Thresholds to Infinity: Towards a Typology of Haunted House Narratives

Abstract

Stories of houses that are somehow wrong have a long history across languages, cultures, and time. Broadly speaking, a haunted house requires two primary characteristics: a distinct atmosphere of unease and a historical context. The latter of these, as might be expected, changes over time, meaning that at different points, some types of haunted house narrative are more prevalent than others. Moreover, the haunted house narrative has not been limited by media or genre: extant examples range from comedy films to science fiction novels to walking simulator video games. Because of this, the existing body of work which can be viewed as the haunted house narrative consists of a great number of texts, with more appearing every year. This paper argues that, in order to approach the haunted house narrative productively, particularly in broad-scope studies, an organisational method is required. I argue that contemporary haunted house narratives can be categorised based on their storytelling mode, drawing from their transtextual interactions with the existing body of haunted house fiction. In this I identify the gothic mode, the weird mode, and the horror mode, all of which I contend to be present in contemporary haunted house fiction through recognisable shared formal and thematic characteristics.