Oh my god, think about the money! Think about the bills! … And I do think the economics of haunted house stories are kind of interesting. … In The Amityville Horror you’re buying that house, you’re buying that house and it’s all full of horrible things. I guess we would think about it in status terms-I’ve got my sports car, or whatever it is, and that makes me real, having this thing. “One of Marx’s critiques of capitalism is that in capitalism things become more real than people are, and he talks about these moments where an object ‘hails’ you, as he puts it, the object gives you reality. ![]() ![]() Listen to our complete discussion of haunted houses in Episode 121 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast-featuring Langan, Beukes, Hendrix, and David Barr Kirtley-above, and check out some highlights from the discussion below. “It was the people, it wasn’t the house.” “No one ever stopped to listen to them, no one ever did anything for those kids,” says Hendrix. America’s most famously haunted house has been the subject of countless investigations, but in all that time no one ever saw the real horror, the abuse of the children living there, a tragic situation highlighted in the recent documentary My Amityville Horror. He points to The Amityville Horror as another example of haunted people. “They were really subjective, very emotional experiences, like they were just for them.” “There were haunted novelty supply warehouses and medical record filing facilities and gardens and sidewalks and barns,” he says. His work with a parapsychology group taught him that pretty much everywhere feels haunted to someone. And that dynamic of what rushes in to fill the vacuum is really the haunting.”īut author Grady Hendrix says that in his experience it’s not so much places that are haunted but people. “And it’s what you bring to that vacancy-whether it’s your own baggage and malaise and malevolence and psychology, or whether there’s something there waiting to feed into it, is what makes it so interesting. ![]() “You step into these places and there’s a vacancy,” she says. Her new novel Broken Monsters is set amidst the blighted urban landscape of modern-day Detroit. The idea that locations resonate with their collected history is one that appeals to South African author Lauren Beukes. Later books and films have largely followed that lead, featuring houses whose dark histories are replete with slaughtered children and desecrated burial grounds. “Which does seem to have become one of the requirements for a haunted house setting.” “It specifically foregrounds the importance of the home, especially the ancestral home, the home with a certain amount of history to it,” says horror author and English professor John Langan.
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