by Victoria Potenza, Staff Writer

There is an article from Rachel Eve Moulton entitled “On the Haunted Lives of Girls and Women Tale”. A friend sent this to me a while back and in the article, Moulton discusses how women are more suited to understand haunted house stories. In the article, she specifically references works of literature but I think the same rings true to many of the themes of different haunted house movies. Initially, I thought a lot about how many horrors can happen in the home for women, especially when they were often tied to the home with marriage, and children. Therefore abuse, loss, money problems, and countless other horrors can happen under a “happy home.” However, I think it goes even further than that. 

In her article, Moulton says “We make our homes in bodies that bleed once a month, a gift that brings life, and yet we are told that this body, this shedding of lining is fundamentally disgusting and best ignored. Our orgasms are mysterious and unimportant. The idea that we’d fabricate a story about our body being abused is far more believable than the story itself. Our bodies are the horror show. The ghosts we see are not real. As a woman, what you understand to be true and right could easily be contorted until it is a shape you barely recognize, and in this way, the world can legitimately call you crazy.” 

I loved the idea that haunted house stories can be tied to the female experience in general, and wanted to see how this compared with haunted house films I had seen. So I put together a list of haunted house stories that I enjoy, that also speak to other aspects of the female living experience. From grief to sexual repression, to abuse, there are countless haunted house stories that focus on the female experience.

The Haunting (dir. Robert Wise, 1963)

So yes this is the adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. I think it does a great job at staying true to the initial themes of the book, especially those surrounding its main character, Eleanor. She is a lonely woman who spent most of her adult life taking care of a sick mother and was never able to have a life or explore the world. When the opportunity presents itself to go to Hill House it seems like her chance to break out of her old life. However, the visit seems to only make her feel more isolated and more of an outsider. Hill House’s dark and terrifying history seems to affect her more profoundly than anyone else there, essentially she is easy pickings for the ghosts. It is also a space where she deals with some of her emotions towards Theodora, a woman who has clearly lived a much more interesting life than she. Eleanor becomes attached and by all accounts seems to have romantic feelings for Theodora that do not seem to be reciprocated. The house seems to be haunted by many spirits including that of Hugh Crain’s wife who died while on her way to the house for the first time. His second wife then dies from falling down the stairs inside the house. Later his daughter lived in the house until she died in her bed, her female companion inherited the house but hanged herself. There is something fascinating about how the house goes after the women of it as if they are some sort of threat. 

I am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (dir. Osgood Perkins, 2016)

The story of this haunted house plays out in an interesting way with it being split between two timelines. One with a writer, Iris, and her nurse, Lily; and then with the newlyweds who bought the house who mysteriously disappeared. It seems that Iris has a connection to the house and that one of her more popular novels “Lady in the Walls” alludes to the deaths of the couple who lived in the house. As the story unfolds and you learn the secrets of the house it becomes clear that the haunting has much to do with the trauma the young bride faced at the hands of her husband, tethering her to the house in the hopes that she can get some sort of closure. Lily is a similarly lonely character like Eleanor in The Haunting who is particularly sensitive to the paranormal happenings in the house. It makes her susceptible to the ghosts in a similar fashion as well. 

The Entity (dir. Sidney J. Furie, 1982)

I find this to be a particularly interesting film to talk about in the context of “haunted bodies. The house itself is not haunted, as it seems to be Carla, the woman living there, who is the haunted party. This is a film with huge trigger warnings as it is about Carla being repeatedly raped by the “entity.” This can be a rough viewing and it is profoundly scary as Carla could be victimized at any moment. It is hard to tell when this presence will choose to go after her, making it impossible for her to stop the victimization. In the end, even when she leaves the house itself it is clear that it can follow her wherever she goes. This film feels so terrifying because this could very well be the experience for any woman who is in an abusive relationship. It feels impossible to escape and they are trapped by this person who could hurt them at any moment. Take out the paranormal elements of this story and you are left with the very real situation countless women have been in, and cutting those ties is just not as easy as one would hope.

The Babadook (dir. Jennifer Kent, 2014)

The Babadook is one of the highest regarded horror films in recent years. It follows the recently widowed Amelia and her son, a high-needs child whose behavior makes it difficult for Amelia to build her life back up. Her grief and exhaustion isolate her more and more from friends and potential romantic relationships. Much analysis has been done about this film’s symbolism around grief, how it can either be something you learn to live with or it becomes all-consuming and destroys you. Amelia is supposed to be so many things; a wife, mother, caretaker, and woman. Yet like so many women, society asks too much of her and it is simply too much for one woman to take.

Hausu (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)

Hausu is one of the strangest and most wonderful ghost stories in my opinion. The story is about a girl named Gorgeous who is eager to spend the summer with her father who has been abroad working. He surprises her with a houseguest, Ryoko, the woman he plans to marry. Since her mother died 8 years prior she is resistant to the idea of her father remarrying and decided to spend the summer at her aunt’s house. She invites several of her friends to join her but once they arrive the girls start to disappear one by one and they continue to be haunted by strange happenings. It is revealed that Gorgeous’s aunt died many years ago, waiting for her fiance to return from the war. Her ghost lives on and feeds off of the souls of young unmarried women. In so many cultures being unmarried and growing old alone is frowned upon for a woman so it is not surprising that this spirit would want to take vengeance on girls who are on the cusp of womanhood and potentially marriage. Obayashi supposedly based the story on fears his daughter had growing up.

The Innkeepers (dir. Ti West, 2011)

The Innkeepers is another film that seems to center on this lonely, frail woman as the one most affected by the hauntings. Claire is a young woman with severe asthma who recently dropped out of school. She works at a historic inn that will be closing soon. The inn is said to be haunted by Madeline O’Malley, a woman who hanged herself there in the 1800s after she was left at the altar. She and Luke, one of the other employees, have an interest in ghost hunting and try to find signs of paranormal happenings at the inn before it closes down. There are so many stories of female apparitions who died due to some sort of heartbreak or at the hands of their husbands so it is no surprise that is the major plot point for the ghost in The Innkeepers. It is interesting how the ghost goes after Claire similarly to the ghost in I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in this House. Is it because they are somehow easy prey since they are lonely or unattached? Or is it that these modern-day women somehow offend these ghosts? Either way, it is an interesting theme that seems to come up in many of these stories and films. 

There are so many films that have these similar themes and revolve around the many ways women are constantly haunted, and sometimes haunting. Simply being a woman in the world means so many things and comes with so many expectations. As Moulton says “it seemed to me that there was always something I wasn’t being told; the flat line of my mother’s mouth indicating a story too painful to articulate. The town’s haunted house was an obvious mystery, but there were plenty of others, smaller and less visible, even less structurally sound. The broken pile of dishes in my girlfriend’s kitchen trash can. The neighbor woman who always had greening bruises on her upper arms. The old widow down the street who invited us to see her collection of snake skins and bird bones.” There are so many countless stories of women’s lives, things that are hidden and things that sometimes are never unearthed. So sometimes we need these ghosts to rise back up, as a reminder of what happens when we keep things buried.