The New Haunted House Is a Symbol of the Housing Crisis

It was the height of summer, midway through the day, when I found myself walking through Westmount, the wealthiest neighborhood in Montreal. I had intended to cut through the municipality but instead found myself stuck in a labyrinth of curling roads and dead ends, the sun and humidity beating down on me as I tried to find the way out. There was nobody around except for the occasional glimmering luxury vehicle that barreled past me, and it was eerily quiet. Set back a ways from the sidewalk on either side of the road, the houses were soaking up the light, black and dark gray, glassy and geometric, looming like monoliths. The roofs sliced across at terribly sharp angles and the massive doors towered with dark austerity. Under the relentless sun I started to feel afraid of them, afraid that in the midst of all their perfection and sterility there was something watching me. Like the horror of their opulence had materialized into a thing with eyes, with teeth.

Almost all of Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 film Parasite takes place in a house like one you’d expect to find in Westmount, or in any other walled-off affluent neighborhood present in, or adjacent to, urban metropolises: the Hamptons, Hollywood Hills, Polanco. The home in Parasite is practically indistinguishable from the myriad modernist mansions in any of these cities. In line with the wealthy’s architectural obsessions du jour—a modernist minimalism that’s been popular since the 1960s but that’s become inescapable over the last decade—the house is a massive structure made of interlocking cubes, flush with long walls of glass; sleek, dark colors; and an open-air floor plan. It’s also a home that’s haunted by a dark presence, though you probably wouldn’t guess that just by looking at it.

Parasite exhilarated audiences with its delicious narrative shift midway through, when an ominous visitor intrudes upon the graphite-and-aluminum castle and reveals the ghosts lurking within it. The shift is all the more jarring because we aren’t used to seeing those kinds of houses as stages on which our fears play out. With the luxury of their wide-open spaces and their hip, easy expressions of undeniable affluence, these houses are more often dangled before us as aspirational. But beneath the veneer of desire and ambition lurks something darker—the grotesqueness of wealth and the violence it implies.

The frightening underbelly of wealth has powered our image of the haunted house for decades. If you try to picture a haunted house, a house with ghosts whispering through the walls and sadists skulking in the corners, this is what you’ll probably imagine: creaky wooden floorboards, swinging orange light casting deep shadows, cobwebs and looming turrets. You’ll probably conjure up a building with deep history, massive and crumbling, hemorrhaging with the past. These Victorian-era mansions are the quintessential horror houses; just do a quick internet search for “haunted house” and you’ll be greeted by hundreds of images of the towering mid-late-nineteenth-century constructions.

It’s not that this architectural style is inherently hair-raising. But over time, through a number of complex cultural and historical trends, such houses have become cemented in our public memory as looming structures that carry frightening things inside them. Since the mid-twentieth century, Victorian-era mansions have been used as the settings for horror media again and again. For Psycho, Hitchcock’s team used Victorian flairs to design the dark, secluded Bates Motel; the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre used a dilapidated late-Victorian as the family home of Leatherface and his cannibal relatives; the Addams family spent their series living in a condemned Victorian-style mansion.

The frightening underbelly of wealth has powered our image of the haunted house for decades.

The Victorian house frightens us with the way it drips with history, bloated grotesquely by all the memory held within it. Faded pictures hang at angles along the winding hallways, forgotten belongings gather dust in the attic, and ghosts cry out from behind the peeling wallpaper. All of these tropes remind us that no matter how much we might wish it, history is never truly left behind. Rewind a half century, and the same architectural style was seen as enviable and beautiful rather than grotesque. But envy and terror are two sides of the same coin—the prosperity touted by these Victorian mansions is precisely what made them appear frightening later, after the Great War and the Great Depression. In the face of the world’s horrors, our predecessors asked, how could the rich have built such magnificent, ostentatious symbols of untactful wealth? It’s the same question that we’re asking today, only while looking at constructions that are minimalist rather than ornate.

Over the last decade, more and more horror films have begun to use fashionable modernist structures as settings for terror. In Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, Elisabeth Moss’s character is attacked by a mysterious presence inside a futuristic bungalow that resembles a set of shipping containers on stilts, black and modular. Goodnight Mommy, directed by Austrian filmmaking duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, is a domestic horror film that takes place almost entirely inside a trendy rectangular house with wraparound windows behind which nearly everything is monochromatic. The witch’s house in Gretel & Hansel, Oz Perkins’s reimagining of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, is so stylishly contemporary that one might think it’s a tech oligarch’s tacky vacation home. The same could be said for all the homes in these films, which is the point—they’re scary because they’re haunted by the violence hidden beneath their luxury.

Whether it’s Oscar Isaac’s glassy mansion in Ex Machina or the affluent neighbors’ waterfront condo in Us, these stylish modern buildings successfully scare us for reasons that are at once different and remarkably similar to our fear of crumbling Victorian structures. The key difference lies in how these buildings relate to time, to history and the past—the most dogged of all our ghosts. Where Victorian mansions are bloated with history, the modernist horror house takes another direction entirely. There are no dusty boxes in these buildings, no time-worn furniture and crumbling staircases; in fact, there’s nothing much at all. The defining feature of these houses is their sleek emptiness, all their clean lines and monochromatic color schemes granting them a sterility that, in the context of horror, is unsettlingly devoid of history—what frightens us is not the excess of it, but the near-total absence.

These are homes that look like showrooms, sparkling brand-new and sharply technological, looking unwaveringly to the future rather than remaining dredged in the past—or the present. And by feverishly cleaning themselves of the gunk of life, they remain haunted by what they shove aside. It’s no coincidence that in Parasite, the house’s ghosts emerged from its hidden basement; that in The Invisible Man, the cruelty was inflicted from beneath a concealing cloak; that in Goodnight Mommy, the children are haunted by what’s obscured beneath their mother’s crisp white bandages. When I watch these movies, my anxiety wonders: Within the luxurious emptiness of these houses, where is all the complexity of life, of human activity? It’s the same question I ask when I walk the streets of Montreal and other cities and see these homes off-screen. Horror seizes this anxiety and dives into it, eager to explore.

The imagined houses in these contemporary horror films remind us of their real counterparts, of the multimillion-dollar minimalist castles with Teslas in their driveways and smart appliances in their kitchens, of the 401(k)s and stock options of their owners. In our era of absolute precarity, in which everyday horrors are structured by an ever-growing gap between the vertiginously wealthy and the rest of us, wall-to-wall windows and large empty living rooms are the perfect places for us to locate our anxieties.

The horror genre refracts and explores our anxieties through a range of visceral symbols, and class anxieties are no exception. In reality, the upper echelon’s influence on my daily life is wide-reaching, subtle, and incessant. In horror, their influence becomes more direct: Alongside the characters, I become trapped in their houses, and together we bear the hidden violence of these extravagant properties. It’s impossible for me—or any normal person—to afford one of those shiny modernist houses. Even the ones that aren’t mansions, the townhouses and condominiums, are more and more out of reach—each year, a higher proportion of newly built real estate is eaten up by investors, driving up housing prices and decreasing the number of units available to people who actually want to live in their homes. Part of what makes stylish modernist abodes creepy, what makes them feel void of life, is that sometimes they literally are—they sit empty, passive-income-generating shells rather than actual homes, sleek commodities rather than venues for the activity of life, community, and intimacy.

The horror genre refracts our anxieties through a range of visceral symbols, and class anxieties are no exception.

Before I lived in Montreal, I grew up in Toronto, where I would walk through neighborhoods like Yorkville, Rosedale, and Forest Hill, looking up at the cubist puzzles, inaccessible and incomprehensible to me. Through their walls of glass, I saw kitchen islands with pendant lamps floating above, their sparse living rooms accented by intentionally placed mid-century furniture. If the houses weren’t sitting empty, they seemed like they were, like self-contained and foreboding pieces of art—dark-colored Rothkos, terror-stricken de Koonings—rather than homes that were lived in. I, at least, could never live in these neighborhoods, and neither could anyone else I knew. But even in the working-class parts of the city, I was haunted by sleek, empty homes. Through the 2010s, apartment listings started to be dominated by aggressive new developments—giant modernist towers with open-floor-plan units; metal, glass, and plastic; impossible price tags. Tiny condominium offspring to the minimalist castles in their gated neighborhoods.

By the end of the 2010s, the situation had become untenable, and, unable to afford rent in Toronto, I fled eastward to Montreal. But, like a final girl being relentlessly pursued by a dark presence that hovers just off-screen, high rents, minimalist condos, and black cubes of glass followed me every way I turned. Even in this city, with its more stringent laws regulating housing, we’ve felt the ripples of the monster’s cry, especially as the pandemic has unfurled over the last few years and the wealthy have collected their checks. Tenants are evicted so buildings can be renovated into contemporality, with all of its slickness and unreachable price tags. Every time I pass through a high-income neighborhood, dust and tractors surround a lot, erecting yet another mansion of glass and granite to sit fashionably empty, some CEO’s second or third home. There’s no escaping them, in waking life or in nightmares on-screen.

In David Bruckner’s 2019 thriller The Night House, the protagonist, played by Rebecca Hall, is haunted by a house even emptier and more minimalist. Deep in the woods opposite her home, an unfinished replica of her house projects itself into her nightmares. With its hanging tarps and skeletal beams, The Night House’s titular structure is the modernist haunted house taken to extremes. It carries neither history nor presence within its shallowness; the shell of a house doesn’t even really exist to begin with. Instead, it’s defined purely by absence, by the way it’s left to float in a state of perpetual emptiness. What’s frightening about it, for both myself and for Hall’s character, is that it isn’t a house at all; it’s a rough sketch segregated from everything that makes a house recognizable as a house: the sense of life and presence, the liveliness and history. Just like the minimalist castles in its horror-film contemporaries and in real life, the bare-bones haunted structure of The Night House seeks to separate housing from all the messiness and complexity of a place that’s meant to be lived in. For these reasons it’s also an ideal house for the vultures, the hyper-wealthy and the real estate investors who want homes separated from anything that makes them human. It’s a nightmare, and it’s the perfect commodity.

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