The Terror of Home: The Haunted House Formula in Contemporary Culture

International Political Anthropology IPA Journal ISSN 2283-9887 - Journal Website: https://www.politicalanthropology.org The Terror of Home: The Haunted House Formula in Contemporary Culture Paul O’Connor To cite this article: Paul O’Connor (2022) The Terror of Home: The Haunted House Formula in Contemporary Culture, International Political Anthropology journal, (2022) Vol. (15) 1, 37-52, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6774438 To link to this article: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6774438 🔐 © 2022 International Political Anthropology —————————————————————— 🗓 Published online 2018 —————————————————————— 📝 Submit your article to this journal ➠ Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.politicalanthropology.org/ipa-journal/terms The Terror of Home: The Haunted House Formula in Contemporary Culture Paul O’Connor ORCID 0000-0003-0058-6905 Abstract The article explores the cultural significance of the haunted house formula in contemporary fiction and film. These narratives involve the fictive staging of a reversion to modes of thought and feeling which are integral to the experience of meaning, but repressed within core institutional arenas of the modern world. Latour, Lévy-Bruhl, Habermas and Bacon are drawn on to theorise the peculiarly modern severance between knowledge and meaning which these narratives transgress. Through a deliberate invocation of liminality, the haunted house formula enacts a kind of transcendence in which the modern ‘self in a case’ (Elias, 1978) is dissolved and individuals are restored to a condition of participation in their surroundings characteristic of older patterns of belief. Such participatory and existential modes of experience – simultaneously fascinating and terrifying – are particularly associated with the private sphere of the home, which has served as a refuge from rationalisation in modern societies; hence the centrality of domestic space in the haunted house formula. Keywords Home; private sphere; supernatural; cultural theory; transgression; experience; Latour; rationalisation; sociology of knowledge; liminality Introduction If we accept the centrality of novels as instruments for understanding the modern world (Szakolczai, 2016), we can go further and suggest that this includes not just the work of literary greats, who deliberately attempted to plumb the essence of modernity and diagnose its ills through their writing, but also – in a somewhat different way – works of popular fiction. The most common tropes of contemporary popular fiction, hackneyed, stereotyped and endlessly repeated, can give us an insight into the subconscious of modernity: structures of thought and feeling which undergird significant parts of modern life, but are seldom subject to open debate in the columns of newspapers or the pages of academic journals. The focus of this paper, namely the haunted house formula in contemporary fiction and film, is a remarkably stable cultural artefact (Bailey, 1999). Hence, it is possible to interpret it as embodying wider cultural understandings, fears and desires. The haunted house embodies the reverse polarity of some of the central values of our age; the weight of the past against the insistent promise of the future, the survival of spirit against a materialist rationalism, primordial darkness in contrast to the perpetual daylight of a technological culture. Ghosts, as Freud (1955) recognised, represent a recurrence of supposedly superseded beliefs. Moreover, they violate the ‘constitution’ of modernity Paul O’Connor The Terror of Home: The Haunted House Formula in Contemporary Culture which institutes a sharp separation between natural and social, human and non-human, material and mental phenomena (Latour, 1993). As I will argue, drawing on the ideas of Lévy-Bruhl (1975), this constitution privileges those mental processes leading to operative knowledge over those which endow our experience with meaning. Home, on the other hand – which in the contemporary imaginary is symbolised primarily by the domestic space of the family dwelling – is both a refuge from the rationalisation of social life (Berger & Kellner, 1974), and a centre of integrative meaning, a place where experience ‘hangs together’ due to processes of association and participation which run counter to the principles of modern, operative logic (O’Connor, 2018). Therefore it is not insignificant that the contemporary supernatural novel or film is most often set in a ‘haunted house’ and features a family as its protagonists. Domestic space, as a centre of personal identity and intimate relations not wholly absorbed into the rationalised structures that govern modern life, provides an appropriate setting for narratives built around the resurgence of supernatural beliefs and existential fears. Through a deliberate invocation of liminality, the haunted house story enacts a kind of transcendence in which the modern ‘self in a case’ (Elias, 1978) is dissolved and individuals are restored to a condition of participation in their surroundings characteristic of older patterns of belief. However, because this involves transgressing the categories into which modern knowledge divides experience, it can only be enacted in isolation, by protagonists who have stepped (or been pushed) outside society. Hence the story frequently ends with one or more characters trapped in a perpetually liminal situation in which the breakdown of taken-for-granted ways of structuring reality generates an overwhelming experience of terror. The haunted house formula therefore embodies a central ambiguity in contemporary culture: a longing for transcendence of the rationalised structures of our society accompanied by a terror of the results; a hunger for and horror of existential experience. The Haunted House Formula as a Cultural Artefact Ghost stories and ghost belief have been the subject of scholarly research in the fields of folklore (Bennett, 1999; Goldstein et al, 2007; Stewart, 1982), literary criticism (Bailey, 1999; Killeen, 2014; Spencer, 1992; Tatar, 1981), and among philosophers with an interest in the aesthetics of horror (Carroll, 1987; Santilli, 2007). However, with the exception of recent studies of patterns of ghost belief in America (Baker & Bader, 2014) and the social psychology of fear (Kerr, 2015), there has been little engagement with the topic by sociologists. This is despite the fact that ghosts are a pervasive presence in contemporary popular culture. Ghost stories ‘reveal the contours of our anxieties, the nature of our collective fears and desires, the things we can’t talk about in any other way’ (Dickey, 2016: 2). They offer a glimpse into our collective sub-conscious. As such, they deserve the attention of the cultural sociologist. The focus of this paper is neither folkloric narratives nor alleged ‘real life’ experience of ghosts, but the haunted house formula in popular culture, as disseminated through commercial fiction and film. 1 Building on the work of Bailey (1999), this section identifies six recurrent features of the contemporary haunted house story, whose significance will be explored in more detail in the remainder of the paper. These themes 38 International Political Anthropology Vol. 15 (2022) No. 1 are endlessly repeated in horror novels from the past several decades as well as in countless horror films which have a domestic setting. Home A haunted house story typically begins with a family moving into their new house, full of excited expectations for the future. This is often an ‘ideal’ home – old and roomy, with attic and cellar – reminiscent of Bachelard’s ‘oneiric house’ imbued with ‘dream values’ (1994: 17). In other words, it is a domestic space which is not purely functional, but affords ample room for memories and daydreaming as well. However, it also turns out to have a chequered past of which the new occupants only gradually become aware. Over the course of the novel or film the house turns out to be a thoroughly unhomely space, a source of mortal danger to the family rather than a refuge and centre of security. The haunted house story, then, problematises the notion of home. A dwelling that is rooted in the landscape and bears the patina of history appears, not as a refuge and place of flourishing, but threatening and evil. Isolation The characters at the centre of the narrative become progressively more isolated from the social world as the supernatural events unfold. Extended family members, friends and neighbours barely intrude on the closed world of the haunted house, within which the family becomes enclosed both psychologically and physically. Representatives of the institutional domains of medicine, law and order, religion, or science, embodying the rationality of the social world, may offer aid, but are baffled and turned away by the supernatural forces lose in the dwelling. The isolation of the haunted house creates a selfcontained world which operates according to different rules from society at large. The boundaries of the house become a rigid frontier between the space where ordinary logic still rules, and that within where supernatural forces are unleashed. In this context, ways of thinking considered superseded in the daylit world of everyday rationality suddenly become feasible again. Older modes of thought and experience recur The physical and social isolation of the protagonists creates the circumstances in which the categories of rational thought which govern the modern world can be temporarily suspended. What occurs in the haunted house story, therefore, is not a mere sequence of terrifying events, but a shift in the way the characters understand reality. Physical nature (trees, storms, animals) becomes a threatening force seemingly full of malevolent intent. The dead come to life and the past spills into and eventually overwhelms the present. Unconscious forces, symbolised by the basement which is a feature of every reputable haunted house, become predominant. The blurring of lines between animate and inanimate is a central feature of such stories: buildings take on a sinister life and purpose of their own, dolls come alive, objects like televisions and taps turn themselves on and off at will, while the human protagonists are often reduced to zombies manipulated by supernatural forces. 39 Paul O’Connor The Terror of Home: The Haunted House Formula in Contemporary Culture As well as transgressing the structural categories of modern thought, haunted house stories display an affinity with experiences which, according to Anthony Giddens (1991), tend to be sequestered or hidden in modern societies. Giddens argues that as abstract systems come to order ever more of day-to-day life, external disturbances to these systems are progressively minimised. These include madness, criminality, sickness and death, sexuality, and nature. ‘The overall thrust of modern institutions is to create settings of action ordered in terms of modernity’s own dynamics and severed from ‘external criteria’… day-to-day social life tends to become separated from ‘original’ nature and from a variety of experiences bearing on existential questions and dilemmas’ (1991: 8). These experiences are not in themselves uncanny, as they do not run counter to the laws of nature laid out by modern science. But, having been marginalised by the systems which organise everyday life in modern societies, we may surmise, pace Freud (1955), that when they intrude into our consciousness, they share at least an affinity in emotional colouring with uncanny or supernatural happenings. Perhaps it is not surprising, therefore, that criminality and illicit sexuality feature in the background of many ghost stories; that prisons and asylums are frequently reputed to be haunted; and that the archetypal haunted house is often associated with threatening natural phenomena such as thick vegetation, storms, and animals behaving in unusual or unfamiliar ways. Liminality Horror has been described as ‘an experience of those aspects of the real that are not yet slotted into any particular cultural schema… it is an anxiety about the instability and contingency of the world itself’ (Santilli, 2007: 184). More accurately, we might describe it as the deliberate staging of a situation in which the cultural schemata of the modern world break down and it is no longer possible to fit phenomena into the categories of officially recognised knowledge. Such narratives rely on the deliberate invocation of liminality (van Gennep, 2019). At the start of the haunted house novel or film, the capacity of the protagonists to participate effectively in everyday routines is already under strain due to financial problems, marital breakdown, childhood trauma, substance abuse or some other cause. The events of the plot serve to reinforce this marginal status of the characters, which has an affinity with the setting of the haunted house – isolated and of ill-repute – and the supernatural manifestations which escape the strictures of ordinary logic. Breakdown of personality According to Anthony Giddens (1991), the nuclear family and the domestic sphere are the central bulwarks of identity in the modern world. Their threatened destruction in the haunted house story therefore constitutes a frontal assault on the personality of the protagonist, which is further undermined by their deepening isolation. As the story proceeds, the main character is likely to find their mind clouded and their character eroded by the supernatural forces resident in the house. Jancovich notes the popularity in horror fiction of ‘The figure of the house as a monstrous place within which the self is either imprisoned or lost’ (1992: 41). 40 International Political Anthropology Vol. 15 (2022) No. 1 Knowledge Perhaps because the haunted house represents a domain of resurgent irrationality, rational knowledge, rather than religious or magical interventions, is frequently presented as the best hope of rescue. The characters may start researching the history of the property, delving through old newspaper files and searching for outside experts in order to identify the cause of events. The promise is that through the discovery of the ‘secret’ of the haunting, it will be overcome. Hence ‘horror stories are predominantly concerned with knowledge as a theme’ (Carroll, 1987: 57). Once the uncertainty is removed so, it is hoped, will be the sensation of the uncanny: ‘what was formerly unheimlich becomes heimlich: the once hostile world becomes habitable again’ (Tatar, 1981:182). However, frequently the search for knowledge is thwarted, the explanation falls short, and the supernatural force inhabiting the house is not defeated. Within the world of the haunted house story, in fact, investigative techniques which embody the principles of modern rationality rarely succeed in stabilising the situation. Where the supernatural force is defeated, it is through moral qualities of courage and love. More frequently, the protagonists flee the house or are destroyed at the end of the story. Conclusion We can now summarise the characteristics of the contemporary haunted house novel or film. It is a narrative in which the main characters are isolated in a house whose homely qualities are systematically inverted, and in which core underpinnings of the modern self, the nuclear family and our conviction of our own rational agency, are threatened; one predicated on the deliberate invocation of liminality and the resurgence of archaic modes of perceiving and interpreting experience, and centrally concerned with knowledge as a theme. What does the popularity of such narratives say about the fears and desires which cluster around the ideas of home, rationality and the self in late modern society? Return of the Repressed Ghosts, all right-minded people agree, should long ago have ceased to haunt us. Goldstein et al (2007: 60) note the conventional academic perspective that supernatural beliefs are survivals from a naive past destined to fade away as society develops. Yet this has not been the case. Surveys indicate high levels of belief in ghosts in even the most technologically developed countries. According to the 2005 Baylor Religion Survey (BRS) in the United States, 49% of respondents believed that ghosts probably or absolutely exist; 21% percent agreed that it is possible to communicate with the dead, and 39% that places can be haunted (Baker & Bader, 2014: 572). A Huffington Post/YouGov poll in 2012 reported that 45% of Americans believe in ghosts (Kerr, 2015: 91). In fact, public opinion polls indicate increasing belief in ghosts over time (Goldstein et al, 2007; Baker & Bader, 2014). Moreover, ghosts and hauntings (along with other aspects of the paranormal) have come to permeate large areas of popular culture (Kerr, 2015). Horror novels and films, television programmes dedicated to ghost-hunting, Halloween decorations, scare houses, walking tours of haunted locations, and internet sites dedicated to true-life ghost stories are only some of the ways in which restless spirits permeate popular culture. Ghost lore is 41 Paul O’Connor The Terror of Home: The Haunted House Formula in Contemporary Culture commodified through literature, television, movies, and electronic games; as images on greeting cards and Halloween decorations; in theme park ‘houses of horror’; in ghost tours, haunted hotel travel listings, and the commercialisation of haunted real estate (Goldstein et al, 2007: 173-4). Yet none of these are quite respectable. Our culture is ambivalent towards ghosts, as well as other incidences of the paranormal, regarding them with a mixture of embarrassment and fascination. Part of a body of belief supposed to be long exploded, they nonetheless retain an enduring appeal. Hence ghosts exemplify what Freud meant by the uncanny: the terror associated with the recurrence of something long-familiar, but partially repressed. For Freud, ‘An uncanny experience occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed’ (1955, 17). It is the second source of the uncanny which is the focus of interest here. Freud saw belief in ghosts and other supernatural phenomena as embodying ‘a regression to a time when the ego was not yet sharply differentiated from the external world and from other persons’ (Freud, 1955: 10). The uncanny represents a recurrence, in the modern world, of an animistic conception of the universe characterised by a ‘narcissistic overestimation of subjective mental processes’ which Freud termed ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ (1955: 12). This habit of mind has been left behind by modern rationalistic consciousness, but occasionally an individual will experience something – a series of coincidences, a perception of malevolent force, or the apparent sighting of a ghost – which seems to offer it support. Thus ‘everything which now strikes us as “uncanny” fulfils the condition of stirring those vestiges of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression’ (1955, 13). Freud’s essay offers important clues to the nature of the uncanny, pinpointing its origin in experiences which seem to contradict our everyday, rationalistic modes of thought and evoke an older, pre-scientific understanding of the universe. Unfortunately, he also shoehorns it into a naively evolutionary and progressivist understanding of cultural development. Freud characterises animistic habits of thought as ‘figments of the imagination’ through which our ‘primitive forefathers’ (1955: 17) sought to deny the ‘inexorable laws of reality’ (1955: 13). Instead of labelling belief in ghosts as simply false, however, it is more fruitful to see it as one of several modes of interpreting experience which were suppressed by the reordering of what counted as the categories of acceptable knowledge that accompanied the emergence of modernity. Surveys indicate that significant numbers of people continue to have experiences which they interpret as encounters with ghosts or haunted buildings (Baker & Bader, 2014). What has changed is that their interpretations are no longer accepted as legitimate within the categories of ‘official’ knowledge – those sanctioned by scientific, educational and public institutions. According to Bruno Latour (1993), modernity is characterised by the institution of a sharp divide between the natural and social worlds. These constitute ‘two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of non-humans on the other’ (1993: 10). Simultaneously, God was removed from the dual social and natural construction; there was neither a divine presence in nature nor a divine origin to society 42 International Political Anthropology Vol. 15 (2022) No. 1 (1993: 33). ‘The obscurity of the olden days, which illegitimately blended together social needs and natural reality, meanings and mechanisms, signs and things, gave way to a luminous dawn that cleanly separated material causality from human fantasy’ (1993: 35). Premodern societies embraced within their symbolic imaginaries fantastic figures – combinations of humans and animals, demons, and other supernatural creatures – but these were not, strictly speaking, uncanny, because they are given a location within the ruling symbolic system of the culture (Santilli, 2007). This tolerance of hybrid entities which cross the boundaries of life and death, gods and mortals, beasts and men, is reflected in the literature of past centuries. ‘For Prince Hamlet, seeing his father's ghost is certainly alarming; but it is the ghost's message, not its presence, which so distresses him.’ (Spencer, 1992: 199). What distinguishes the specifically modern horror story from traditional legends that featured ghosts or monsters is the attitude of the characters; ‘In works of horror, the humans regard the monsters that they encounter as abnormal, as disturbances of the natural order. In fairy tales, on the other hand, monsters are part of the everyday furniture of the universe’ (Carroll, 1987: 52). Belief in ghosts implies the survival of personality outside the physical body. Likewise, stories of hauntings often involve the ascription of agency, usually malevolent, to physical places. They transgress the boundaries between humans and non-humans, people and things, subject and object, conscious and unconscious entities which undergird our modern understanding of the world. Consequently, with the emergence of modernity, ghost belief was delegitimised. The effect of the ‘constitution’ described by Latour was to consign those habits of mind which Freud referred to as ‘the omnipotence of thoughts’ (1955, 12) to the realm of the infantile, the primitive and the unconscious. The significance of this goes beyond the dismissal of specific beliefs about ghosts or other supernatural phenomena. As we shall see, the habits of mind which modernity tends to delegitimise are central to the achievement of belonging and the experience of the world as meaningful. Hence, perhaps, the stubborn recurrence of ways of thinking which were meant to be superseded, and the attraction evidenced in so many areas of contemporary culture towards experiences (whether direct or vicarious) labelled supernatural. Knowledge and Meaning One of the most detailed explorations of the kinds of thought supressed by the ‘constitution’ of modernity is to be found in the writings of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1975). According to Lévy-Bruhl, moderns tend to view reality through the medium of concepts which are relatively fixed and well-defined; the concepts of earlier peoples, on the other hand, are more like generic images (1975: 37), fluid and subject to transformation under the impact of emotion and ‘mystical’ experience. Consequently, the elements of their experience are less subject to watertight division into logical categories. The same individual can be at one and the same time both a man and a leopard. Piercing the footprint of an enemy with a spear has the power to injure the person who made it. Above all, the individual is apprehended as consubstantial with the group, its mythical ancestors, and the sacred sites which preserve their memory (1975: 193). Moreover, according to Lévy-Bruhl, 43 Paul O’Connor The Terror of Home: The Haunted House Formula in Contemporary Culture this so-called ‘primitive’ mentality incorporates universal features present in every human mind – they are simply more marked and easily observable among traditional peoples. His term for this way of thinking and experiencing was ‘participation’. Such a participatory relation to the world generates rich patterns of association and meaning. This is recognised by Jürgen Habermas – although like Freud, he takes it for granted that such modes of thought are superseded. Based on the works of Lévy-Bruhl and Maurice Godilier amongst others, Habermas describes what he terms the ‘mythological-narrative figures of thought’ (1984: 67) dominant in archaic societies, in counterpoint to contemporary ways of understanding the world that embody rationality. In the mythic worldview there is a ‘reciprocal assimilation of nature to culture and conversely culture to nature’ (1984: 47). Cultural arrangements are naturalised whilst natural forces and processes are personalised and take on the characteristics of social actors. Appearances are organised according to relationships of similarity and contrast in such a way that everything can be related to everything else. Everything is significant and can be explained within the terms of a unified symbolic order. There is no sharp demarcation between the individual and the surrounding natural and social worlds (Habermas, 1984: 51). In this ‘mythological-narrative’ or ‘participatory’ worldview almost all experience is profoundly meaningful, because it can be integrated within an overarching symbolic order. ‘Meaning’ is used here, following Dilthey, to refer to the subjective coherence ascribed to experience by an individual or social group: it is ‘the comprehensive category through which life can be understood’ (Dilthey, 1976: 235). However, when participatory thinking is supressed and the natural and social worlds assigned to separate and incommensurable ontological domains, the webs of meaning woven by mythic figures of thought begin to be unpicked. What counts as knowledge is narrowed, and the status of myth and narrative is dramatically reduced, as the web of connections which they embody come to be perceived as irrational and primitive. ‘Knowledge’ is now limited to what is objectively certain, methodically ascertained and empirically verifiable. In practice, it is increasingly reduced to operative knowledge which specifies replicable sets of relations between things that enable their manipulation and control. Meaning on the other hand is demoted to the status of a secondary construction, subjectively ascribed to experience by imagination. Another way of describing the constitution of modernity therefore – with a different emphasis from Latour – is to say that it establishes a profound severance between knowledge and meaning. This separation of knowledge and meaning occurred at the very foundation of modern science. As Mary Midgely writes (2011: 25), the founding move of Galileo and his colleagues was to narrow the province of physics, excluding from it all questions about purpose and meaning. Koyré likewise describes the emergence of the scientific conception of an infinite universe governed by uniform laws as implying the ‘discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based upon value-concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally the utter devalorization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world of facts’ (1957: 2). A key figure in this process was Francis Bacon, the first thinker to systematically develop the principles of modern scientific methodology. 44 International Political Anthropology Vol. 15 (2022) No. 1 Bacon, like Descartes after him, elevates doubt to a core methodological principle (1893: 34). This is due to his conception of the human mind, which for Bacon ‘is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced’ (1893: 132). The problem Bacon identifies is that the mind is too inclined to participation in the world, too disposed to infuse objective reality with subjective desires or social meanings. Bacon’s central concern is to ‘disenchant’ the glass. It is in this context that we should read his attacks on the admixture of science and theology. In The Advancement of Learning Bacon argues that theology and science are completely separate spheres. God does not intervene directly in the world (for example through miracles) and we cannot access the divine or discover its nature through the physical world (the world is in no respect sacred). Bacon’s objection to theology is that it seeks to impute meaning to the world under the guise of describing objective reality. Similarly, in the Novum Organum, he attacks the idols of the tribe; those beliefs arising from the nature of the human mind, which naturally assimilates things to itself and discovers an order in them which may not be there in reality. For Bacon, therefore, it is precisely the human tendency to seek meaning in our experience that turns the mind into an ‘enchanted glass’ which fails to accurately reflect the processes of the physical world. Questions of meaning and values are downgraded or dismissed in his thinking, as are the discourses and disciplines which embody them, from poetry to theology. Rather than seeking to understand the world and their place in it, humans should aim to command and transform it. The purpose of knowledge is to extend our control over the world: to ‘enfranchise the power of man unto the greatest liberty and possibility of works and effects’ (1893: 96). Bacon’s writings constitute the founding charter of our technological society, vital for understanding the reordering of the discourses and categories of knowledge which occurred at its foundation. Yet his ambition to render the enchanted glass of the human mind transparent clashes with our ineradicable desire for meaning. The connections between phenomena established by operative knowledge fail to satisfy our need to conceive a world which is responsive, purposive and meaningful; consequently, mythological-narrative and participatory modes of thinking persist. The separation of knowledge from meaning led, not to the eradication of discourses and practices concerned with meaning, but their corralling within certain domains of social and cultural life. One of the most important of these was the domestic space of the home. Haunted Homes The rise of the modern world was accompanied not only by a redefinition of what counted as knowledge, but also by a shift in the meanings ascribed to social space. From the eighteenth century onwards, the domestic space of the household was increasingly defined by its separation from the public arena of work and politics, and viewed as a refuge from the rationalisation and market logic which were coming to dominate other areas of life (Rybczynski, 1987; Hareven, 1991; Flanders, 2014). As Berger and Kellner write, the private sphere served as ‘a kind of balancing mechanism providing meanings and meaningful activities to compensate for the discontents brought about by the large 45 Paul O’Connor The Terror of Home: The Haunted House Formula in Contemporary Culture structures of modern society’ (1974: 166). The ‘irrational’ impulses and feelings which had to be supressed in the worlds of industrial production and public administration could here be allowed freer play. As the public sphere became increasingly dominated by Baconian, operative logic, the privacy of home offered a space where other ways of thinking and feeling could persist – including the participatory thinking central to the crystallisation of meaning. While in modern societies the domestic sphere operates as a (partial) refuge from rationalisation, in every culture home functions as a centre of meaning, the location around which individuals and communities organise their experience of the world (O’Connor, 2018). Underlying the perception of being at home, whether in a household, neighbourhood, city or territory, are a series of localising processes which endow experience with a particular density and coherence: the cultivation of place, the accumulation of memory, the crystallisation of tradition, the establishment of symbolic boundaries, and the ‘mutuality of being’ (Sahlins, 2011) generated by commensality, gift exchange and mutual recognition. Each of these obeys the logic of participation outlined by Lévy-Bruhl (1975), since they involve a transcendence of the distinctions between subject and object, self and other, nature and culture, and thereby work to integrate experience as a meaningful whole. A home is permeated by the personalities of those who have dwelt there; consequently, it is always, in a sense, haunted. In fact, the words ‘haunt’ and ‘home’ derive from the same ancient root; etymologically, to haunt simply means to make a place one’s home (McClenon, 1997: 62). Whether we perceive these residues of past dwelling as beneficent or malevolent depends partly on our relationship to the previous inhabitants, to the past in general, and to the house itself. People in pre-modern societies were habituated to sharing their homes with entities we would now class as ghosts. Claude Lecouteux (2013) writes in his exhaustive study of household spirits in Europe that when we examine rituals and beliefs connected to the house in folklore, we encounter fundamental constants whose underlying structure scarcely evolves over time. Central to this system of belief was the idea that every house possesses its own spirit, which must be propitiated with various rituals (Lecouteux, 2013). The folklore which Lecouteux collected from across Europe was permeated by the belief the house is a living being; that the spirits of the ancestors remain in the place where they lived and take a continuing interest in the affairs of its inhabitants; and that these household spirits should be treated with respect and propitiated with offerings of food. Moreover, this structure of belief was not confined to Europe, but can be found in traditional societies around the world, while its presence as early as the Neolithic is suggested by archaeological evidence (O’Connor, 2018). Such household spirits, while they could harm those who showed them disrespect, were in no sense ‘horrific’ or ‘terrifying’. They were conceived anthropomorphically and tended to have diminutive names which carried connotations of familiarity and affection (Lecouteux, 2013: 122). ‘The household spirit is first and foremost a tutelary spirit who is helpful and benevolent’ (Lecouteux, 2013: 125). However, they were progressively demonised, first as a result of Christianisation and then with the progress of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation (Lecouteux, 2013). In today’s haunted house novels and films, motifs associated with the traditional corpus of beliefs around house 46 International Political Anthropology Vol. 15 (2022) No. 1 spirits recur, but now cast as terrifying and uncanny. The belief in household spirits, which was a feature not just of Europe but of traditional societies around the world, was no doubt, at least in part, a survival of the cult of the ancestors, which is quite universal in early societies. So too is the modern celebration of Halloween: the original Irish traditions surrounding this festival included leaving out offerings of food and drink for the spirits of the ancestors, who were believed to revisit the dwellings of their living relatives on this night. Such practices were originally was about cultivating a meaningful relationship with the departed ones based on memory, reverence and respect: yet over time this meaning has been subverted, so that the notion of the ancestral dead continuing to be present in the dwellings of the living, and even interacting with them, has been at once trivialised and cast in the frame of pure horror. It may be that, in a thoroughly rationalised world, some of the very things which help create the sense of home – the sense of specific places being alive and imbued with the legacy of the past, of the ancestors reaching out to shape the present – have become ‘unthinkable’ and therefore uncanny. Certainly, many of the anxieties expressed in haunted house stories seem to cluster around the existential underpinnings of home itself – in particular, our relationships to places, the past, and the house itself and its boundaries. As one writer notes, ‘ghosts – that is, the sense of the presence of those who are not physically there – are a ubiquitous aspect of the phenomenology of place’ (Bell, 1997: 813). In other words, a sense of place is constituted in large part by our awareness of those who have lived there in the past, including our own past selves. Moreover, our ideas about the rightful possession of a place depend in part on our relationship to the ghosts that inhabit it (Bell, 1997: 832). Attitudes to ghosts therefore provide a barometer of changing relationships to place. From the gothic tales of the eighteenth century onwards, the literature of terror has been shaped by the centrality of setting (Bailey, 1999: 4). Place not only plays a crucial role in ghost stories; it is invariably instinct with sinister agency, usually derived from the hostile presence of the previous occupants. One might suggest that as people have become more disconnected from places, so that the traces of past inhabitants are today usually those of strangers, the ghosts of place have become progressively more alien and potentially hostile. Ghost stories also reflect an ambivalent relationship to the past. Just as eighteenthcentury gothic tales reflected the hostility of their authors towards the past represented by a feudal aristocracy and the Catholic religion, more recent American horror novels and films have featured the legacy of the Salem witch-trials, haunted Indian burial grounds, and abused and vengeful slaves. These symbolise the sins of the fathers which disturb the protagonists’ possession of the haunted house. ‘Embedded deep in the idea of home ownership – the Holy Grail of American middle-class life – is the idea that we don’t, in fact, own the land we’ve just bought’ (Dickey, 2016: 45). A sharp separation from the past and a sense of difference from our ancestors is one of the hallmarks of modernity (Olick et al., 2011: 7). With this comes an estrangement which can make the endurance of that past within the present appear sinister and threatening. Finally, there is our relationship to the house itself. It is striking that locations which had particular significance in the corpus of beliefs about house spirits studied by Lecouteux (2013) – the threshold, doors, windows, roof, fireplace, chimney, and the basement or 47 Paul O’Connor The Terror of Home: The Haunted House Formula in Contemporary Culture ground beneath the house – typically feature in fiction as the site of uncanny manifestations. One might surmise that some residue of the thinking which conceives of the house as animate and its boundaries as endowed with special importance survives today, to resurface in ghost stories. However, stripped of folkloristic ritual and ancestral associations, the animate house is alien and hostile, and its desire for ‘mutuality of being’ (Sahlins, 2011) with its inhabitants is perceived as a threat to their life and sanity. The haunted house formula, playing as it does upon an underlying ambivalence in our relationship to places, the past, and the physical presence of the house itself, embodies our profound severance from the existential underpinnings of belonging and integrative meaning. Liminality The haunted house formula relies on the evocation of liminal anti-structure in counterpoint to the rationalised structures of modern society. For Arnold van Gennep (2019: 10), liminality refers to the middle stage of a rite of passage. Such rites mark the movement of an individual or community from one cosmic or social world to another. They are ‘always founded on the same idea, the reality of a change in the participants’ social condition’ (van Gennep, 2019: 141). The liminal stage is preceded by preliminal rites which separate the initiand from their established place in the social structure, and followed by postliminal rites which mark their incorporation into a new position (2019: 10). During the liminal stage, the initiands are to some degree outside the social structure, with its rules and conventions. This is illustrated by the fact that among a great many traditional peoples, youths undergoing initiation were permitted to steal from the community without suffering adverse consequences. Their position outside of the social structure liberated them from structural obligations. It also, as Victor Turner underlines, placed them in close connection with the asocial powers of life and death; hence the frequent comparison of novices to ‘ghosts, gods, or ancestors’ (1974: 59). Like the participants in a rite of passage, ghosts are liminal beings. The funeral rites of traditional societies frequently reflect the idea that the dead do not pass into the world of souls right away, but endure a transitional period (van Gennep, 2019: 148). This is paralleled in the mourning rituals prescribed for survivors, during which ordinary social life is suspended (van Gennep, 2019: 147). Moreover, some spirits, perhaps because they have died due to an accident or suicide, cannot enter the land of the dead and remain wandering between the two worlds. In modern culture this liminal character of ghosts is exacerbated, since they are positioned ‘betwixt and between’ the categories of nature and culture, life and death, the known and the amorphous, through which we usually understand the world (Stewart, 1982). In the contemporary haunted house story, however, it is not only the ghosts which are liminal beings, trapped between life and death, unable to move on from the scene of a past tragedy. A similar fate threatens the protagonists in these stories. Progressively isolated from the social world, separated from their everyday habits and routines, and submitting to a kind of fascination by the haunted house and its uncanny inhabitants, they withdraw from the world of structure into the liminal anti-structure represented by the supernatural. Typical features of the haunted house story – the move into the isolated house with the sinister reputation, the progressive severance of contact with the outside world – can be 48 International Political Anthropology Vol. 15 (2022) No. 1 viewed as rites of separation from the social world. Subsequently the protagonist, like an initiand enduring the theatrical terrors which were part of many traditional rites of passage, is subjected to horror after horror by a malevolent force which aims to destroy their personality and identity in order to absorb them into itself. Eventually, there may be a stage of reaggregation, in which they escape from the building and the family structure is reestablished. Alternatively, this stage may never arrive, leaving the protagonist trapped in the perpetual liminality of the haunted house. The isolation of the protagonist in the haunted house story – and frequently, the physical isolation of the house itself – facilitates the recrudescence of modes of thought delegitimised in modernity, alongside modes of experience excluded by the modern effort to create settings of total calculation and control. Victor Turner wrote that liminal situations and roles ‘are almost everywhere attributed with magico-religious properties’ (1977: 108). If both the ghostly and human inhabitants of the haunted house resemble the participants in the liminal phase of a rite of passage in being outside the social structure, they are also outside of its logic. Within the liminal space of the haunted house, the takenfor-granted categories of modern thought are suspended, so participatory and mythological-narrative modes of thought can recur. This recurrence is, however, delimited both spatially (within the confines of the haunted house) and temporally (within those of the ghost narrative). At some point the novel ends, the film credits role and the cinema lights come on. So how do we characterise the experience of those who consume these narratives? Rather than liminal, perhaps it might better be described as ‘liminoid’ (Turner, 1974). For Turner, the ludic aspects of tribal and agrarian myth and ritual were intrinsically connected to the work of the community. The liminality incorporated in rites of passage, their dissolution of structure, took place within the larger structure of stable, cyclical and repetitive systems (1974: 62). The liminoid, on the other hand, arises in a complex industrial society where ‘free time’ is arbitrarily separated from work and production (Turner, 1974: 65). Participation is individualised, a matter of choice rather than social obligation (Turner, 1974: 84). For Turner, the liminoid offers an independent domain of free creative activity within a complex modern society. However, Thomassen (2014: 165) contends that many contemporary experiences which might be termed liminoid ‘involve no transformation of subjectivity or no passage to the ‘other world’. Instead he proposes the term the limivoid for the contemporary ‘inciting of near-death experiences, a jump into nothingness, a desperate search for experience in a world of ontological excess’ (Thomassen, 2014: 165). Such limivoid rituals have lost any connection to cosmology and ritual passages; they are individualistic and voluntary, decoupled from the schemata of social rituals; involve adrenaline-inducing sensations of fear and danger sought for their own sake; and are associated with substantive changes in neither the individual nor the social and cultural order (Thomassen, 2014). Liminality is structurally central to the haunted house formula in fiction and film, which involves a staged dissolution of rationalised structures of thought and experience. Within the fictional universe everything we assumed we knew about the nature of reality is overturned. But the liminality is contained within the narrative form of a limivoid 49 Paul O’Connor The Terror of Home: The Haunted House Formula in Contemporary Culture entertainment. The paranormal novel or film is, to borrow Thomassen’s term (2014: 184), a ‘jump’ in and out of normality which leaves the identity of the viewer and the social world around them unchanged. It can therefore evoke the most terrifying dissolution of the takenfor-granted structures of normality while simultaneously containing and neutralising it. Conclusion By evoking a liminal space in which the dominant categories of modern thought do not apply, and in which existential experience and a participatory relation to the world can recur, the haunted house formula offers its watchers and readers a break from the constraints of rationality. Norbert Elias perceived a relationship between the birth of modern science, with its conception of natural processes in a purely mechanical or causal way, void of any purpose related to humans, and the parallel birth of the modern self, characterised by self-control and an intense restraint of the instincts and affective impulses (Elias, 1978). It was, moreover, this restraint of the impulses which gave rise to the sense of separation between self and world characteristic of modern thought (Elias, 1978: 257). The recurrence of archaic patterns of thought within the liminal space of the haunted house enables the dissolution of this modern ‘self in a case’ and the participation or blending of the self in the haunting dead, the haunted place, the enduring past and the natural world. This dissolution of the rationalised modern self, if experienced directly, might be purely terrifying; however, when staged and contained in a work of fiction, it creates a frisson of mingled fear and pleasure for the viewer who experiences it vicariously. The haunted house formula in contemporary popular culture therefore enables a certain kind of transcendence, and this is likely the root of its appeal. These are also stories about a longing for home, whose protagonists want a settled place in the world which they can call their own. But the haunted house invariably betrays its inhabitants. Why is this? The residual association of domestic space with participation and existential experience makes it a centre of personal identity and meaning. But likewise, it can become the dwelling of uneasy spirits, because it contains the residual memory of habits of mind and forms of experience supressed or denied within wide domains of contemporary culture. Precisely because these modes of thought have been supressed, they bear with them an odour of the uncanny. The ‘case’ which the modern self extrudes as its shell may exert a sometimes intolerable pressure on our impulses and instincts, but it also structures our experience of self and world, and its dissolution can be terrifying. Moreover, the paradox of modern domesticity is that it is founded on a declaration of independence from many of those existential constants of ancestry and place which helped constitute home in previous cultures. Perhaps, even as modernity longs for home, it fears entrapment by the ties of belonging. Notes This section draws on a structural and thematic analysis of a number of works in the genre. Books: Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House; Jay Anson, The Amityville Horror; Robert Marasco, Burnt offerings; Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door; Stephen King, The Shining. Films: The Amityville Horror, The Conjuring, The Shining, Veronica, We Are Not Alone, I am the Pretty 1 50 International Political Anthropology Vol. 15 (2022) No. 1 Thing that Lives in the House, Finders Keeper, The Duplex, Paranormal Activity, and the Netflix television series of the same title based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston (1994) The Poetics of Space (transl. M. Jolas), Boston: Beacon Press Bacon, Francis (1893) The Advancement of Learning, London: Cassell & Company, accessed via. 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