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

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.