Ghostly mansions to spooky ships: exploring the haunted settings in films

Stay home, fortify castle, chill with cosmopolitan & Carrie; horror when safe spaces turn against us. Gothic novel, The Haunting of Hill House, Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, Beetlejuice, Get Out, Us, Blair Witch Project, Crimson Peak, Alien, Event Horizon, Ghost Ship, Neelavelicham; horror within four walls creates frisson of terror.

There are vengeful ghouls, demented witches and cannibalistic serial killers aplenty in the reel and real world out there. The forests and bars seem to be practically teeming with creatures and creations out to harm you in the most gorily gruesome ways possible. So then common sense would dictate you stay home. Fortify your castle against all malign influences and chill with a cosmopolitan and Carrie till kingdom come.

However, that is not to be no? How many times have we seen characters run and run from evil beings, barricade themselves at home or distinctly sinister cabins in the woods only to realise to their horror (and our unbridled delight) that they have locked themselves with the horrid creature? What about houses with supernatural squatters? The kind that makes one’s stay an existential nightmare? There are houses that are just nasty by themselves and others that have supernatural visitors with unfinished business.

With Haunted Mansion, a needless reboot of the 20-year-old Eddie Murphy starrer, which was an adaptation of theme park, (sounds like the house Jack built) sputtering on a screen near you, let us take a look what happens when our safe spaces turn against us. An old, mansion/castle with a history of violent death and unhappy spirits wandering about the musty, dusty, fusty corridors is as old as time itself. Remember Hamlet encountering his father’s ghost on the ramparts of Elsinore castle? Shakespeare was not above haunted mansions and gloomy ghosts murmuring about murders most foul.

Shirley Jackson’s frankly terrifying The Haunting of Hill House (1959), long considered one of the best literary ghost stories, was adapted twice into film, The Haunting (1963, 1999) and once for a streaming series, The Haunting of Hill House (2018). The gothic novel speaks of a paranormal investigator renting Hill House to study supernatural phenomena. Two very different women, Eleanor and Theodora, accept the investigator’s invitation. Luke Sanderson, the owner of Hill House completes the party.

The ‘63 film directed by Robert Wise was fairly close to the book and succeeded in spooking one and all including Martin Scorsese, who has given it the top spot of scariest movie of all time. The 1999 version, starring Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Owen Wilson, and directed by Jan de Bont, incidentally was quite dreadful.  

Ghosts seem to be like cats attached to a space rather than people and houses seem to inherit the bad karma of wicked deeds and pass it on to the next occupants. It would be nice if it worked the other way too, with good luck, health and wealth being transferred through brick and mortar.

The Amityville Horror (1979) was based on Jay Anson’s eponymous 1977 novel detailing the experiences of a family that moves into a house where mass murders took place and being terrorized by malignant spirits. The book has spawned a never-ending series of films, 29 at last count.