Recommendation | The Haunted House

Flickering lights, creaking wooden floors, doors that get loudly slammed by themselves and the sound of an insane laughter that bursts in the middle of the night? This is probably a haunted house. Why are there so many movies of this genre? Maybe because we all have the fear that our home is not really a safe place. In the book “Home for the Soul” by Yaakov Metri, he claims that our connection to our home is not only to the physical home, but to the special inner experience that our home gives us. At home we can feel enough security and inner peace that allows us to feel, imagine and just be ourselves. Home is our anchor in the face of difficult and painful events that we go through in life. Metri talks about home not only as a physical place where we feel protected, but about an inner mental space where we feel calm and belonging.

However, in the current economic situation and in view of the housing crisis, many of us will not have the opportunity to buy a home and we will probably continue to move between rented apartments at extortionate prices. Freud’s saying “There is no home, there is only a journey to home” seems accurate today in both the materialistic and mental sense. The gap between the fantasy of home as a safe and private place, a solid rock that nothing can hurt or penetrate, compared to the reality of break-ins, financial inability, mortgage, natural disasters, divorces and fearful inheritance quarrels, this suspense is the basis of those horror movies about haunted houses.

There is no home, there is only journey to home”– Sigmund Freud   

Hila Padan, illustration inspired by The Haunted House

It is without a doubt the genre of horror movies I hate the most. It is always the same – a young couple moves into a big, empty house that they managed to buy at a bargain price or inherit from a distant aunt. Everything seems to be going great, but then weird things start to happen. They will find out that the ancient house is haunted by an evil spirit or that it was built on an ancient Indian cemetery and all the atrocities committed in it demand revenge. Of course that this house will always have a secret basement or attic where something terrible and awful happens and for some reason the characters will insist on entering them alone. The only parameters that vary from movie to movie are – who is the ghost that is haunting the place? How exactly is it abusing the tenants of the house? And whether or how do they eventually manage to get rid of it? Of course, though, there are also goof movies in this genre that show new angles or that are just well made as opposed to Gore garbage.

Of course, every rule has an exception. Several works in the genre make new and refreshing use of the old formula, present the story from a new and intriguing angle, or are just well-made.

The Babadook// Choosing life, with pain

The Babadook is a 2014 film by Jennifer Kent about a mother and son. The father was killed in a car accident while driving the mother, Amelia, to the hospital for the birth of the son. Since then, Amelia has been having a hard time talking about the subject and is taken aback from her son, Samuel, who reminds her of the terrible event. One day Amelia reads to Samuel a mysterious book called The Babadook about a creature that infiltrates the house and causes atrocities. Samuel claims he sees the “Babadook”; his strange behavior increases and Amelia is afraid he has gone mad, until she herself begins to hear and see strange things. The Babadook manages to enter the house and take over Amelia and make her shout, hit and try to murder her son. Only with the help of Samuel’s love for his mother, she is able to overcome the Babadook, stand up to him and protect her son.

The Babadook by Jennifer Kent

At the end of the film, we witness Amelia managing to deal with the painful past; she can talk about her husband, see Samuel’s good features, and express her love towards him. But the Babadook is not banished or destroyed. He remains at home, in the closet under the stairs where all the father’s belongings are found. Now, when he is restrained, Amelia sees him as an object of empathy, not fear.

Babadook can be viewed as a supernatural expression of mourning, a frightening monster that forces Amelia and Samuel to deal with death, memory and pain. The Babadook penetrates the house and Amelia and transforms her into a murderous creature, perhaps showing us what might happen if we hide our pain and let it consume us from within. But Amelia chooses Samuel and thus she chooses life that include pain instead of pain that takes over life. 

Monster, Kent’s short film from 2005, on which The Babadook is based.

The Haunting of Hill House // The ghost is a wish

Also in the series The Haunting of Hill House created by Mike Flanagan in 2018, there is a family haunted by the past. Olivia, Hugh and their five children buy and renovate an old house to sell it. But strange things happen in it, and the little ones, Nell and Luke, claim that they are seeing ghosts. One evening, Hugh takes the kids and leaves Olivia behind, and ever since then he refuses to talk about the subject. The children only know that Olivia died that night. The series moves between the past and the present where the father and the grown children reunite again after Nell, the little sister, returns to the Hill House and is found dead. Nell’s death forces the family to reunite, open the wounds of the past and try to figure out if the ghosts they see are real and what happened on their last night at the house. When they find out that Luke also went to Hill House, they go out there to save him. At the Hill House they confront the ghosts of the past and realize that Olivia, who was apparently suffering from a mental illness, tried to kill Luke and Nelly because she thought this is how she is protecting them. Hugh got there on time and managed to save the children, but when he returned home to take care of Olivia, he found out she was dead. To save the family once again, Hugh promises Olivia’s ghost that he’ll stay with her if she lets the children go. The brothers are saved and united and in the Hill House the ghosts of the house continue live, now joined by Hugh, Olivia and Nelly.

The Haunting of Hill House by Mike Flanagan

This film also has a dark and unspoken secret, and the characters can move on and overcome the trauma only after the secret is revealed. Hugh refused to talk about that evening to protect his children, but silence opened the door for the ghosts to enter and haunt the family. What is not talked about, becomes even more frightening. In the first episode of the series, Steve, the older brother who has become a ghost book writer, claims that a ghost is something that haunts you, does not leave you, scares you. It can be a memory, a secret, mourning, anger, guilt … and most of the time we would want to see it, because it’s better for us than not to see this something again: “Most of the times, a ghost is a wish”.

I have seen a lot of ghosts. Simply, not exactly in the way it is customary to talk about them. A ghost can be many things. A memory, a daydream, a secret. Mourning, anger, guilt. But from my experience, in most cases, they are simply what we want to see” – from the series Who Lives in Hill House

The Orphanage/ Because of the people

This idea also appears in some way in Juan Antonio Bayona’s 2007 film Orphanage. Laura, her husband Carlos and their son Simon arrive at the orphanage where Laura grew up, with the goal of opening a boarding school for children with special needs. Simon connects with a ghost of a boy named Thomas and when Simon disappears, Laura is convinced that the ghosts of the orphans have kidnapped him and are hiding him from her. She discovers that Thomas was the son of one of the workers at the orphanage, a child that was born with a deformed face and hidden from the rest of the children. When the other children discovered Thomas, they took him to a cave by the sea where he died. In revenge, Thomas’ mother poisoned all the children and the institution closed. Laura tries to search everywhere, but even after many months, there is still no sign of Simon. Carlos despairs and decides that they should leave the house and Laura asks him to go and give her two days to look for Simon.

The Orphanage / El orfanato by J. A.  Bayona

Carlos despairs and decides that they should leave the house. Laura asks him to leave and give her two days to look for Simon. She invites the children to play with her and help her find Simon and they lead her to the basement, the place where they hid Thomas. In this room Laura discovers Simon’s body and realizes that she locked him there without her knowledge and that he tripped on the stairs in the dark and died. Laura is grief-stricken, takes pills and wakes up in a parallel world where Simon is alive in her hands and all the dead children ask her to stay with them and take care of them.

Mourning, Trauma, and Pain

To my opinion, these three films are excellent because they all make use of the world of horror, fantasy and ghosts not as a gimmick or just to scare the audience, but as a tool for dealing differently with the issue of mourning, trauma and pain. The house is not haunted by a ghost that wants to destroy and take down everyone simply because it is evil or crazy, but it has a human story behind it.

The psychic in the Orphanage explains that “when something terrible happens, it sometimes leaves a trail, a wound that functions as a connection between two times. It’s like an echo that is repeated over and over, waiting to be heard. Like a scar. It is begging to be caressed, to be eased.” And indeed, after acknowledging the trauma, treating it, or exposing a secret, it reveals that the haunted house is just a house. The bad things that happened, happened not because of ghosts, but because of human error, something he could have possibly avoided. As Steve says in Who Lives in the Hill House, sometimes we prefer to see the ghosts because we want to. Maybe because it is harder for us to deal with a mistake and we want to believe that the source of our trouble and pain is a supernatural enemy. Not just the home itself, but the family within it is the subject of these films that raise questions about family traumas and how to overcome them, about parent-child relationships and motherhood.

In these three films the border between the world of the living and the dead, imagination and reality is shaken. It is not clear if there really are ghosts, if it was a secret wish or if it was just the characters’ imagination or their way of dealing with the situation, as grief and pain become something so strong that it seems to be supernatural, something that cannot be defeated. Eventually, in the three films, the ghosts remain at the house alongside the living and this situation is not presented as something negative, but perhaps as something even comforting. At home there is some gate to an imaginary world, which can be scary, but also hopeful.