The sixth season of the MUBI Podcast, titled “Haunted Homes,” considers how movies about haunted houses let us explore—and often parallel—our relationships with our homes.
This five-part series is guest-hosted and written by author, film programmer, podcaster, and horror expert Anna Bogutskaya. Below she introduces this special, haunted season.
To listen to the show and subscribe on your preferred podcast app, click here.
In 1950, science-fiction author Ray Bradbury wrote: “Nothing ever likes to die—even a room.” Seventy-four years later, I read those words and think of how a house can become haunted. In Bradbury’s story “The Veld,”two parents try to unplug a room that is capable of manifesting into reality whatever their two raucous (read: sociopathic) children imagine. It happens to be lions. The back-and-forth between them about what to do with the room—which is and isn’t a character, because it is implied to have a will of its own, to have transgressed the rules of its purchase—is not dissimilar to a conversation about putting down a family pet: a mercy but also a precaution.
In the sixth season of the MUBI Podcast, I’ll be looking at haunted house movies. On the wild, wide spectrum of horror subgenres, from the broad (ghosts! zombies! vampires!) to the hyper niche (ghost cats! mumblegore! cell-phone horror!), a haunted, or evil, house has always captivated and terrified me the most. The home is expected to be a safe place, a respite and a nest—and what is a house if not the promise of a home? When it is invaded, defiled or haunted, where do we go? In my book on horror films and feelings, Feeding the Monster, I looked at the houses in horror films across the last decade, which has been characterized by rising rents, bloodsucking landlords, and impossible mortgages. Horror has separated the idea of a house from that of a home. Sometimes what’s haunted is not a house at all.
The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg, 1979).
Sometimes the family itself is haunted, like the Lutzes in The Amityville Horror (1979), or the Torrances in The Shining (1980). In the former, a young family buys a dream home for a song, below market value because a mass murder had occurred between its walls; in the latter, an unemployed father takes a last-resort job caretaking a remote hotel in the off-season. Both patriarchs are persecuted by the evil forces that inhabit the houses, both end up being the real menaces to their families. Even before they step foot through the doors, these family units are already fractured.
A haunting is often a metaphor. Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001) opens with this question: “What is a ghost? A terrible event destined to repeat itself. A moment of pain. A feeling, suspended in time, like a blurry photograph, like an insect trapped in amber.” In the film, ghosts are not the enemy, they are memories: of a murder, of a war, of a promise. In Poltergeist (1982), it’s not the house that’s haunted, or the family (the Freelings are, atypically, a beacon of familial unity). It’s the land itself, which erupts and makes itself known in bombastic ways. Haunted house movies are never just about the bricks and mortar. As Alison Rumfitt writes in Tell Me I’m Worthless, a haunted house is about “structure, architecture, history.” A haunting is an event that refuses to let itself be forgotten.
Sometimes a house is just evil, of course. That is, perhaps, my favorite variant. Corrupt foundations. Wicked brickwork. Ill-wishing walls. Architecture where evil is steeped into the design. It’s "the Happylife Home" in “The Veld,”a technologically advanced home that may have been designed for evil, or may have turned nasty after interacting with spoiled, violent kids. It is Hill House, as imagined by Shirley Jackson on the page, and reimagined by Robert Wise in The Haunting (1963) and Mike Flanagan in The Haunting of Hill House (2018): “It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope.” No matter who moves in, an evil house will ruin them.
The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963).
Because a haunted house does not want to die, it is a desperate place to live. At the end of most of these films, the house must be destroyed. Sometimes, like in Poltergeist, it destroys itself, almost in protest. In Skinamarink (2022), a house starts disappearing—door by door, window by window—around two children, who are left alone and fearful. I don’t know what’s more frightening about it, that the house is completely empty or that some unholy creature left living in it with the kids.
But eliminating the structure may not dispel the evil that’s seeped into the earth beneath it. Even if it gets blown up, or sucked back into its foundations, the haunted house remains. The idea of a home is universal, and so is the fear of its perversion. It can be twisted by grief, paranoia, and pain. It will retain the memories of a tragedy, of murder or abuse. Our idea of what a home can or should be, and what it can be twisted into, has evolved alongside cinema. In The Amityville Horror, one of the granddaddies of haunted house horror, the Lutz family purchases the only house they can afford: their home-ownership (the first in their family) lasts only 28 days. Rewatching the film in 2024, I consider what kind of ghost I’d be up for tolerating if it meant I could afford a home. If the pandemic transformed many homes into prisons, if homes have become sites of anxiety instead of rest, if so many do not have access to a stable home, do we even need a ghost or a poltergeist to feel haunted? In horror movies, houses are always untrustworthy. But at least a movie ends at some point.
Check out the "Haunted Homes" season teaser below: