AMERICAN DREAM AND HALLOWEEN

It’s the day before Halloween so here’s something spooky to ponder. From Psycho to Amityville Horror to Poltergeist to The Shining to Rebecca, American horror films have one thing in common: home ownership. It’s truly a nightmare.

Hit jump if you’re interested.

“The haunted house has become a powerful and profoundly subversive symbol of everything that has gone nightmarishly awry in the American Dream,” writes author Dale Bailey. I happen to agree.

In The American Nightmare, horror Director Wes Craven puts it this way, “I think there is something about the “American Dream,” the sort of Disneyesque dream if you will of the beautifully trimmed front lawn, the white picket fence, mom and dad and their happy children…the flipside of it, the kind of anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that that’s not the truth of the matter, I think that gives American horror films in some ways kind of an additional rage.”

Brandon Wurst, for Emerson College, made this point: “The voiceover in the trailer for Poltergeist begins by saying, “The house looks just like the one next to it…and the one next to that…and the one next to that.”

If you remember the film, you’ll know that Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams live in a masterplanned community called “Cuesta Verde,” which translates, literally, to “it costs green.” In other words, Wurst writes, “the film appeals on a deeper level to both the imaginative fears of children and the real-life fears of their parents, which are typically rooted in the vulnerability of home, family, and finances… The distraction of materialism is the real threat.”

See you, guys? Real estate is scary!