Haunted House Films Are Really About the Nightmares of Gentrification

By Sam J. Miller, PopPolitics.com. Posted October 31, 2007.

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing. --Hannah Arendt

In the course of 15 years as a tenant organizer, my friend and mentor Artemio Guerra has become intimately, disturbingly familiar with the process of gentrification -- the shifting demographics, the clash of old and new tenants, and the monstrous machinations of landlords bent on pushing out rent-controlled tenants. The threats and harassing late-night calls. Whole buildings left without heat. Bombs planted in lobbies. INS called on immigrant tenants who fight back. A nightmare so pervasive it would surely rate broader attention if it wasn't a "normal" consequence of capitalism.

Artemio and I always end up having long discussions about horror films and politics, so he called me up after seeing the haunted house film Cold Creek Manor. "It's all about gentrification!" he said. "It's a piece of crap, but still ...

He was right on both counts. In the film, an upper-middle class family from New York City moves into a rural working-class community, and finds itself under assault by a crazy handyman who used to live in the house, as well as the angry spirits who haunt it.

Rich city folks move out into the country and find themselves up against nasty poor locals and a ghost in another recent vengeful-spirit film, Wendigo. The more I thought about this recurrent motif, the more I realized: the modern haunted house film is fundamentally about gentrification. Again and again we see fictional families move into spaces from which others have been violently displaced, and the new arrivals suffer for that violence even if they themselves have done nothing wrong.

This thriving subgenre depends upon the audience believing, on some level, that what "we" have was attained by violence, and the fear that it will be taken by violence. In the process, because mainstream audiences are seen as white, and because gentrification predominantly impacts communities of color, the racial Other becomes literally monstrous.

The biggest cliche in the modern haunted house film is that of the Indian Burial Ground. In Pet Semetary, The Shining, and The Amityville Horror, the source of the problem is that the real estate parcel in question has desecrated sacred ground.

The conquest of North America could be classified as our most extensive gentrification, where thousands of communities of color were violently pushed out by white settlers manifesting racist destiny. The ubiquity of the Indian burial ground points to screenwriter laziness, but it also constructs a movie-going public all too willing to accept that our homes are literally built upon genocide and terrified that those dead Indians will come back -- not to scalp us or to take "our" land through armed force, but to suck our children into the television or make our husbands go insane and try to kill us with an axe.

Guilt over the North American genocide persists, in spite of centuries of racist history that have clouded the general public's grasp on the extremity of violence perpetrated against the Native Americans -- the broken treaties, the Indian Removal Act, the smallpox blankets. With the death of the Western as a film genre and the success of the Civil Rights Movement in challenging the blatancy of racism in mainstream culture, the Indian-as-bloodthirsty-savage was transformed into the Indian-as-murderous-ghost.

That's one of the main ways the horror genre, on its surface so apolitical, connects to the United States' histories of genocide. How far a leap is it from the menacing ex-slaves in Birth of a Nation to the zombies in Night of the Living Dead? Even though its subtext of displacement and gentrification might foreground race and violence and displacement, the haunted house film participates in the mystification of demographic change by convincing us that we are innocent, and the people we have displaced are monsters.

Displacement creates a paradox: We acknowledge the wrong that has been done but feel powerless to do anything about it. A sort of collective guilt springs up, a sense that we are insignificant cogs in the machinery of economic and social factors that create gentrification. This is particularly true for the middle class, who are often forced by economic necessity to move to gentrifying neighborhoods or to new suburban developments that have demolished pre-existing space.

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Sam J. Miller is a writer and community organizer. For the past three years he has organized homeless people to successfully fight for changes in city housing policy. A graduate of Rutgers University, where he majored in cinema studies, he lives in the Bronx with his partner.