Supernatural spectacle cinema: the anxiety of un-belonging and the haunted house in contemporary Hollywood horror films

Abstract

Much recent scholarship involving ghosts has focused upon spectrality as a metaphor for trauma. While this is a fruitful area of research, in the case of Film Studies, this risks flattening haunted house films to the status of ‘text’ and overlooking their filmic quality, which sets them apart from other artforms. This thesis centres the supernatural as a diegetic reality, focusing on the cinematic representations of ghosts, demonic entities, and haunted houses in the period between 1979 and 2015. To examine these hauntings, the thesis reads the films using three technical languages of filmmaking; cinematography, set design, and sound design. These languages make the mechanisms of hauntology visible, making this a complementary approach to traditional readings based on spectrality and trauma. These readings are underpinned by theoretical and thematic work around belonging, the influence of technology, and the cultural stagnation created by neoliberalism. Mark Fisher’s work on the weird and the eerie becomes the starting point for belonging, and reading the languages of filmmaking reveals that in these films, it is the living that do not belong in these spaces, rather than the dead. The supernatural keeps these haunted houses caught in the past, unavailable for occupation in the present. While Fisher’s assertion that neoliberalism created a post-millennial cultural stagnation in the UK, these films reveal the same problem in the United States, where these Hollywood-produced films are haunted by the spectres of The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg, 1979) and Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982). The discussion explores the extent to which the living can return the domestic spaces to the present. This thesis examines how the technical languages of filmmaking represent haunting on screen and visualise aspects of the Gothic around space and isolation, while revealing this preoccupation with the weird and eerie as central components of a haunting.