper hand. The house’s door knobs, coat hangers, and very electrical infrastructure are fastened as boobie-traps to electrocute and incapacitate the rival patriarch. The chainsaw he retrieves from the basement, the space in the home which typically holds the man’s tools and toys, along with the garage, allows John to vanquish his perverse double while simultaneously revealing his own uncanny perversity. As Robin Wood writes about the end of the film, “the road leads to nowhere.’ The last image is of the parents collapsed together in empty victory, drenched in blood.” (Wood, 128).
The Last House on the Left posits the nurturing and protective institutions of America as being capable of just as much perversity and violence as its most abject subjects. The family becomes the murderous soldiers of white middle class hegemony, tasked with the extermination of the other in order to purify the home—that sacred site of the “American way of life” (May, 8). But the film also evokes the confused and disillusioned moment in American history in which such unmerciful critiques of beloved American institutions became possible within popular culture. Wood again,
“The domination of the family by the father, the domination of the nation by the bourgeois class and its norms, and the domination of other nations and other ideologies (more precisely, attempts at domination that inevitably fail and turn to mutual destruction)—the structures interlock, are basically a single structure. My Lai was not an unfortunate occurrence out there: it was created within the American home.” (Wood, 128)
Without explicitly referencing Vietnam, Kent State, Charles Whitman, or one of many political assassinations, The Last House on the Left locates America’s violent and oppressive tendencies in the white middle class family, and their protection of their private kingdom, the suburban home.
“My Family’s Always Been in Meat”, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
I don’t want no hippie pad
I want a house just like mom and dad
—The Descendants (1982)
Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre perhaps represents the peak of the cultural and stylistic chaos of the 1970s horror film. Both Hooper and Craven’s film can be incredibly difficult to watch because of the brutality of their subject matter and the erratic camerawork and editing. In Hooper’s film the Age of Aquarius has come to an end and once again the radio brings our characters news of industrial accidents, economic and infrastructural collapse, “daughters chained in the attic by their parents”, and “oil wars in the Amazon”. Instability and violence from within and without. Returning to their rural Texas hometown, Sally and her wheelchair bound brother Franklin have to check on their grandparents’ graves after a string of grave robberies and corpse desecrations in the area. They are accompanied by Sally’s boyfriend Jerry, and another couple, Kirk and Pam. The group plans to spend the weekend at their grandparents old house but their getaway is cut short when they trespass on the land of a family of out of work slaughterhouse workers who have been forced to find other outlets for their obsolete skillset.
The film’s opening shot reveals a tableau of decomposing corpses, “a female corpse is posed in the lap of a male corpse in a hideous parody of domesticity) as ‘a grisly work of art’” (Wood, 93). Neither of the “families” depicted in the film adhere to the traditional nuclear family which was so central to the ideal of American living, and both of the featured houses are either outwardly dilapidated or inwardly grotesque. Both families are incomplete and dysfunctional. Franklin is consistently bullied and made to feel left out but he is also nagging and morbidly curious of the self harming hitchhiker they pick up. His handicap is considered a burden by Sally and her friends. Together they represent a new age hippie family, ostensibly progressive in their beliefs, but also inescapably elitist. Kirk acts as the alpha male and paternal figure of the group. When Franklin worries that the hitchhiker may be coming back for him, he reassures himself, “he’s probably afraid Kirk would kill him.”. But Kirk is already dead, bludgeoned on the head with a sledge hammer when he wandered into the neighbouring house in search of gasoline. Patriarchal authorities are rendered impotent or dispatched of with ease. The other family is comprised of the hitchhiker, his brother Leatherface, their father who works at the gas station and barbecue down the road, and their near dead grandfather. The family is motherless and their revered patriarch, the grandfather, is largely incapacitated—his flesh already appearing to rot as he sits slumped in his wheelchair. The father holds little authority and his son constantly refers to him as “just a cook”, demeaning him on the basis of his relation to domestic—and therefore feminine—work.
In another dinner scene, once Sally has been captured, Leatherface dawns a female mask and brings food to the table—playing the role of mother as if attempting to maintain the illusion of a traditional nuclear family. When it comes time to kill Sally, the family decides to give their grandfather the honours, but he too is revealed to be impotent. Unable to muster enough strength even to hold the hammer—the old patriarch can no longer keep it up long enough to finish the job. All the while the rest of the family is frantic. As Wood notes about the film, “not only have the five young victims no control over their destiny, but their slaughterers (variously psychotic and degenerate) keep losing control of themselves and each other” (Wood, 90). But despite their random and uncontrollable actions the source of the family’s derangement has a seemingly traceable origin: industrial capitalism.
When Sally and her friends first encounter the hitchhiker in their van he explains that his whole family used to work at the nearby slaughterhouse. “My family’s always been in meat”, he tells them. They were let go when the slaughterhouse introduced new technology—replacing the sledgehammer with the air gun as the primary mode of killing livestock. Upon hearing this Sally interjects, “Grandpa used to sell his cattle to the slaughterhouse”, establishing Sally’s family as owners of capital in contrast to the working class locals. One could easily imagine that this family once resembled the white middle class ideal during years of postwar prosperity, when homeownership was a more realistic prospect at least for a narrow demographic segment. In the face of the cold and uncaring nature of industrial capitalism, the family had to turn to other means to maintain their home and hold their family together. Wood writes, “The family, after all, only carries to its logical conclusion the basic, though unstated, tenet of capitalism, that people have the right to live off of other people.” (Wood, 93). This logic is demonstrated both in their cannibalistic source of nourishment (which it is implied they have utilized as a new source of income in the form of the barbecue) and in the material construction of their home.
Even disassociated from the narrative, the physical manifestation of the home which the film presents offers an apt visualization of the violence on which the dream of homeownership and the prioritization of private property is based. If as Marx suggests, the capitalist sees beauty in property while the worker sees deformity, perhaps the vision of the home which Massacre presents could be said to come from a kind of proletarian gaze.
And while in the 1970s the welfare state did ensure that even many blue collar workers could at least afford to finance a home, the general relationship between workers and the commodities they produce remains one of alienation and estrangement. The frequent use of off kilter dutch angles and abrasive camera movement render otherwise normal staircases and hallways strange. Just as the extreme close up of Sally’s terrified eyes cause them to appear monstrous, the closer one looks into the house, the more grotesque it becomes. The home is furnished by couches, lamps and tables literally constructed from human bones, teeth, and flesh. The ‘chandelier’ which hangs over and illuminates the dinner table is a human head. When Sally runs upstairs into the grandparents room the walls, handrail, and bannister are blood red. Down the main hallway and through a large, steel, sliding door is the kitchen. It resembles the back room of a butchers shop—equipped with chest freezers, meat hooks, and a chopping block. As Wood writes, “The borderline between home and slaughterhouse (between leisure and work) has disappeared—the slaughterhouse has invaded the home” (Wood, 90). The family’s vocation is displaced upon the home. This conflation of work and domesticity functions as an uncanny revelation of the kind of social reproduction which the home and family perform, as well as the kind of labour which is necessitated to turn dreams of homeownership into a reality.
“Houses Don’t have Memories”, Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror (1979)
Watch out, you might get what you’re after
Cool babies, strange but not a stranger
I’m an ordinary guy
Burning down the house
—The Talking Heads (1983)
Released later in the decade than the previous two films, Stuart Rosenberg’s 1979 film, The Amityville Horror can be characterized as “blockbuster horror”. Based on Jay Anson’s 1977 book of the same name, Stephen King has called The Amityville Horror, “the primal haunted house story” (Baily, 55). Newlyweds George and Kathy Lutz move their family into a large, old, three story house. Though it is expensive, the price of the house is discounted due to the horrible murders which occurred there a year earlier. A father killed his entire family before turning a shotgun on himself. Soon the family begins to experience strange and violent phenomena, and George’s behaviour grows aggressive and erratic. Stylistically the film does not reflect the political and cultural turmoil of the early 70s to the same extent as The Last House on the Left, or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And while those films depict traditional authorities as either absent, or comedically incompetent (a pair of dim witted police officers futilely attempt to warn the Collingwoods about the escapees, only to show up after the climactic murder), in Amityville, traditional institutions are depicted somewhat more respectfully. The stereotypical “good cop” character seems genuinely worried about the strange occurrences in the house, and is suspicious of George’s behaviour. The family priest continually tries to intervene despite the disbelief of his colleagues and superiors. This relatively renewed faith in the professionalism or competence of the country’s traditional patriarchal authorities is indicative of a trend towards conservatism which emerges in the genre towards the end of the 1970s and comes to full fruition in the more formulaic films of the 1980s. The period is marked by a reassertion of ‘traditional’ family values, and the strategic re-ignition of Cold War tensions in the service of certain political ends. As such many of the popular horror films produced at this time do not contain the emancipatory potential born from the chaos of films produced earlier in the decade. In other words, instead of fulfilling “our nightmare wish to smash the norms that oppress us” they tend to ultimately reinforce those norms, and reassure the audience of their benevolence (Wood, 80). But despite the film’s relative lack of cinematic artistry, its strict adherence to haunted house tropes inadvertently addresses many of the anxieties surrounding aspirations of home ownership and the American dream. Through the Lutz family’s ordeal, we are presented with an image of homeownership rife with gender and class tensions, and an image of the home itself as a monstrous vessel of historic violence.
As Kathy and George Lutz are toured around their future home by a nervous real estate agent, they try to conceal their enthusiasm. “Be cool” George tells his wife, knowing that under normal circumstances, appearing too excited about a prospective home will likely result in an inflated price tag. Throughout the film the couple, and especially George, is anxious about their finances. He is a partner in a small, independent land surveying business. Despite the house’s significantly discounted price, he expresses that it would still be an overextension of their budget. But the offer is too good to refuse, and they move their family in a month later. George begins to spend all of his time at the house, neglecting his business. He chops wood all day, constantly feeding the home’s fireplace. His money problems begin to accumulate when the house seemingly absorbs his brother-in-law’s wedding fund, causing George to promise to pay his caterer. Later his business partner informs him that the business is failing due to his absence, and that they are being hounded by the IRS. Upon hearing the news George is unreasonably frustrated, but his aggression stems less from the expenses themselves then their distraction from his ‘duties’ at the house. The film depicts a parasitic relationship between the home and homeowner in which the house demands an unceasing supply of fuel and labour. George grows increasingly tired, sickly, and unstable. This relationship is analogous to that of the mortgage lender, and the borrower. As Maurizio Lazzarato writes in The Making of the Indebted Man,
“The debtor-creditor relationship…intensifies mechanisms of exploitation and domination at every level of society, for within it no distinction exists between workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers…Everyone is a debtor accountable to and guilty before capital.” (Lazzarato, 7)
Unlike the working class family of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, George is technically a capitalist, a small business owner. Still the available avenues to homeownership require the more meagre of the propertied class to enter into an exploitative relationship with capital. This hostile relationship between George and his property not only wears on him, it seemingly changes him into someone else.
As the film progresses we watch George transition from a stern but loving father figure—trying to assimilate into his new family—to an uncompromising and short tempered patriarch. But as it has been suggested above, what makes this transformation so terrifying is not that George turns into something new and utterly different from himself. Instead, we are provided with another instance of the uncanny, in which George’s violent behaviour is disturbing precisely because the viewer has a previous inclination that the potential for violence was always present. That the figure of patriarch and property owner is always already unheimliche. Lipsitz proposes that, “while one can possess one’s investments, one can also be possessed by them.” (Lipsitz, viii). Both in George’s increasingly aggressive behaviour, and in the opening scene which depicts the mass murder which previously took place in the house, the film suggests that these men are somehow possessed by the spirit of the property. During the initial murders we see Ronald Defeo Jr. shoot his family with a shotgun. But instead of showing Defeo when the shots are fired, the film cuts to an exterior shot of the house—showing its eye-like windows as they light up with each blast. The impression is that it is not just a man committing this heinous act, but somehow the house itself—or some insidious assemblage of the two. When George’s partner’s wife begins to tear at the basement wall where she senses paranormal energy, he reacts angrily, “What the hell are you doing to my house!”, as if the wall is a part of him. At the climax of the film George finally attempts to bring his family to safety. Now the house reacts, pouring blood from the stairs and walls in a manner well beyond the oozing fluid and strange smells we have seen earlier in the film. The house’s deepest core—the basement—becomes nothing but a pit of blood, mirroring the sink hole that the house represents for George’s energy and finances. As Dale Baily points out in his analysis of the haunted house formula in American literature, “Most of the supernatural events… have nothing to do with ghosts; rather, they tend to manifest themselves in the structural integrity of the house itself.” (Baily, 58). But the film does offer a potential origin for the house’s evil beyond the material facets of the home. It was built, on a Shinnecock aboriginal burial ground.
It has become a trope in haunted house films that the home itself, or the land on which it was built should be revealed to have a gruesome and violent history. In Amityville, like in many films of the genre, it is the trope of the “Indian burial ground” which identifies the incitement of the property’s history of violence. And while this may be a predictable and cliched plot device, I would like to suggest that it offers an interesting opportunity to critique notions of private property which underpin our collective obsession with homeownership. When the couple are still debating if they should purchase the house, Kathy asks George if the previous year’s murders affect his decision making. George responds reassuringly, “Houses don’t have memories.”. But the events of the film—and of countless others—consistently refute this claim. These films seem to insist, if only through their adherence to a generic formula, that the primordial sins of America will always continue to haunt secluded lakeside properties, and idilic suburban communities. In Amityville, when George researches the history of his property, he learns of its origins as a kind of Aboriginal sanatarium, its previous occupation by literal Devil worshippers, and of course, the familial murders which took place the previous year. The suggestion that the violence of the past will always continue to haunt the present—never dissipating, only compounding—questions the very notion of “owning” property. It refutes the belief that property could ever truly belong to anyone separate from its origins, which as French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon asserts, always lies in theft. The previous residents and occupants, and the circumstances in which that land was taken from them will always haunt the property. This idea is asserted further in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in which the haunted house formula is applied to an isolated, grand hotel, but this is discussed in more detail below.
The family’s introduction into domestic space does not only affect George by way of financial burden, it also places increased tensions on their gendered and familial relationships. George’s position as patriarch is established as precarious from the beginning of the film. He has just married Kathy, but her children are not his, questioning the legitimacy of his patriarchal authority. It is even suggested that his desire to assimilate into the family plays a role in his decision to purchase the house, which Kathy seemed to fall in love with. The more time he spends in the domestic sphere, the more aggressively he seems to need to assert his authority. He becomes obsessed with manual labor around the house and eventually yells that the kids, “need some God damn discipline”. When Kathy interrupts him as he is cutting firewood outside, he warns her menacingly, “Don’t ever do that, come up to a man with an axe in his hands.”. Much like the chainsaw in Massacre and Last House, the axe is a tool of labour, and is therefore coded as masculine. While at times George will appear overly masculine, as if suffering from testosterone poisoning, in other moments he is revealed as impotent. When he and Kathy try to have sex he cannot keep an erection and Kathy has to reassure him that “he has nothing to prove”. Kathy also seems to feel pressured to live up to a domestic ideal of femininity. She is constantly looking at herself in the mirror, practicing ballet poses as if trying to literally perform a graceful and beautiful vision of womanhood. She recoils in fear when she looks in the mirror to see that her reflection appears ugly and scarred. Not only concerned with her own appearance as a woman, Kathy also obsesses over the appearance of her home and what it may reflect about her new position as a housewife. When her Aunt, a nun, is supposed to come visit she repeatedly asks George to help clean up and reiterates the gravity of the situation, “We’ve always been a bunch of renters and this is the first time any of us have bought a house”, she says. As their situation escalates, George blames Kathy for pushing him into the decision to buy. She suggests that they leave for the safety of their children. Unhinged, George replies, “You’re the one who wanted this house!”, demonstrating the marital resentment that reaching for the dream of owning a beautiful home has caused them. But despite these tensions, the film ultimately reassures us of the primacy of the family and the isolated nature of this incident. The family escape the hostile house and drive into the distance. A title card reads, “George and Kathleen Lutz and their family never reclaimed their house or their personal belongings. Today they live in another state.”. In the previous two films the impression given is that the characters who survived are traumatized by their experiences, and will have to live with that terror for the rest of their lives. Because the horror is not rooted in one isolated home or situation, it is carried with them everywhere. In Amityville the danger is localized in the house, an isolated incident within an otherwise benevolent institution. In what would become typical of the family horror films of the 1980s, the audience needs to be ultimately reassured of the safety and primacy of the family and the home.
“The Grass Grows Greener on Every Side”, Tobe Hooper (and Steven Speilberg’s) Poltergeist (1982)
We sit glued to the TV set all night (and every night)
Why go into the outside world at all (it’s such a fright!)
TV news shows what it’s really like out there (it’s a scare)
You can go out if you want (We wouldn’t dare)
—Black Flag (1982)
The Amityville Horror stylistically and narratively gestures towards a resurgence of a more conservative and more conventional genus of horror film. By the time Poltergeist was released in 1982, the genre was largely void of the more ideologically and cinematically challenging elements which characterized the films of the early 70s. These had been replaced by bigger budget blockbuster fair and low-budget slasher films, the artistry of which often rapidly decreased throughout their endless sequels. Regarding horror from the early 70s, Robin Wood writes,
“The interesting horror films of this period, without a single exception, are characterized by the recognition not only that the monster is the product of normality, but that it is no longer possible to view normality itself as other than monstrous.” (Wood, 95)
It is this ability to reveal the monstrosity of normality which makes most of the films analyzed here valuable to a critique of the institutions of the home and family. But in many ways, Poltergeist does just the opposite of this. Written by Steven Speilberg, much like his earlier film, Jaws (1975), Poltergeist places the blame for the horrifying events of the story on the greed and hubris of individual actors, in this case Steven Freeling’s real estate developer boss, Mr. Teague. By neglecting to move the bodies from the cemetery upon which the Freelings' suburban community was built, Teague brought about the abduction of their daughter Carol Anne by an angry spirit who communicates through the television. Wood describes this narrative decision as a kind of “cleansing job”, attempting to “separate the American family from ‘bad capitalism’, to pretend the two are without connection.” (Wood, 180). But despite the film’s attempt to “inoculate” the more systemic violence of the systems on which homeownership and the white middle-class family rely, its depiction of horror in a suburban setting remains revealing of the insidious mentalities which constitute these institutions. The film presents issues of isolation, privacy, technology, and gender and familial relations which complicate the idealized image of the suburban home and nuclear family. But far from an overt critique, Poltergeist functions more like a demonstration.
Of the films analyzed here, Poltergeist offers the clearest illustration of the domestic ideal which was constructed during the post-war years. In the Freeling’s suburban housing development, identically constructed houses are lined up in neat and condensed rows. A beautiful four door car sits in every driveway. The central family of the film includes Diane a stay at home wife and mother, Steve, a successful and upwardly mobile real estate agent, their teenage daughter, Dana, two younger children named Carol Anne and Robbie, and their dog, E. Buzz. In one scene Steve is trying to sell a house to a couple. The camera cuts from the Freeling’s kitchen to the identical but empty kitchen of the unsold house. When the prospective buyer says he “can’t tell one house from the other”, Steve reassures him that the construction policies are “very liberal”, referring to neighbours who attached a hot tub to their living room. This interaction demonstrates the conflict between the conformity and homogenized purity of the suburbs, and the individuality which is so ingrained in American culture, particularly among men. Similarly to how the films of the early 70s address the social and political turmoil of those years, Poltergeist reflects the general turn towards more traditional and conservative values which took place during the Reagan years. It is likely not coincidental that the reemphasis of traditional family values which took place during the Reagan administration was accompanied by increased tensions with the Soviet Union and a renewed prospect of nuclear war. This period represents a revitalization of the rhetoric of containment, as exemplified abroad by the invading of countries like Grenada and the support of anti-communist regimes around the globe, as well as the increased emphasis on traditional family values at home. Social and medical emergencies like the crack and AIDS epidemics represented the devastating consequences of prioritizing the white middle-class nuclear family as the hegemonic ideal.
Steve and Diane Freeling are depicted as children of the 60s. They came of age during the Summer of Love. And after living through the cultural change and political turmoil of those years they are learning how to adjust to maturity and adulthood in the 1980s. Steve frequently comments that he feels he looks older and fatter, but still displays a lighthearted humour about his aging. Both have taken on their stereotypically gendered roles, but seem unsure about how to fulfill them. After putting the kids to sleep, Diane takes a small box from her bedside table and begins to roll a joint. When a scared Robbie wanders into their room, she takes one last puff before putting out the joint and putting Robbie back to bed. As his wife smokes Steve reads, “Reagan: The Man, The President”. Perhaps a Reagan Democrat, he reads the book intently, as if studying how to be a man in this new decade. Steve is the star salesmen for their suburban development. Valued and complemented by his boss, he not only has achieved the American dream of becoming a homeowner, father, and breadwinner, he sells that dream to others. Unlike some of the other films analyzed, where the horror seems to stem from attempts to maintain or construct the domestic ideal—in Poltergeist the introduction of the supernatural is framed as a disruption of their traditional familial and gendered roles.
Diane is the first to experience supernatural occurrences in the house. While cleaning up the kitchen after breakfast, she pushes a chair in to the kitchen table, yelling to the kids to remember to tuck them in. She begins to blame Carrol Anne but turns around to find that every chair is balanced precariously on the table. Startled, Diane drops her cleaning supplies and is quick to connect the dots between the chairs, and the “TV people” that Carrol Anne has been telling her about. But Diane’s reaction to this supernatural redecorating is barely one of fear. She is near giddy at this unexplainable phenomenon, and is surprisingly receptive to the idea that paranormal forces are residing in her home. She displays a kind of New Age fascination with the spiritual. Part of her excitement may lie in the moving chairs’ disruption of her gendered duties. Her emotional change from wearily reprimanding Carrol Anne to joyously investigating the mechanics of these paranormal phenomenon express just how happy she is to be working on something which is outside of her prescribed domestic labour. But when Steve gets home from work to find Dianne letting Carrol Anne be supernaturally slid across the kitchen floor he is cautious and protective, ordering that nobody goes into the kitchen until they have more information. Diane and Carrol Anne have been playing there all day and Carrol Anne tells her father that “Mommy didn’t make dinner”—she’s distracted from her domestic and maternal responsibilities. Steve’s caution can understood as a well intentioned attempt to keep his family safe, but it also functions to refocus Diane on her duties as a mother. Diane’s fascination and association with the spirits is likely related to her own status as Other in relation to the hegemonic white male identity of her husband.
The horror films of the early 70s broke from conventional narrative structure: introducing a disruption to the status quo which is never fully resolved, precisely because that disruption is inseparable from the status quo itself. Poltergeist returns to a more traditional horror structure—moving from status quo, to the introduction of a disruptive force, and back to a recuperation of that status quo. The intruding supernatural entity is marked as the Other in relation to the white middle-class family. The implications of this Othering are two fold: those who are also considered Othered in some way must be utilized to engage with the supernatural Other. And ultimately, the Other can only be fought and conquered by the reinforcement of its antithesis, the traditional nuclear family. As a white woman who plays an active role in a traditional family unit, Diane is only relatively Othered. In order to learn more about the poltergeist who has broken up their family by abducting Carrol Anne, the Freelings turn to a professor’s team of paranormal investigators. Professor Lesh is an older unmarried working woman, who brings her two colleagues Ryan and Marty to the house. Marty is white, and as the paranormal happenings become more violent he quits and does not return to the house. Dr. Lesh, and Ryan—who is a black man—have to carry on their investigation without him. While this does provide two courageous, smart, and capable marginalized characters, their skills in dealing with the poltergeist also align them with the supernatural Other. The proximity between the social or cultural Other and the supernatural Other is further reinforced when Tangina—an idiosyncratic older woman who can communicate with spirits—is brought to the house so that the Freelings can access the spirit world. In film and television, those who can communicate with spirits are almost always Othered in some way. But while the invocation of the Other is crucial to engagement and communication with the spirits, the film makes it clear that only the reinforcement of the hegemonic status quo can defeat the poltergeist.
When Tangina contacts Carol Anne in the spirit realm, she instructs Steve and Diane to assume their traditional gendered roles as father and mother in order to force Carol Anne to acquiesce to their instructions. When preparing to contact Carol Anne, Tangina says that Carol Anne can only be contacted by the “voice of her mother”. When Carol Anne doesn’t answer these nurturing calls, she tells a worried and reluctant Steve that he must yell at his daughter in order to get her attention. “Tell her if she doesn’t answer you she’s going to get a spanking”, she says. Steve has to assert his patriarchal power over his daughter in order to save her. His threat of corporal punishment is effective and Carol Anne responds from the spiritual plane. When Diane retrieves her from the spirit world they return covered in a kind of ectoplasmic goo. The reassertion of the parental gender roles and their reunion with their daughter has resulted in a rebirth of the traditional family unit. When the supernatural Other is thought to be expelled from the house, Tangina proclaims that the house is “clean”. The rhetoric of cleanliness in relation to a spiritual intrusion mirrors common rhetoric surrounding the purity of the suburban community which often functions as a thinly veiled code for a racial or otherwise identitarian purity.
As Poltergeist demonstrates, and Diane Harris points out, discourse of purity and cleanliness are inseparable from the institution of suburban housing. Since their proliferation in the post-war years, suburban communities offered an unprecedented level of privacy to middle-class families in comparison to the more communal extended family living which was prevalent in many urban and ethnic communities. The migration of many of these European ethnic groups to the suburbs coincided with their negotiation of a white identity. As Harris writes,
“The discourse of privacy in the visual and textual held attendant to house and garden design is an exclusionary discourse, and in that sense privacy largely connotes spatial purification.” (Harris, 118)
The negotiations and contradictions of privacy and its relation to the purification of the home from the presence of the Other is prevalent in Poltergeist’s depiction of suburbia. In the film’s early shots of the Freeling’s community, near identical houses are lined up in rows. The whole development appears to be banked by large rolling green hills, making it difficult to imagine how the community is connected to any larger municipality. Supernatural or otherwise, the Other is depicted as an intruding force to the white middle-class home, even in its most benign forms. The working class pool workers reach through the kitchen window to take food and coffee and are gently scolded by Diane. In the film, the complexities of suburban privacy and community are often illustrated by the presence of a technology which proliferated on the heels of suburbanization, the television.
As Lynn Spigel writes in her book Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, “television was caught in a contradictory movement between private and public worlds, and it often became a rhetorical figure for that contradiction” (Spigel, 33). Spigel explains that the introduction of television into suburban homes throughout the 50s and 60s offered the possibility of a virtual community within the privacy of the home, rendering the need to physically journey outside for such bonds increasingly unnecessary. In Poltergeist, TV is depicted as both a site of communal interaction and a threat to the seclusion and privacy of the home. Some of the neighbourhood men gather to watch a football game in front of the Freeling’s TV, but the channel keeps changing, picking up the signal from an angry neighbour’s remote. The television allows for a technological intrusion into the allegedly sovereign and private space of the home. As a result television represents the possibility of the intrusion of the Other—the urban, the abject, the alien, or supernatural. It was through the television that many suburban families would have heard about and witnessed the tumultuous events of the 60s and 70s. Television brought assassinations, race riots, and colonial wars into white middle-class living rooms. Worried that the blank station will hurt Carol Anne’s eyes, Diane changes the channel to a war movie. We hear bombs, gunfire, and screaming. Television promised a connection to the “outside world” at the risk of contaminating the purity of the suburban home. It is through the television that Carol Anne is abducted but also through the TV that the family is able to access the supernatural Other. At the end of the film, forced to leave their home which has been destroyed by the rising corpses of those who were buried beneath it, the Freelings move into a motel. Steve places the TV outside of the door, as if the family will remain safe and stable so long as the Other is denied its medium of technological intrusion. While the house is destroyed, the family is together and are never implicated in the violence. The horror of the film is tacked on to the invasion of the Other into the home and the individual greed which made the property vulnerable to that intrusion. Wood writes, “the suburban bourgeois nuclear family remains the best of all possible worlds, if only because any other is beyond Spielberg’s imagination.” (Wood, 182).
“White Man’s Burden Lloyd, White Man’s Burden”, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980)
Get a little bit of bourbon in 'ya
Get a little bit suburban
And go crazy
—Lana Del Rey (2014)
In Stanley Kurbick’s The Shining, former teacher and struggling writer Jack Torrance moves his wife Wendy, and son Danny, into the Overlook Hotel. Jack has agreed to the job of caretaker for the winter in hopes that the secluded hotel will provide peace and quiet for his writing. Soon the family begins to see strange visions, and much like George Lutz, Jack grows increasingly irritable and aggressive. Encouraged by the spirits that haunt the Overlook, Jack eventually tries to kill his family with an axe. Wendy and Danny escape in a snowcat, and Jack is left to freeze to death in the hotel’s intricate hedge maze. Most of the films analyzed in this essay feature a variation on the suburban domestic ideal. Set in the secluded Overlook Hotel in the mountains of Colorado, The Shining represents the most drastic departure from the site of the suburban or small town, country home. But it is in these differences that Kubrick’s film provides perhaps the most radical critique of the American dream of homeownership and domesticity.
In the beginning of the film the family live in a small—presumably rented—apartment in Boulder, Colorado. Jack has recently quite his job as a school teacher to pursue writing full time. Due to his lack of income, accepting the job of caretaker at the Overlook is the only way Jack and his family could live a life near as abundant as if they owned their own home in the suburbs. And there is no shortage of abundance in the hotel, it represents an absurd hyperbole of suburban living. Located in the mountains and completely cut off by road in the winter, the hotel has plenty of the privacy and seclusion that so many suburban homeowners seek. It is about as far from the crime and poverty of urban life as one can get. And echoing Poltergeist, television plays a crucial role in facilitating a sense of community for Wendy and Danny—both in Boulder and in the hotel (Rasmussen, 264). But the TV is not enough to combat the extreme isolation of the Overlook when even their sparse familial connections begin to disintegrate. As Frederick Jameson writes about the film,
“whatever possibility this particular family might have had, in the social space of the city, of developing some collective solidarity with other people of similar marginalized circumstances is henceforth itself foreclosed by the absolute isolation of the great hotel in winter.” (Jameson, 122).
The desirable seclusion of suburban life is taken to its extreme, rendering the home barren and hostile. For the family this isolation means facing the violent totalitarian authority of its own patriarchal structure with little chance for reprieve or relaxation. Wendy is constantly on edge and nervous, unsure of how her husband will respond to each sentence she utters. For those outside the family unit, this isolation is all the more violent. One of the few possibilities for communication lies in Danny’s telepathic powers, his titular “shining” ability. He finds that he shares this ability with Hallorann, the black cook who shows them around the hotel when they first arrive. Made aware of the family’s violent circumstances through telepathy, Hallorann embarks on a long journey from his Florida home to the mountain hotel. But after flying, driving, and renting a snowcat to reach the Torrances, Jack kills him with an axe, almost immediately after entering the hotel. Hollorann’s race and supernatural abilities mark him as someone who must be eliminated to maintain the purity of the family home. And unlike in Poltergeist where the spirits represent a supernatural Other, the spirits of the Overlook—which guide Jack in his mania—represent a lineage of patriarchal white power. But the Overlook hotel’s hyperbolic mirroring of suburban life is not only evident in the hotel’s location and severe isolation. The space and facilities of the hotel itself present an absurd vision of domestic abundance.
As Jack talks to his new boss before his family is left alone to care for the hotel, Hallorann shows Wendy around the kitchen. The pantry shelves are lined from floor to ceiling with the colourful packaging of various food and kitchen products. The walk-in freezer is filled with more meat than any family could possibly consume in a season. The kitchen itself is equipped with technologically advanced and industrial grade culinary tools and appliances. Wendy is provided with all of the domestic luxuries that Nixon lauded in the kitchen debate almost twenty years earlier. In Boulder, Wendy appears to be far from an ideal housewife. She looks relatively plain, and their apartment appears cluttered as she prepares simple snacks for Danny. At the Overlook, she is dwarfed by the immensity of the kitchen. The size, abundance and commerciality of the hotel kitchen also draws attention to the domestic work which is still disproportionately performed by women to this day. Wendy fumbles with an industrial can-opener as she prepares dinner for Danny and herself. When she brings a meal to Jack’s room on a serving tray one can’t help but see parallels between Wendy’s work, and the labour of hotel hospitality workers. The film’s connections between the recognized, waged work of a hotel and Wendy’s unacknowledged and unpaid domestic labour brings to mind Marxist feminist Sylvia Federici. Federici writes, “To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking.” (Federici, 19). By placing Wendy’s domestic work in the explicitly commercial setting of the hotel, her unpaid labour is revealed as productive of capitalist surplus value. While as Jameson points out, Jack is indeed constantly working and even writing about work (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”)—it is Wendy who checks the furnaces and radios and does the cooking and cleaning (Jameson, 122). The job of caretaker for which Jack expresses such feelings of responsibility and which he has been hired to do, is actually performed by Wendy. Jack likely feels anxiety regarding his work as school teacher and then caretaker, both jobs which are often coded as feminine. He tries to claim his own gendered space in their new home, either by retreating to the “Gold Room” or by angrily reprimanding Wendy when she comes into his writing room, an enormous space near the hotel lobby. When Jack becomes violent, Wendy first escapes by trapping him in the gendered space of the kitchen pantry. When he is let out by Mr. Grady, the spirit of the hotel’s previous caretaker, Jack lashes out at the kitchen, throwing pots and pans to the floor. While Wendy is able to temporarily confine Jack, ultimately the hotel’s lineage of patriarchal authority is able to set him free—but only after ensuring that he is willing to “correct” the disobedient behaviour of his wife. In The Shining, both Jack’s authority and his burden are derived from the history of white patriarchal power which haunts the Overlook.
The spirits that drive Jack to madness are explicitly tied to patriarchal power and the responsibilities of caring for property. When Jack slips into the hotel’s past, he meets Delbert Grady, the Overlook’s previous caretaker who had killed his own family with an axe. Grady appears to Jack as a waiter at a 1920s party which manifests out of thin air in the Gold Room. As Jameson writes regarding the specific period of history which haunts the hotel,
“The 20s were the last moment in which a genuine American leisure class led an aggressive and ostentatious public existence, in which an American ruling class projected a class-conscious and unapologetic image of itself and enjoyed its privileges without guilt, openly and armed with its emblems of top-hat and champagne glass, on the social stage in full view of the other classes.”(Jameson, 123)
At first, Grady appears as a servant to Jack. When he spills a drink on him, he tells Jack that he is “the important one”. Grady, and the lavish 1920s world which Jack is transported too, function to validate the kind of unrestrained privileges which Jack feels he deserves as a white man, and which he feels his wife and son are trying to take from him. Jack is an alcoholic, and after hurting Danny in a drunken rage he is pressured to live sober. But in the 1920s version of the hotel, Jack is graciously served bourbon “on the house”. He commiserates with the ghostly bartender about problems he's having with “the old sperm bank upstairs”. Before taking his first sip of the bourbon he looks at the bartender and says “White man’s burden Lloyd.” It is not clear exactly what that burden is—alcoholism, taking care of the property, fatherhood—but it becomes clear that the history of white patriarchal domination which haunts the Overlook is not only accommodating to Jack’s misogynistic and domineering impulses, it is insistent on those impulses.
In the bathroom Grady warns Jack that Danny is trying to bring, “an outside party” into their situation, “a n***er, a n***er cook”. When Jack tells Grady that it is “the mother’s” fault for interfering, Grady says, “when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I corrected her.”. It is as if the spirits of the hotel insist that Jack impose the mandate of containment within the hotel by eliminating the racial difference that Hallorann represents, and keeping his wife and son in line. But Jack’s exercise of patriarchal power is always connected to his responsibilities as caretaker of the property. Later when Wendy suggests that they leave the hotel after Danny has been injured, Jack accuses her of trying to prevent him from meeting his responsibilities to his employer, and to the property itself. He screams at her,
“Have you ever though for a single solitary moment about my responsibilities to my employers!… Does it matter to you at all that the owners have put their complete confidence and trust in me and that I have signed a letter of agreement, a contract!”
Jack’s responsibilities as a father are in conflict with his responsibilities as caretaker of the property. His job was to provide and maintain a home for his family, which he has done, and in return he feels he deserves obedience. He fears that he will have to return to a working class life in the city and blames Wendy for his economic hardship. When she suggests they leave the opulent home which he has provided, he becomes furious. As he threatens Wendy, he perverts the language of a loving domestic relationship, “Wendy, darling, light of my life… I’m not going to hurt you, I’m just going to bash your brains in.”. Jack’s violent imposition of patriarchal authority renders the structure of the nuclear family—in which the father is both chief discipliner and chief breadwinner—terrifyingly uncanny. But just as Jack’s position as caretaker is haunted by a violent history of murderous fathers, the property of the hotel itself has a dark and violent past.
The quantity and volume of lives and experiences which comprise the history of an old hotel are much greater that that of an ordinary family home, giving the hotel a much denser sense of historical time. Early in the film the manager of the Overlook reveals that the hotel was built on “Indian land” and that the builders had to fight off attacks by the indigenous people. The property in which the Torrance family live was literally made possible by colonial war. Indigenous iconography is ubiquitous in the hotel, displaying that violent history but also signifying how the history of the colonial subjects is often appropriated by the oppressor. The crimson columns and walls signify bloodshed, a metaphor which is made explicit in the famous shot of blood flooding from the hotel elevator. Harkening back to Freud’s description of the uncanny as “an area in which a person [is] unsure of his way around”, the hotel’s hallways and layout are a complex network of confusing and nonsensical paths (Freud, 125). It is a home transformed into a labyrinth as vast as the hedge maze outside. While not actually a “home” Jack consistently comments on how “homey” the hotel feels to him—how he feels like he has lived there his entire life. As such the film draws a direct line from the original oppression of the indigenous people, through a sordid history of unexplained horrors, to Grady’s murder of his family, and finally to Jack. All of these horrors are depicted as just as foundational to the structure and functioning of the Overlook as the stones and logs which make up the hotel itself. The very relationship between the family and the hotel call into question the legitimacy of the space as true private property, divorced from the labour of others and the history which constitute it. The hotel never belongs to the Torrance family, they simply occupy it. In The Shining the white man’s connection to property is inextricable from the oppression of the Other, and the brutal authoritarian rule of his family.
Conclusion: Burning Down the House
The films analyzed above span a decade between 1972 and 1982. In many ways they are inextricable from their specific historic and cultural circumstances. But I would like to suggest that the horrifying and often apocalyptic images which these films present can and should be applied to the very basic assumptions which persistently underline dreams of homeownership and ‘the good life’ in Western culture. The legacy of racially discriminatory redlining policies and gendered oppression in the home is not only felt through its historical reverberations. The idealized image of property ownership and domesticity remains plagued by the assumed supremacy of whiteness, heteronormativity and culturally naturalized gender roles. These films reveal the institution of homeownership as being composed of layers of cyclical oppression. The economic oppression of debt and austerity, and the estranged labor required to hold onto the commodity of the home as one’s own private property. The gendered pressure for men to submit themselves to this economic exploitation for the promise of patriarchal power and social acceptance. The trade—made in bad faith—of women’s unpaid and unaccounted domestic and reproductive labour for the dubious benefits of an unattainable and restrictive domestic ideal. A trade made under coercion, in a culture which places the weight of their very identity as a women on the precarious peak of immaculate slope roofed houses. And as Diane Harris argues, the values of identitarian supremacy are entangled with the very foundation, design, and lexicon of domesticity, making the relinquishment of racicalized or queer facets of identity and the appropriation of white, heteronormative signifiers a prerequisite to the culturally defined ‘good life’. In these films, the home is infested with these oppressive ideologies, they have chewed to its very foundation, where they breed and multiply.
When looked at together and from a distance the films render these layers of oppression visible. They render the cracks in domestic and ideological containment sharply tactile. Their depictions of property haunted by an irreconcilable history of violence denaturalize assumptions of sovereignty and ownership in relation to the patriarchal kingdom that the home represents. In these films, the home is always owned by ghosts. Scenes of psychotic fathers terrorizing their wives and children visualize the gendered oppression of a family structure that disproportionately grants financial autonomy to masculine labor and considers women property to be accumulated in the pursuit of a vision of mature masculinity. As a group, the blinding and persistent whiteness of these films becomes apparent. And as Cheryl Harris points out, whiteness itself functions as a kind of property to be curated and accumulated. But perhaps with the exception of Poltergeist, they depict whiteness as deranged and cannibalistic. In Richard Dyer’s terms they can be read to reveal the “specificity of whiteness” as something violent, out of control, and indeed “strange” (Dyer, 14).
With the threat of communism and nuclear war looming, the United States embarked on a conscious and concerted effort of ‘containment’ in which they placed immense ideological weight on the home, and the white middle-class nuclear family to prop up consumer capitalism and all of the hierarchies on which it relies. In a relatively brief moment of hegemonic crisis, these institutions were questioned and confronted. During this time of cultural confusion, horror cinema gravitated towards the home and family. And as Robin Wood notes, the chaotic and apocalyptic endings of the horror films of the early 1970s offer “the possibility of radical change and rebuilding”, “even in their overt nihilism” (Wood, 84). Once revealed, the unhiemliche cannot be repressed. As Sally narrowly escapes Leatherface’s flailing chainsaw in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre her blood curdling screams can be heard until the credits roll. After this trauma, she will never return to normalcy. At the end of The Last House on the Left, John and Estelle Collingwood sit blood-soaked—their own chainsaw in their hands. They too will never recapture the wholesome domestic bliss which they performed at the beginning of the film. I would like to conclude with a quote from feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminist Manifesto,
“If we want to break the inertia that has kept the moribund figure of the nuclear family unit in place, which has stubbornly worked to isolate women from the public sphere, and men from the lives of their children, while penalizing those who stray from it, we must overhaul the material infrastructure and break the economic cycles that lock it in place.” (Laboria Cuboniks, 8)
When institutions are revealed as inherently violent and destructive—when the house has burnt to the ground—we should proceed to build something truly unfamiliar on the wreckage, rather than rebuilding yet another uncanny house of horrors.
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Filmography The Amityville Horror. Dir. Stuart Rosenberg. 1979. Web.
The Last House on the Left. Dir. Wes Craven. 1972. Poltergeist. Dir. Tobe Hooper. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1982. The Shining. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. 1980. Web.
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