Recommendation | The Haunted House

Flickering lights, creaking wooden floors, doors that get loudly slammed by themselves, and the sound of 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 the reason for it is that we all fear that our home is not the safe haven we assume and expect it to be.

In the book “Home for the Soul” by Yaakov Metri (Modan 2011), he claims that our connection to our home is not only to the physical home but to the exceptional inner experience that our home gives us. At home, we can feel enough security and inner peace that allows us to sense, imagine, and just be ourselves. Home is our anchor in the face of complex and painful events we go through in life. Metri talks about home not only as a physical place where we feel protected but also as an inner mental space where we feel calm and belonging.

For a long period, we have been experiencing ongoing financial crisis, and the housing problem became something that defines an entire generation-  many of us will not have the opportunity to buy a house, 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 insecurity, natural disasters, divorces, and inheritance quarrels. An abyss separates these two, and in the depth of this abyss are the fears on which many of of those horror movies about haunted houses are based. This is where the monsters dwell.

“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 almost 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, just wonderful, but then, ah then….  Weird things suddenly happen. They will discover that the ancient house is haunted by an evil spirit or was built on an old Indian cemetery, and all its atrocities demand revenge. Of course, 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 there alone. The only parameters that vary from one movie to another – who is the ghost 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, 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” (Australia, 2014) is a 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 son’s birth. Since then, Amelia has been having difficulty discussing the subject and is taken aback by her son, Samuel, who reminds her of the terrible event. One day, Amelia reads 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, 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 does she manage 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.

The 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, transforming 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 a life that includes 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

In the TV series “The Haunting of Hill House,” created by Mike Flanagan in 2018, there is a family haunted by the past as well. 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 they see ghosts. One evening, Hugh takes the kids and runs away with them, leaving Olivia behind. The children don’t know what happened and ever since then, he refuses to talk about the subject. The children only know that their mother died that night.

The series moves between the past and the present, between the kids’ childhood to a later period, when the father and the grown children reunite again after Nelli, the little sister, returns to the Hill House and is found dead. Nelli’s death forces the family to reunite, open the wounds of the past, and figure out if the ghosts they see are real and what happened on that terrible night, their last night at the Hill 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, a fabric woven of sorrow and pain that it is unclear whether it is made of devilish spirits or traumas, as in both cases the family is haunted from beyond the grave.

“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 haunt the family.

That which remains unsaid 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, and scares you. It can be a memory, a secret, mourning, anger, guilt … and most of the time, he says, we would want to see it because it’s better for us than not to know this something again: “Most of the time, 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

A dark and unspoken secret is also a theme in “The Orphanage / El orphanato” (Spain, 2007) (2) directed by Juan Antonio Bayona. The movie is also known that to Guillermo del Toro’s involvement in the production.

“The Orphanage / El orfanato” by J. A.  Bayona

Laura, her husband Carlos, and their son Simon, arrive at the orphanage where Laura grew up to open a boarding school for children with special needs. Simon connects with the ghost of a boy named Thomas, and shortly after- disappears. Laura is convinced that the spirits of the orphans have kidnapped her son. While she searches for him, she discovers the truth- Thomas is the son of one of the workers at the orphanage, a child born with a deformed face and hidden from the rest of the orphan children. When the other children discovered Thomas, they mocked him, took him to a cave by the sea, and left him there to die. As revenge, Thomas’ mother poisoned all the children, and the institution was closed.

Upon this horrific discovery, Laura continues to search everywhere for her son. After days, weeks, months, there is still no sign of Simon. Carlos despairs and decides they should leave the place. Laura asks him to go and give her two last days to look for Simon, otherwise she will join him. Will Laura and Carlos meet again?

Mourning, Trauma, and Pain

These are three excellent because the horror and fantasy in them is meaningful: The supernatural is not a gimmick, the ghosts are not made to scare the audience; the formulas, motifs, known cliches, as well their interruption, all those narrative means are in the background and allow to deal with complex and painful issues of mourning, trauma, and pain. The house is not haunted by a ghost that has an inexplicable desire to destroy and take down everyone simply because it is evil or crazy. There is, in the background, a painful human story.

The psychic in the “Orphanage” explains that “when something terrible happens, it sometimes leaves a trail, a wound that functions as a knot between two times. It’s like an echo that is repeated again and again, waiting to be heard. Like a scar. It is begging to be caressed, to be relieved.” 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 happened not because of ghosts but because of humans. These were human mistakes, mistakes that could maybe been avoided. As Steve says in “Who Lives in the Hill House,” “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”

Maybe because it is harder to deal with human mistakes, with our own mistakes, we want to believe that the source of our trouble and pain is a supernatural enemy. Home and with it the family it is meant to house are both at the heart of these works; works that deal with motherhood in particular and in children-parents relationship in general, in family traumas and in ways that we may, along with difficulty and sacrifice, overcome them after all.

These three films shake the border between the world of the living and the dead, imagination and reality. It is unclear if there really are ghosts or if there are a wish, existing in the characters’ imagination or perhaps it is their way of dealing with the situation; grief and pain become something so substantial that they seem to be supernatural enemies, something that cannot be defeated.

But, Eventually, in these three films, the ghosts are not destroyed, they remain at the house alongside the living. This situation is not presented as something negative but even comforting.

At home, there is a collision of worlds, a gate to another world, perhaps imaginary, which can be scary, but also hopeful.