Ladies, Does It Give You the Ick When Your Man Buys a Haunted House?
+ the perilous masculinity of horror realty
The haunted house is a staple of horror movies, which means that the haunted house buyer is a staple character archetype. Haunted house buyers tend to share several qualities. They are, chiefly:
White and straight
In need of a fresh start
There are variations, but this is the old standby, and for good reason. The suburbs have always been horrifying, and the Haunted House movie epitomizes the many anxieties of home ownership, family life, and nosy neighbors. I was reminded of the most interesting thing about the Haunted House Movie while watching the new horror film Night Swim: how often it’s the father who pushes for the home purchase. Even though he’s never portrayed as particularly domestic, he suddenly has a strong opinion about where the family should set roots.
We do not need to dwell on Night Swim, which provides only the type of slow burn you get from sitting in a soggy bathing suit, but it hits every beat of the standard narrative. Family looks at houses, Dad (Wyatt Russell) falls in love with Murder House, Murder House turns out to be evil, Dad refuses to acknowledge it. This is the basic story of many haunted house movies.
It is a simplification of the beats of The Shining, it’s the plot of Sinister, it’s the plot of all the Little House on the Prairie books if you consider them horror (which I do), and I assume it’s the plot of at least most seasons of American Horror Story. The standardization of this story makes it easy to play with its parts: in X, it’s an adult film director (Martin Henderson) who rents a suspiciously cheap property for what turns out to be a cursed shoot. In each of these, the story asks how long a man will deny the reality of what others are experiencing if it means he doesn’t have to accept that he cannot control the forces around him.
This brand of Dad Anxiety movie stars men with palpable, boyish vulnerability: Patrick Wilson, Ethan Hawke, Chris Messina, Ethan Embry. They play men who think they can will themselves into being protectors, even when all other signs point to the contrary. There’s a type two of Dad Anxiety movies, the Dad-As-Hero movie (I’ll be writing about that in a future issue). In type two, a man, played by an enormous slab like Liam Neeson or The Rock, moves heaven and earth to save his children (almost always a daughter). The key difference between Hero Dad and Haunted Dad is not whether Dad lives or dies: it’s how he gets to the end. Hero Dad and Haunted Dad can be equally bad, loving, or absent. It’s whether they recognize their place in their mistakes that defines them. Hero Dad is looking for redemption for his flaws. Haunted Dad is looking for vindication that he was right all along.
This story plays with the idea of women as inherently emotional and men as inherently logical, that old r/Relationships bugaboo that lionizes male emotional unintelligence. The Mom becomes the Cassandra, whimpering something along the lines of: “We have to get out of this house.” Dad will board up a basement door, buy a gun, or do some other masculine cosplay that will be proven laughably useless. His goal isn't just to protect his family, his goal is to prove that he always could protect them.
There are certainly Haunted House movies where Mom leads the move, but these are rarer and less straightforward about the house as the central villain. The Curse feels like a recent subversion, and the off-kilter gender dynamics between Whitney and Asher are a central theme of the show. I’ve seen domineering house madams like Lizzy Caplan’s petrified Stepfordian in Cobweb, Toni Collette’s possessed artist in Hereditary. But these movies don’t operate from an assumption of the house as a place of peace. These women have recognized the absurd promise of the American Dream and know that domestic harmony is not something that comes bundled alongside a down payment. It’s a hard-fought balancing act that can fracture disastrously at any point.
Even in our own homes, women have little expectation of our own safety. This danger is maybe even inflated amongst suburban women, who pipe grizzly true crime stories into their ears like its bad Christmas music and they’re an H&M. But most of us recognize how rare random violence is, how much safer the dark alley is compared to the average marital bedroom. We know that the most dangerous man, statistically, is the one we trust the most.
We already know the house is haunted. What the Haunted House movie asks of men, and what everyone should ask of the people who enter their lives, is not, “will you be able to protect me?” It’s “can you admit that you might not be able to?”
Worth it for this line alone: "I’m doing things in Canva you wouldn’t believe:
I was just writing about this re The Shining last week!
I think there's also a type of dad that can be found in some of these movies that shades into something else, men who are convinced that their families are the thing that stands between them and their full potential - the family becoming not a symbol of the thing to be protected or saved through Masculine Competence, but rather the thing that gets in the way of whatever the dad's true calling is.
In The Shining, Jack views his duties (both to his job and to his family) as obstacles on the path to his writing career; a similar sentiment can be seen in Anatomy of a Fall, which isn't explicitly a haunted house film but is certainly haunted by the husband's rage. In the end, it comes down to the same thing that this post is discussing: a man's inability to face, articulate, and accept that he can't do something he's scaffolded his entire identity on thinking he can do.