Two weeks into October, we’re finally ready to start our spooky podcast topics with an episode about haunted houses – but not just any old episode about haunted houses. Today, we’re specifically talking about the subgenre’s history, from the ancient times of Pliny the Younger to the ghostly haunts of today. We may skip over a little in the middle. Listen as Wes walks us through each wave of haunted stories, Chris presses us to define what we mean by ghosts, and Oren puts up some beautiful yellow wallpaper.
Show Notes
- Pliny the Younger’s Ghost Story
- The Castle of Otranto
- Horace Walpole
- The Goths
- Ann Radcliffe
- Crimson Peak
- The Fall of the House of Usher
- The Bronte Sisters
- Jane Eyre
- Wuthering Heights
- Hark A Vagrant: Wuthering Heights
- The Others
- The Yellow Wallpaper
- The Turn of the Screw
- Janeway’s Holoprogram
- And Then There Were None
- The Haunting of Hill House
- The Conjuring Lawsuit
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Alien
- Betrayal at the House on the Hill
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Another film where the protagonist is a ghost is Haunter (starring Abigail Breslin), but in this case that’s not a twist – it’s meant to be obvious pretty much from the get-go. But there are other twists and several “layers” of haunting. I definitely recommend it.
Awesome podcast, guys! Another type of dwelling that gets haunted a lot (allegedly) are “total institutions”: asylums, prisons, boarding schools, etc. These can act like houses because people live there and are isolated from the outside world. Ghosts are said to haunt them because so often bad things happen there.
Someone once said Hollywood has two kinds of ghosts: if it’s a horror movie the ghost goes around scaring everyone and won’t say what they want. If it’s a comedy, the ghost won’t shut up!
I think you missed one of the most iconic haunted house works of the second half of the 20th Century, however: Scooby Doo. :)
How could we forget the cultural powerhouse that is Scooby Doo???