The Haunted House On Film Part One

Over the next few months I’ve decided to spend some time exploring the haunted house in horror film. Given the simplicity of the plots, and the general structure which has become so well established as to be cliche, these films are a useful way of exploring both the historical and ideological constructions of housing, and the various ways in which housing structures interpersonal relationships. 

The criteria for choosing what I’m going to write about are completely governed by my own whim and whatever might be useful for the longer book project I’m working on. Some of the material here might end up in the book, or may just end up contributing to research notes and background. Either way, I’m not restricting myself to the classics nor am I trying to be universal in scope – that said, if you have suggestions please do let me know.

I’m starting with something of a left field choice I suppose, Lucio Fulci’s The House by The Cemetery (1981). It was preceded by the first two parts of Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy – City of the Living Dead in 1980 and The Beyond the year after. While the films aren’t sequels they are all thematically related but their independence means it’s worth thinking about The House by the Cemetery on its own terms. 

Fulci worked on the screenplay for the film with Dardano Sacchetti, who was known for his collaborations with legendary horror director Dario Argento. Sacchetti was ostensibly inspired by Henry James’s novella, The Turn of the Screw, and Fulci was well known for his fondness for Lovecraft suggesting a rather literary film for a director so infamous for sex, violence and lurid horror. However, in his own biography, Fulci was quite dismissive of Sacchetti, suggesting that the film script was ultimately derivative of the earlier Spanish language horror The House That Screamed (1969). Right or not in his assessment of Sacchetti, I think Fulci has a reasonably clear eyed understanding of what this work is – The House By The Cemetery melds Fulci’s fondness for giallo shock (there are a lot of deeply uncomfortable stabbings plus a very gory sequence with a bat) with a surprisingly restrained cinematography, filmed on location with a cold, austere sense of restraint.

The set up is familiar – and shows the influences of Lovecraft and James with its New England setting and rather beautiful nineteenth century American architecture. The plot follows Norman and Lucy Boyle and their son Bob. Together they move into a house in rural Massachusetts. Norman is a researcher of some sort, and the house was the home of his ex-colleague Dr Peterson who murdered his mistress and committed suicide shortly after. The house, known as “Oak Mansion” is in a dire state of repair with the cellar is boarded up and locked. The small town feels somewhat hostile to the new family, and Bob sees a young girl that no-one else seems to be able to see. Before long a strange woman, called Ann arrives, claiming to be the babysitter and it’s she who unblocks access to the cellar. 

From the off then we have multiple iterations and configurations of the family unit. There are the Boyles, the now dead Petersons and the film introduces a third set – the long-dead Freudsteins. The house itself is not just next to a cemetery, but has a grave within its very architecture. In the house grounds is a grave for Mary Freudstein, but Ann informs Bob that she isn’t buried there. In the entryway is a grave marked “Jacob Tess Freudstein.” Freudstein, it turns out, was a Victorian surgeon, known for his vivisections and experiments. Of course, it turns out the cellar is a grave – beneath the headstone lurks the 150 year old living corpse of Dr. Freudstein who uses the bodies of his victims as a way of prelonging his existence. The girl that Bob has been seeing is Freudstein’s daughter, Mae. At the very end of the film, with Norman and Lucy both dead, Bob is pulled from the house and away from the clutches of the mad necrotic doctor by Mae and Mary Freudstein, and is almost immediately adopted into a new spectral familial configuration – orphaned not just from his own family but his own history. 

The film also seems to suggest that there’s a kind of temporal inevitability to what happens in the house – Norman is not just following in Peterson’s footsteps but he is, in a way, trying to become him. Following up on his research will lead to a promotion – as he tells his wife, it’ll be worth an extra $5,000 a year! The economic subtext is there in the family’s small city apartment and their broader discomfort with the realities of real estate agents.

On another, deeper level, Norman is yet another mad doctor – like those before him, he’s brought his family out to the middle of nowhere for the good of his research, for the good of his experiments. If Norman is, in a way, Peterson, then he is also Freudstein too. The Frankenstein reference is rather on the nose when the film comes to its climax but truthfully the film doesn’t seem overly interested in the mad scientist plotline for the majority of its runtime. Rather, the focus on the film is very clearly on domesticity – particularly the status of children as a source of anxiety. 

Much initial commentary of the film focuses on the famously distinctive ADR for Bob’s voice – using it as an easy punchline for a lazy joke about the quality of giallo or foreign language film which depends on this kind of dubbing for international distribution. However, as disconcerting as the vocal performance is, to me it adds to an interesting kind of temporal disjunction. Bob’s voice is dubbed by Lyle Stetler – a woman. So, you hear a mature voice coming from a child which inevitably unsettles a clear understanding of Bob’s own position in the domestic temporality of the home. He is constantly missing, an absent presence that the house exists to contain and observe. Some of the most frequent dialogue is Bob’s name – telling him to go outside, telling him to do something else. The child is always both burden and responsibility, making the home into both a fortress and prison.

This, coupled with Fulci’s fondness for zooming in on the eyes of his characters, ensures that the film becomes obsessed with whether a child can be seen and monitored at all points. Ultimately, there’s a deeply bleak cynicism about the domestic space in the film. The home is a trap – the very floor cracks open and from right beneath your feet comes a reintrusion and restaging of the violent experiments of patriarchal authority.  Can you get out, can you escape any of this? Fulci’s answer is no – the history of the American home is one of violence, that even children will be dragged back into, making new ghosts to haunt old buildings.