Sick Houses Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread

Explores the architecture of haunted houses, uncanny domestic spaces, and how the horror genre subverts and corrupts the sanctity of home.

The history of horror begins with a house. From Otranto to Amityville, the haunted house story endures because it perverts what is equally the most universal and the most personal of realms: the home. Our home is an extension of our self, a manifestation of our identity, and a repository of our memories. It is a micro-universe of our own creation that we control. It is also where we are the most vulnerable because we are supposed to be the most safe.

Whether it is a decrepit Victorian mansion, a modernist luxury high-rise, a little cottage in the woods, or a starter house in the suburbs, Sick Houses explores how the horror genre in film, television, and literature uses architecture and the ideology of the home against us. It looks at the mythology of the American Dream and how the lure of homeownership becomes a trap. It celebrates the witch house, the power of the crone, and the fear of aging women who live alone. It explores how concrete utopias became ready-made mise en scene for urban terror.

From the betrayal of sentient shape-shifting houses to shadow-self dollhouse doppelgangers, Sick Houses examines how the horror genre subverts and corrupts that which is the most sacrosanct.

Leila Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer, speaker, and designer whose work focuses on the intersection of history and horror and the gothic in contemporary culture. Author of Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, her essays have appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, The Repeater Book of the Occult, The New Urban Gothic, and Bitter Root Vol. 3: Legacy.