Haunted Houses

This is my 52nd edition of the newsletter since the weekly format began! It's been a wonderful experience for me—I've gotten closer than ever to the genre, and I've learned a lot about my own interests and values. Feel free to let me know how you're liking Dead of Night, including any requests or recommendations. Catch me on BlueSky or email me at deadofnightmailbox at proton.me.

This week, haunted houses and survival horror ...

(Minor spoilers below.)

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ The Changeling, dir. Peter Medak, 1980.

Rooms with secrets. In The Changeling, George C. Scott’s John moves into a house that feels haunted even absent the spooky phenomena. Medak’s elegant, slow camera and deep focus—usually through space unoccupied by human beings—craft a domestic interior of what feels like infinite horror potential. Every long hall, or shadow, or doorway promises its own secrets. And if a house is always a secret world, a large house is a secret universe. 

Big and spooky. It cannot be overstated how large this house is for a solo widower—as visitors tell John more than once. There’s something obscene about all these empty rooms, but there’s also something hair-raising. Unoccupied private space holds its own unnatural mood. Most of us experience this at the margins of our living spaces—attics, storage rooms, and crawl spaces. John has chosen a home which is almost entirely this kind of space. It’s as if he’s asking for ghosts.