What Makes a House... Wrong?

A young woman comes to a Bad House. You’re probably already forming a picture in your mind of what that house looks like: it’s a rural castle, or an English country manor with distinctly gothic details, or perhaps a creaky old Victorian, looming on a hill, isolated from any neighbors. It’s nighttime, or at least gloomy, and the weather is bad—maybe a bolt of lightning illuminates turrets at the top, or a widow’s walk. It’s big and it’s old and it’s quite possibly a bit of a dump, one that has seen much, much better days (and a lot more money for maintenance). And it is absolutely haunted, whether by literal ghosts or somebody’s awful secrets or, in many cases, both. 

The Bad House is a very old literary trope that crops up again and again, like the mushrooms you might find in and around a particularly alarming example. It goes all the way back to lurid 18th-century Gothic page-turners like The Mysteries of Udolpho, which were such a well-established genre that Jane Austen took a crack at satirizing them in Northanger Abbey. Jane Eyre’s Thornfield Hall, the titular House of Seven Gables, Rebecca’s Manderley, Hill House—all iconic bad houses. The trope was absolutely core to the gothic romance—you know, the ones with the girl in the white nightgown on the cover, running away from a big house—which was hugely popular in the late 1960s, before taking a nosedive in the 1970s. But the bad house didn’t go anywhere, looming large in the horror genre via ’70s classics like The Amityville Horror and Burnt Offerings. 

And now, it’s making another resurgence; bookstore shelves are suddenly filled with entire neighborhoods worth of bad houses, while Netflix is offering them up on your home screen in productions like The Watcher and The Haunting of Hill House and its sequel, Blythe Manor. After years of the pandemic and given the brutal nature of the housing market, people have a lot of feelings about houses, and it seems they’re plowing those feelings right into this beloved trope.

The bad house is, at its core, about a supposedly domestic space that has gone wrong. For instance, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House opens with a scene-setting description that’ll send a chill down your spine: "Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone." 

"There’s so many established tropes that still work every time to me," explains Alix E. Harrow, author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, whose upcoming Starling House plays with the concept. "You see something in the mirror that’s not there. There’s something bad in the attic. There’s something bad in the cellar. That door wasn’t there a minute ago. The floor plan is changing." Dark wood helps, with bonus points if the details are heavy and Victorian or, even better, Tudor in style. Dampness is a guaranteed sign you’ve got a problem. If you see mushrooms? Well, based on Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead, you better run.  

"Almost always, it’s two stories," says Grady Hendrix, author of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and the forthcoming How to Sell a Haunted House. "You will probably very rarely see a haunted house in a railroad apartment, because they always have hallways. And usually, you’re going to find, in traditional haunted house stuff, the ghost is in the hallway, on the stairs. It’s always in these in-between spaces." 

"When you walk into a rambling Airbnb and you know immediately the vibe is off? That scares the bejesus out of me," explains Isabel Cañas, author of The Hacienda. "I definitely wanted that in the book."  

But they’re alluring at the same time. Harrow says: "I think even in a gothic horror where we’re like, oh, bad house—there is something a little like, ‘But it’s a good-looking bad house. I could fix it!’" Think velvet drapes (even if they’re rotting). Think stained glass windows (even if the light they cast onto the floor looks suspiciously like blood). Chip and Joanna Gaines renovating a literal castle in Waco has all the bones of a great bad house book, let’s put it that way.  

In the midcentury, the creepiness of the bad and/or haunted house was intricately entangled with architecture that read as old. In a post-war era when America was furiously suburbanizing, building modestly sized Levittowns and low-slung ranch houses, the enormous drafty mansions of an earlier era seemed dark and thrillingly spooky and faintly ridiculous. It’s summed up by a tossed-off line from Mad Men, in which Don Draper tells Sally of her mother’s new husband’s ancestral pile: "I don’t want you to get rickets in that haunted mansion." (Notably, Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride opened in 1969.)  

"Haunted houses are cold and damp. They’re unhouses. They’re anti-houses."

Castles (both the original European versions and their Gilded Age American ripoffs) and creaky Queen Annes were something out of another aeon, which made them a safely distant setting for women to read about the terror of not really knowing or trusting this stranger you married and yet being isolated with him in a house, cut off from a community. And they sure did: Today often considered a vintage curiosity, the gothic romance was one of the biggest genres of popular fiction in the 1960s. That popularity was about their present, not necessarily the past.

But the bad house very much offers a way to write about the weight of the past, too, which is well incarnated in the physical form of a house. All three authors I spoke to for this piece cited Toni Morrison’s Beloved, in which a household of formerly enslaved people are dealing with a haunting directly connected to their past, as one of the greatest examples of the trope. "It’s one of those things where it’s both a fun and useful literary metaphor but it’s also very true, in America and most of Europe at least: if there’s a really big, grand old house, the money for that did not come from anywhere good, I promise you," says Harrow. The very successful Mexican Gothic uses this to great effect: Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s bad house is a big English country house plopped down in a Mexican mining town, its sheer existence testament to exploitation.  

The look translated very well to film and television, too. The film industry was already adapting Jane Eyre, for instance, in the silent era, and returned to Thornfield Hall over and over. Bad houses look especially breathtaking on luminous black-and-white film stock, and creaky floors, dark wood, and ominous turrets all became a Hollywood staple. Psycho’s action might begin in a motel, but it ends in a Second Empire house. 

A bad house doesn’t have to be a stock gothic monstrosity, though. Harrow points out that the building in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves—a book that has the reputation of scaring the pants off people—is in fact a basic suburban brick ranch. Things for the family in that book begin to go off the rails when they measure the outside of the house and notice something very simple: The outside is six inches bigger than it should be. "You can make it work for almost any book, because it’s not actually ultimately the specific aesthetics of the house that matters, so much as the sense that the house is not what it’s supposed to be," Harrow argues.  

Of course, while you CAN do anything, making a brick ranch go bad does present challenges that authors have to work around. Hendrix set his latest in his native Charleston, which presented a problem: "We’re at zero sea level. So there are no basements."

"That took me a long time to figure my way through: having a haunted house story in a slab house," he admits.

Cañas went in a different direction: "Instead of a creaky house, I got stucco and damp and dark shadows." The Hacienda is set in Mexico in the 1820s, in the wake of Mexico’s financially disastrous war for independence from Spain. She knew she wanted to write about a big, bad house, but she had to figure out who would have that kind of home in her setting. She decided on a family making pulque, a type of sour beer that was popular in the era, in the state of Hidalgo. (There’s always money in liquor.) Hence, a rustic hacienda.  

Because she lived in Mexico City and Southern California as a kid, that meant she was working with an architectural style that was very familiar and downright homey to her: "Which makes it even more eerie, I think, when you take the familiar and make it eerie by tilting it juuuuust a little bit in the wrong direction."

The heroine of The Hacienda, whose life has been upended by her father’s death in the war, longs for security and so desperately wants to make the house her home, putting her own stamp on it, which—this is a Gothic—goes awry in short order. One of the early moments of horror is around the way the house resists her efforts, with a horrifying scene involving some beautiful blue wall silks she’s eager to hang up and add some color to the starkness of the hacienda.   

You see, the heart of the bad house is that no matter how many gables or rooms, it quite literally fails at its core job. "On the existential grand level, the two things your house is supposed to do is keep you warm and dry. And haunted houses are cold and damp. They’re unhouses. They’re anti-houses," says Hendrix. And they fail metaphorically, too, refusing in an actively malevolent fashion to provide a home. Instead, they split families apart.

One of the big drivers behind this boom is obvious: The pandemic. It doesn’t seem like an accident that Mexican Gothic spent late summer 2020 on the New York Times bestseller list. That specific hit opened doors for other writers with a bent for very bad houses, but also, Covid meant a lot of people looking for somewhere to put a lot of emotions about inside and outside: "We were all stuck in our houses for three years! And we have too many feelings about it!" Harrow says, laughing. Hendrix cites a similar reason for tackling his own spin on the genre: "Haunted houses are about family, and that’s where I wanted to be during the pandemic, when I wasn’t with mine." 

But there’s another, bigger, more structural current at work: the fact that houses are increasingly out of reach for many, many people. "There are so many members of my generation who are at a loss for housing, especially now with housing prices," points out Cañas. "And of course, it’s the immigrant family American dream." For her heroine, Beatriz, amid the financial wreckage of Mexico’s war for independence, Hacienda San Isidro represents stability and security for herself and her mother. That need, that precarity, answers the all-important question of the haunted house novel which is always: why won’t these people just leave the house?

"For a long time, in haunted house fiction, people wanted to go investigate the haunted house," explains Hendrix. (That’s the setup for The Haunting of Hill House, for instance.) "These days, if you want to avoid a haunted house, don’t buy a house that’s out of your price range. It’s always the property that’s too good to be true that’s haunted, right? And the message is, you don’t deserve this, you’re out of your place, you’re too big for your britches. You thought you were getting a bargain—screw you, now you’ve got a portal to hell."  

"Housing crises put us into unsafe situations, and maybe it’s fun to turn that into a horror novel, a horror experience, rather than just the grim reality," suggests Harrow.

But it’s important to note that the literature of houses is far from limited to the bad houses. Cañas pointed out that in classic Latin American literature, like The House of the Spirits by Isabella Allede or A Hundred Years Of Solitude, "houses are almost like an extension of the family. The two families in these two books live in these homes that grow and change as the families grow and change over the generations. So for me as a Latina writer, that was very grounding, as I was reaching into this genre that is traditionally very white, very European, very English."     

For her part, Harrow tried to write a bad house, but the house resisted. "Slowly the house just became friendlier and friendlier," she admits. But she points out there’s an important corollary trope: the fairy tale house, like you see in versions of Beauty and the Beast, or Howl’s Moving Castle. The fairy tale house is deeply cozy, stuffed with dried herbs and roaring fires and comfortable furniture (whether it’s palatial or cottagecore in nature). It’s also vaguely sentient, but instead of malevolent, it’s a caretaker. And it’s yet another place to put our eternally complicated feelings about house and home, to unpack whether those are even the same thing. 

Top Image from Netflix’s adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, Courtesy of Steve Dietl/Netflix.

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