Why Haunted Modernist Homes Are Used to Critique Societal Issues

As part of their HomeQuote Explorer package, Progressive is running a series of television ads wherein homeowners speak to various problems that homeowner’s insurance can’t solve. One of which features a couple who purchased a historic home; a conversation in their kitchen with a Progressive agent is interrupted by the ghost of the original homeowner, who taunts them for their poor renovation choices. "We’ve spent a lot on this kitchen," says the woman. "Yeah, really high-end stuff," the ghost sarcastically retorts. They’ve updated the backsplash with a jade tile, and the ghost points out there’s mold behind it.

It’s a funny bit that hearkens to the common haunting tropes we see across film and television: Old Victorians harbor forgotten souls, their ornamentations and historic fixtures are conduits for the dead. Ghosts require fragments of the past, says the media—rich wood floors, solid and hefty old doors, or embellished furniture—to possess, pass through, creak, and slam shut. Yet there has been a change from the cobwebbed 18th-century mansion to the modernist endroit. In The Guardian, Owen Hatherley expounds on this change, attributing it not to built features, but the ethos that ushered in modern design. "The sentimentality, superstitious religiosity and brutal inequality of the 19th-century city would be swept away in favor of logical, equal, clear-eyed cities," he writes. The white walls, minimalist furniture, and austere design cannot hold "traces," he continues, that play to ghostly manifestations. The promise of modernism—functionalist equality—never truly came to fruition, laying the ground for a different type of haunting that speaks to broader social ills.

Perhaps this idea is most clearly illustrated in Candyman (1992), in which Chicago’s public housing failures—too often blamed on modernism itself—set the stage for tyrannical ghosts. A white graduate student named Helen (Virginia Madsen) studies urban legends, and encounters a local one named Candyman who mythically occupied the notorious Cabrini-Green homes. Early in the film, Helen discovers that her condo, located in a "desirable neighborhood" near Cabrini-Green, was built originally for public housing. While her floor-to-ceiling windows and finishes differ from Cabrini’s cramped, decaying buildings visible from her window, she tells her research partner that all the developer needed to do was cover the cinder block wall with plaster to make a market-rate buck.

Two buildings, identical in their layouts and design: One (located on "the good side of the highway") is deemed appropriate for modernism to flourish, while the other is left to fester. The Candyman—a ghost of a 20th-century painter who was brutally lynched by a white mob and appears in mirrors—doesn’t haunt her building, though they are, at their core, the same. As Helen explains, the Candyman, as an urban legend, can only exist to rationalize the daily horrors of poverty, the systemic neglect and abandonment of an entire race despite the housing project’s roots.

Helen’s observation is brought full-circle in Jordan Peele’s 2021 Candyman reboot directed by Nia DaCosta. It’s set in current-day Cabrini-Green a decade after its demolition, when new, high-end residential developments have been constructed on land surrounding the former public housing’s footprint. In one post-Cabrini condo lives Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), an artist, and Brianna (Teyonah Parris), his girlfriend and a rising curator. Anthony learns about the Candyman lore and Helen’s research (placing both films in the same timeline), and becomes haunted by the murderous specter as he tunes his art practice to issues of dispossession.

Much of the film’s discussion of gentrification relies on the long, sweeping shots of vacant, grassy land where Cabrini once sat. In one scene, Anthony stands in the empty lot to photograph an abandoned church Chicagoans know as the gothic revival Strangers Home Missionary Baptist Church that once hosted artist William Walker’s beloved mural "All of Mankind." The mural depicted Black leaders throughout history, and according to Art Design Chicago, "illuminated the triumph and struggles of Black Americans." In 2015, the mural was whitewashed by the owner to encourage a quicker land sale. In the film, the church’s minimalist white walls speak to the whitewashing of the area. Jokes on us: In our open floor plans, sleek and streamlined, there is no hiding place for ghosts; they move freely, manifesting as, "an abstract cypher," writes Zach Mortice in the New York Review of Architecture.