Haunted Houses

Home, sweet home... or maybe not?

Instead of a symbol of safety and shelter, the home becomes a source of horror and terror - we're obviously talking about haunted houses, an archetype par excellence in horror fiction and film. It hardly matters if the house is cursed because it's haunted, or if it's haunted because it's cursed - and we'd be making a grave error if we think of it as simply a setting, given that a haunted house often becomes a key "character" in the story. This Tag seeks to assemble a wide range of films which share the presence of a haunted or cursed house, regardless of its architectural style or geographic location: isolated hovels, colonial manors, forest chalets, imposing gothic castles, grand Art Nouveau edifices in the heart of the city, nondescript suburban apartment blocks...

Depending on the circumstances, the domicile in question becomes the stage of either metaphysical manifestations or paranormal phenomena (chiefly ghosts/poltergeists and demonic entities) which generally exasperate those trying to live there, if not driving them to a complete physical and/or mental breakdown.

If an explanation for these phenomena is offered, it's likely to fall into one or more of the following categories: (+)

1. Past horrific events (bloody, unjustified, tragic) which occurred in the house. When this is the case, we'll face prior residents of the house who linger in a ghostly form: spirits of previous owners devoted to black magic, ectoplasmic vestiges of sadistic individuals, lost souls of tenants who came to a violent end.
2. The particular physical or topographic location where the building was constructed: the classic native American burial ground, a gateway to Hell, a sacred seal (basically some taboo area).
3. "Diabolic" features of the building itself: angles/corners, inclined planes, architectural elements, etc.
4. "Negative emanations" coming from the building's current flesh-and-blood inhabitants.

 
When it comes to the Seventh Art, the horror genre offers three prototypical "haunted house" scenarios:

1. The characters are persuaded to spend some time in a house that only appears to be haunted. In this scenario, the supernatural component subsequently turns out to be a hoax someone is perpetrating. This is the so-called "rationalism" typical of early cinema and subsequently reprised by directors such as William Castle;
2. The protagonist, generally with family in tow, moves into an actual haunted house and ends up facing disturbing and often deadly paranormal phenomena;
3. A group of experts - physicists, doctors, parapsychologists, theologians, etc. - decide to spend the night in a dwelling with a sinister reputation in order to investigate the true nature of the unsettling events.