Welcome back, goblins and ghouls, to the fourth annual installment of SpookyJawn! Each October, our love of horror fully rises from its slumber and takes over the MovieJawn website for all things spooky! This year, we are looking at ghosts, goblins, ghouls, goths, and grotesqueries, week by week they will march over the falling leaves to leave you with chills, frights, and spooky delights! Read all of the articles here!

by Tessa Swehla, Associate Editor

There is a reason why my favorite board game is Avalon Hill’s Betrayal at the House on the Hill, where you and your fellow players must explore a creepy old house. It’s very Gothic with a capital G, drawing on the old eighteenth and nineteenth century literary and aesthetic tradition that valued ruins and wilderness and age. Why do we find these old houses in books and film creepy? It’s because they are externalizations of their inhabitants, a physical intrusion of abstract ideas like secrets, trauma, lies, and violence. Gothic and horror films keep coming back to the house as a particularly vital symbol for the dysfunction of the family living within. Houses make for excellent visual storytelling, so, for this SpookyJawn, I have selected three films that have pushed the trope of the creepy old house forward through innovative set design and clear mirroring of the family drama on the physical aspect of the house itself.

The Femm House - The Old Dark House (dir. James Whale, 1932)

Based on J.B. Priestly’s novel Benighted (1927), The Old Dark House has become a yearly watch for me. Desperate to get out of a dangerous storm, some travelers seek shelter at a local mansion, only to become entangled—somewhat literally—within the terrible family drama of the inhabitants. With the exception of the first five minutes, the film takes place entirely in the house and its grounds over the course of one night. The house seems like a safe haven, but as the night continues, it becomes apparent that the dangers in the house far outweigh the dangers of the storm.

The mansion is the old family home of the Femms, who at first seem to consist only of siblings Horace (Ernest Thesiger), Rebecca (Eva Moore), and their menacing butler Morgan (Boris Karloff). Part of the fun of this film is discovering more Femm family members as the mysteries of the house are revealed: they keep popping up as more doors are opened like a character actor’s dream game of Whack-a-Mole. As in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and many other gothic stories about families, the Femms are the last of a long aristocratic line. They are the remnants, the product of years of implied inbreeding, decadent living, and horrifying family secrets.

There is a reason that Whale changed the name of the film to The Old Dark House–the house embodies the family and their history. It’s a large mansion, with several floors, many bedrooms, beautiful wood detailing, and outbuildings like a stable. However, it is clear that, like the Femms, the house has seen better days. It’s dilapidated; the walls are stained; the mirrors are distorted; and there are cobwebs in the rafters. Drafts and leaks abound. When a couple of the travelers (Lilian Bond and Melvyn Douglas) peel off from the rest of the group to drink and flirt in the stable, it’s a relief from the oppression of the house itself. It’s cozier, brighter, and even the music lifts, almost like the characters have stepped into another film, removed from the secrets and terrors of the house.

In the end, only those who are visiting the house are able to leave. The family is still trapped in the house—despite Horace’s alternating prayers and fears that it will be washed away by the storm and another family member’s (Brember Wills) attempt to burn it down—unable to escape their physical or familial legacy.

Allerdale Hall - Crimson Peak (dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2015)

Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) is an American industrial heiress who is wooed by the charming and mysterious English Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston). When Edith’s father dies suddenly, she marries Thomas and moves to his ancestral family home, Allerdale Hall, also known as Crimson Peak due to the abundance of red clay in the soil. Thomas and his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), aren’t the only inhabitants of Allerdale Hall, however. Edith begins to see ghosts and realizes that the house holds secrets that threaten her life.

MovieJawn’s Shayna Davis wrote a great article about the ghosts in Crimson Peak, so I will focus on the house itself. It is a cliche now to say that a place in a film is “another character,” but I’m not sure it has ever been more apt an observation as it is in this film. Unlike the Femm house, Allerdale Hall isn’t introduced until the second act of the film, but once we are there with Edith, its physical presence is overwhelming, in no small part due to the fact that director del Toro and the production team actually built most of the set, including a working elevator, allowing actors to actually move from one part of the house to another in real space and time. Its design is recognizably neo Gothic, but, as del Toro notes, this is a facade layered over the medieval bones of the architecture, implying it and the Sharpe family’s long history. It is truly labyrinthian in its scale and design, implying that there are forgotten corners and rooms everywhere, hiding more of the Sharpe family secrets.

Like the Femms, the Sharpes have also fallen on hard times—Thomas implies that the family fortune was gambled away by his father—and Allerdale Hall shows it. It is beautiful in its elegance and intricate designs, but it is decayed, rotting, with dying insects and moths everywhere. Thomas tells Edith that “the house breathes” due to the way the chimneys form a vacuum when it is windy, causing all sorts of loud noises and groans and sighs, almost like a person crying. Because of the red clay mines underneath the house—symbolic of the way the family has undermined themselves—the house “bleeds” red sludge, through the pipes, through the walls, and through any crack in the foundation. Lucille notes that the house is “colder inside than out,” which is as symbolic a phrase as any I’ve heard. But the house also is sinister—wooden “teeth” are a motif seen over and over again (especially in the corridor outside of Edith’s room), and the set designers built the halls to only be slightly larger than Wasikowska to invoke a suffocating claustrophobia.

Side note: I wholeheartedly recommend watching the special features on Arrow’s Crimson Peak Blu-ray: the process by which they built the house set and all of the detailed work they did on it is nothing short of a work of genius. I can’t cover everything here, but it is well worth the watch.

Like the Femms, the Sharpes are trapped by the house and their history of familial trauma and depravity. Lucille relishes it; despite how inhospitable the house is, she is the ruler of this domain, refusing to give Edith the keys she wears at her belt—a symbolic gesture also found in The Old Dark House when Rebecca rejects the notion of giving up her keys. Thomas, on the other hand, sees the house as a terrible burden that he was “born into and can never relinquish” due to his aristocratic lineage. When Edith begs him to leave the house, to start over somewhere new, he is tempted by the idea to “let the edifice sink into the ground and leave the Sharpe name behind.” The house is the Sharpes to him, to live there is to be a Sharpe and to be a Sharpe is to live there. In the end, the only thing Edith can do is to escape the house and the Sharpe legacy, literally limping away through the red snow.

The Stoker House - Stoker (dir. Park Chan Wook, 2013)

After watching these films for this project and reading Shayna Davis’ article, I am convinced that Wasikowska is the new Gothic heroine (the literary forerunner of the scream queen). I actually forgot that she was the lead in Stoker when I made this list of films, as I was thinking more about the house in the film than her performance (which is incredible). But the two are inextricably linked: just as the houses in the previous films reflect the families within, the Stoker estate reflects the interiority of Wasikowska’s character India and the legacy of her family. On India’s eighteenth birthday, her father dies in a car accident (another similarity to Crimson Peak), and an uncle she has never met before, Charlie (Matthew Goode) moves in with India and her mother (Nicole Kidman) after the funeral. India resents Charlie but is also drawn to him, beginning a psychosexual journey of self-realization and awakening.

Unlike the Femm House and Allerdale hall, the Stoker estate is not decayed or dilapidated at all; rather, it is a beautiful, large-but-not-huge house surrounded by a few outbuildings and an unruly wilderness. Like Crimson Peak, it is a real set: production designer Thérèse Deprez looked at over 80 properties in the Nashville, Tennessee area before choosing this one based on its interior and exterior matching their specifications, a combination almost unheard of in filmmaking now.

The reason that the Stoker House does not fit the usual ruined Gothic mold that the previous two houses did is because Stoker is a Southern Gothic film. This subgenre often reflects the dissembling gentility of the much more recent Southern aristocracy. The surface is beautiful, but the further you press inwards, the uglier it gets. We can see this in the Stoker house when India goes to the basement to get ice cream from the chest freezer: the basement is unfinished, badly lit, with rough stone walls and cobwebs. The chest freezer itself hides a literal body, the housekeeper who disappears near the beginning of the film, buried under the tubs of ice-cream. Because India’s father taught her how to hunt, there are several taxidermied animals and birds displayed. The veneer peels away the deeper you go.

It is within this environment that India grows up, and the film is a documentation of her coming-of-age. Both India and her mother have felt trapped in this house, a feeling accentuated by linear details provided by DePrez that mimic prison bars, like the pattern on the white gauzy curtains. As the film progresses, it becomes apparent that the prison is for India, a way of keeping her safe from the world and vice-versa. The grounds are her childhood playground where she learns to hunt and play and transitions from childhood to adulthood, quietly watching and learning from her mother, her father, and her uncle. The house is her cocoon; she emerges from it at the end of the film as something new and dangerous.