I. The Psychoanalysis of Colorblindness<\/span><\/p>\n Beginning in 2009, horror films underwent a major thematic shift with the popularization of the \u201chaunted house\u201d subgenre. These new films attracted American audiences very much familiar with the threat of home loss. Around the time of the 2009 wide release of <\/span>Paranormal Activity<\/span><\/i>, at least 6.9 million American households with subprime loans faced impossible-to-pay charges. Approximately 2 million households were projected to be lost, the numbers increasing each year thereafter (Ernst & Goldstein 273). The instability of homeownership was horrifyingly palpable, and on the screen, these fears were projected with an unsettling familiarity. In the haunted house film, typically white, perceptively middle-class couples and families live comfortably in their affluent, pristine suburban homes. Such stability is soon threatened by a demonic entity which seeks to rob them of their peace, or, often, a family member. The wife and sons are typically the main targets. The mass appeal of the subgenre in America experiences a boom after the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, which soon evolved into the historic Great Recession. The Blumhouse film production company took the lead on the reproduction of this subgenre, releasing 16 haunted house films between 2009 and 2016<\/span>, many becoming significant box office successes. The <\/span>Paranormal Activity <\/span><\/i>(2009-2015) and <\/span>Insidious <\/span><\/i>(2010-present) franchises raked most of the revenue.<\/span><\/p>\n The horror film\u2019s adaptability to this nationwide crisis makes it a reactionary genre: writers and directors perceive what people fear, and work to embody that fear into the celluloid. Horror films about the loss of the home seem a logical result of the nationwide crisis regarding housing. The very nature of this anxiety about the house however, raises many questions as to what affective responses this horror subgenre incites in its audiences. As Robin Wood writes in \u201cthe American Nightmare,\u201d the horror genre is \u201cthe struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its reemergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror\u201d (75t). The social machination of repression, which is to restrain and hide desires and fears in the unconscious, is a process that the horror film labors to undo. What repressed anxieties and fears, then, are embedded in the American collective unconscious regarding the threat to the house being portrayed in these films?<\/span><\/p>\n Borrowing from Wood, I go beyond the surface-level of a reactionary reading regarding the haunted house subgenre as a simple iteration of the subprime mortgage crisis. Instead, I argue that taking the elements of the subgenre and analyzing them against the backdrop of U.S. housing history and legislation reveals the deep-rooted racism, classism and narratives of segregation and redlining embedded in the symbol of the house. Demonic presences in these films always appear as disrupting home comfort and stability, and are always represented as black, looming figures. Demons are thus affectively-charged iterations of a threat to the American home. Based on this, I assert that the true horrific subject matter explored in these films is that of contemporary American, fear-imbued colorist divisions around housing. This will be a symptomatic reading of the subgenre\u2019s components as telling revelations of something much more monstrous lurking beneath the surface. As David Cronenberg states, horror filmmakers undergo the process of reaching into the \u201cdark pool of the unconscious\u201d to see the reemergence of a repressed monstrosity (Cherry 98). His description is an especially salient one when it comes to the analysis of the American haunted house films I will be undertaking, in which this \u201cdarkness\u201d becomes all too literal.<\/span><\/p>\n To demonstrate the complex relationship between anxiety, desire, fear, race, and housing in America, I turn to concepts of colorblindness and the discipline of psychoanalysis. Colorblindness, defined by Richard Bonilla-Silva, is a contemporary cultural understanding in which \u201cmost whites assert \u2018they don\u2019t see any color, just people\u2019; that although the ugly face of discrimination is still with us, it is no longer the central factor determining minorities\u2019 life chances\u201d (1). I therefore oppose this \u201ccolorblindness,\u201d which in relation to the haunted house subgenre, is an assertion of blindness to the deeply racist history of discrimination, segregation and racist language involved in the very construction of the American home. In other words, I seek to undo Oliver and Shapiro\u2019s perception that \u201cclass perspectives usually wash away any reference to race\u201d (37). In my analysis, class and wealth are the most revealing factors that point to lingering racial inequality. If the \u201chouse with the white picket fence\u201d is evocative of the American dream, the foundation upon which it is built is evocative of a true \u201cAmerican nightmare.\u201d If we understand that \u201cracial considerations shade almost everything in America (Bonilla-Silva 1), and that this shading is repressed, hidden, or ghost-like, we must look towards a non-colorblind language that allows us to unveil these American ghosts present in history and in the mind of every citizen, whether acknowledged or not.<\/span><\/p>\n I also turn to psychoanalysis and affect studies to describe the racial feelings motivating the political forces of discrimination. Psychoanalysis will be important to understanding how American history and legislation are embedded with symptoms of fear and anxiety, as critic Paula Ioanide claims that \u201cthe terrain of politics depends primarily on triggering and shaping affectively charged beliefs\u201d (180). The horror genre itself, like Ioanide\u2019s analysis of politics, also operates in evocations of affect, particularly those of fear and terror. Frantz Fanon\u2019s own formulations on blackness as a \u201cphobogenic object\u201d that produces anxiety around the concept of whiteness (129-130) will prove useful in approaching the affect found in racialized housing legislation. I argue that racist beliefs constructed by redlining and moral panic regarding the home portray blackness as a monstrous threat to white homeownership, and by extent, stability, and comfort<\/span><\/p>\n Throughout this argument, I analyze the highest-grossing and most critically well-received Blumhouse haunted house films from 2009 to 2014<\/span>: <\/span>Paranormal Activity<\/span><\/i> (2009), <\/span>Paranormal Activity 2<\/span><\/i> (2010),<\/span> Insidious<\/span><\/i> (2011), <\/span>Sinister<\/span><\/i> (2012), and <\/span>Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones<\/span><\/i> (2014). Having raked in the most revenue and having had the most positive reception among audiences and critics, these films are an accurate sampling of the major exposures of haunted house film conventions America had during this time.<\/span> Section 1, \u201cThis Is Your House: Housing and Wealth in the Haunted House Film,\u201d analyzes the concepts of homecoming, wealth, and property, which are in full display in the setup of these films, and their relation to white racial identity. Section 2, \u201cA Shadowy Figure: Racialized Demons in the House,\u201d concerns the racist formulations around housing, such as redlining, moral panic, and subprime mortgage, in relation to the demonic forces threatening white stability in the films, also paying attention to actual, racist depictions of minorities in the genre. Section 3, \u201cIt Wants Your Children: How White Innocence Breeds Black Monstrosity,\u201d explores the symbolic meaning of women and children in these films, both in terms of the reproduction and transferring of wealth, as well as affective symbols that construct white innocence. I will also look at the relationship between the victims and the attackers as an evocation of a monstrous, racial blackness and its threatening force against the idealized suburban, white home space. The fourth and final section, \u201cBeyond the White Picket Fence: White Monstrosity as Subversive Horror,\u201d turns to more recent horror films and their attempts to stray away from the formulaic haunted house film. These films contain a much more subversive take on cultural fears and anxieties based on the house, and prove horror film\u2019s prowess as a critical force. They pose the question: What would it mean to depict whiteness as the true American monster?<\/span><\/p>\n This analysis is important in questioning the problematic notion that race and fear are intrinsically tied, in even the most quotidian aspects of our lives. By coming to understand the source of these fears, we can also come to understand how the dichotomy of good vs. evil, in the American sense, is only another iteration of the oppressive structures of racism. <\/span><\/p>\n II. This Is Your House: Housing and Wealth in the Haunted House Film<\/span><\/p>\n The revamped reproduction of the haunted house subgenre in the late 2000\u2019s is best illustrated, thematically, as a retreat into the home, away from the outside. Previously, the horror film genre privileged the reproduction of \u201ctorture porn,\u201d dominant during the earlier half of the decade. Films like <\/span>Saw<\/span><\/i> (2004), <\/span>Hostel <\/span><\/i>(2005), and <\/span>the Devil\u2019s Rejects <\/span><\/i>(2005) were often seen as a reactionary genre in the wake of 9\/11, dealing with subjects relating to public sphere.<\/span> As Alexandra Heller-Nicholas observes, the genre shifted, beginning with the release of <\/span>Paranormal Activity<\/span><\/i> in 2009, away from films \u201clinked to post-9\/11 America and the supposed \u2018War on Terror\u2019\u201d (130). If what scared us during the early 2000\u2019s was international conflict, terrorism, and war, as represented in torture porn through hyperviolence and foreign villains, the beginning of the massive reproduction of fears imbued in the home space in the later part of the decade is telling of the calamitous social and emotional impact the Subprime Mortgage Crisis and the subsequent economic recession had on the American public. Film audience and production trends alone reflect this massive shift. Before, American haunted house films received rather sporadic releases, with <\/span>the Amityville Horror<\/span><\/i> (1979) and <\/span>Poltergeist<\/span><\/i> (1982) being the only ones matching the late 2000s films in terms of financial success, and 1999\u2019s remake of <\/span>the Haunting<\/span><\/i>, although financially successful, is more infamous now for being critically panned. Post-2009, however, haunted house films became the norm in the United States, and among the best-reviewed horror films ever.<\/span><\/p>\n The popularized conception of anxiety over the home space through the haunted house film is telling of the massive amount of economic, social, and emotional investment that the U.S. has historically placed on homeownership and the conception of the American dream. Issues around the home space are as emotionally potent as those of terrorism and war, as American horror film audiences are telling of. Analyzing the American history of homeownership reveals that a threat to the house, as the Subprime Mortgage Crisis was, for the American public means a threat to the very essence of American identity. We must examine, however, how this value of the home in turn displays an exclusively middle-class, white, heteronormative American identity, and how these anxieties affectively resonate with an American identity fixated on consumer goods, wealth, and property to an obsessive degree.<\/span><\/p>\n Homecoming, and by extension the concept of homeownership, is always expressed in the opening sequence of the post-recession haunted house film. These opening sequences right away stress the importance which the house represents for our main characters. <\/span>Paranormal Activity<\/span><\/i> (dir. Oren Peli, 2009) is a film centered on a white, perceptively middle-class couple experiencing increasingly violent supernatural attacks in their suburban San Diego home. Before such paranormal attacks take place, however, the film opens with the tranquil setting of the suburbs in full view. It begins from the perspective of the male character Micah filming his girlfriend Katie returning home from school. \u00a0His handheld camera captures her pulling into the driveway, lingering on a shot of her convertible, the sparse garage, and the identical suburban houses briefly seen in the distance as Micah utters, \u201cHey, baby.\u201d He holds the door open for her, in turn welcoming us, the audience, home as well. After our brief glimpse of the surrounding outside space, Micah shuts the door as Katie questions him about his new camera. This small, two-second glimpse of the surrounding suburbs, as well as a brief scene taking place in their backyard later in the film, are all we ever see of the outside world for the film\u2019s duration. The audience is thus invited home, and simultaneously isolated within the four walls where all the film\u2019s action takes place. The welcoming of the haunted house film is an obsessive lingering in the home space, central to all escalating action and dramatization. Nothing else is offered but the thrill of being welcomed home, where one is to stay put.<\/span><\/p>\n Paranormal Activity 2 <\/span><\/i>(dir. Tod Williams, 2010) opens in a similar fashion with another homecoming. This sequel, released a year later, deals with a similar premise, this time with the same demonic presence haunting Katie\u2019s sister, Kristi. The action is only moved a few miles away from the first film, to Carlsbad, CA. The similarities in setting and opening premise are at once striking, and telling of the haunted house film\u2019s formulaic obsession over isolating its characters in the home space. As the film opens, Ali, the daughter of Kristi\u2019s husband, Daniel, is recording her front yard as she sees her parents pulling onto their street. She exclaims, \u201cWelcome home, Hunter. This is your house!\u201d as her parents return from the hospital with her newborn baby brother. Ali then turns the camera to reveal a beautiful, suburban two-story house, a towering wooden front door highlighting this homecoming as we get a view of the colorful plants and neat, trimmed lawn that surround the property. Much like the previous installment, this is the primary glimpse of the outside world that the audience receives, aside from later, fenced-in backyard scenes. Kristi\u2019s family, as the idyllic white, middle-class, traditional nuclear family, thus becomes the central American identity which is to remain comfortably positioned within the house.<\/span><\/p>\n The tranquility and neatness of suburbia becomes our permanent setting. The tone of these films evolves into an obsessive treatment of white, middle-class suburbia. As we retreat into the house, we are isolated in a world entirely made up of property and consumer goods. This seclusion limits our view, and constructs the perception that affluent, pristine suburbia is an exclusive world, isolated to only the white, heteronormative couples and families we see in these films. What the films begin to represent, then, is not a national housing crisis sprawling across all American identities. It is instead the idea that the suburban world which will, as the film progresses, be put at risk from outside forces, is an exclusively white, middle class world. <\/span><\/p>\n Insidious<\/span><\/i> (dir. James Wan, 2010) and <\/span>Sinister<\/span><\/i> (dir. Scott Derrickson, 2012) also open with homecomings, as they both introduce us to two new white, middle-class families moving into their new homes. This representation of homecoming is different from those in the <\/span>Paranormal Activity<\/span><\/i> series in that it evokes of homeownership much more strongly. Whereas the previously discussed films merely show us family members returning home, these films portray the actual arrival and experience of beginning to own a home, and thus obtaining its wealth and benefits. In <\/span>Insidious<\/span><\/i>, the familiar story of a family being attacked by a demon attempting to steal the eldest son, begins with harmonious shots of the central family, the Lamberts, performing morning rituals in their new home. Move-in boxes are scattered throughout the house as the wife, Renai, briefly occupies herself with the unpacking of her personal belongings, longingly handling and sifting through them, before directing herself to the kitchen to make breakfast. We vicariously experience, along with Renai, the thrill of settling into a new space. It is useful to imagine the audiences, among them thousands if not millions who had recently experienced the loss of their home, being fed this idyllic iteration of comfortable homeownership to a fascinating, deeply emotional result. It is also of interest to point out that both <\/span>Insidious<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Sinister<\/span><\/i> show the family moving into a new house not once, but twice, as both families in these films flee to a new home after the first one displays paranormal activity. To be shown a move-in twice in the same running time is telling of the excessive extent to which homeownership is languidly portrayed. The haunted house subgenre thus feeds us a romanticized homecoming that evokes American suburban pleasures and security, while ominously promising its audiences to disrupt it in later scenes. <\/span><\/p>\n Why would audiences pour into theaters by the millions to spectate this romantic portrayal of homeownership and the threat to it during a nationwide housing crisis? Do American audiences, in their compulsive drive to witness the pleasure <\/span>and<\/span><\/i> anxiety of homecoming in the haunted house film, reveal their own emotional and historical investment in what the house represents nationwide: wealth, whiteness, and citizenship, and a simultaneous, ever-present threat to them? As Christine Herbes-Sommers\u2019 historical documentary, <\/span>The House We Live In<\/span><\/i>, explains, the American fixation on the home is decades old and directly tied to economic and racial identity. The homecoming of soldiers after World War II and the consequent high demand for housing called for the construction of new neighborhoods as veterans took advantage of the opportunities provided by the newly enacted G.I. Bill. One of the many benefits which army veterans enjoyed was low-cost mortgages. The Federal Housing Administration\u2019s introduction of mortgage loans simultaneously provided more affordable housing at lower rates. All these elements aided in the construction of suburbia as the emblem of American opportunity. It was now possible for the \u201caverage American\u201d to afford housing. As the documentary states, beginning with this legislative shift, \u201cthe American dream had a new name: suburbia.\u201d The goal for American prosperity was now to take advantage of this homeownership opportunity. Historically, the cultural importance of the house thus begins to take on the meanings of comfort, opportunity, and above all, wealth. However, also implicated in this cultural shift towards the house as a sacred space was the idea of race: that indeed, housing was the principal way in which wealth and property all became concentrated within white America, as the opportunity of owning a home at low rates was exclusively extended to whites. <\/span><\/p>\n Thus, the portrayal of the obsessive, isolative homecoming that the haunted house film shows is only an iteration of this historical isolation of the house as a white, middle-class American concept. A catastrophic event for housing such as the subprime mortgage crisis, as embodied by the demonic hauntings which the disrupt the home in the haunted house film, is thus a horrific attack on the American dream, which soon descends into a nightmare. This disruption of American stability is exclusively constructed as a disruption of middle-class white identity.<\/span><\/p>\n Primarily, the representation of a house larger than life in these films breathes even further meaning and emotional investment to the concept of the home. Like the very notion of the American dream being synonymous with the house as an owned object, these films make a point to show that wall after wall, room after room, the house is embedded with symbols of wealth. This is evident in <\/span>Paranormal Activity<\/span><\/i> and its sequel in their use of the \u201cproperty porn\u201d aesthetic. \u201cProperty porn\u201d is defined by James D. Stone\u2019s own analysis of the two films as \u201cimages that advertise desirable homes\u2014viewed online, on TV, or in real estate flyers,\u201d and more specifically in reality shows featuring properties for prospective buyers, that result in a fetishized portrayal of property and consumer goods (54). The use of this aesthetic makes it obvious that the primary concept endangered by the demons\u2019 disturbances in these films is that of capitalist wealth.<\/span><\/p>\n Paranormal Activity<\/span><\/i> starts with the question of wealth and value itself. As Katie notices Micah using a new camera, she asks, \u201chow much did this cost you?\u201d bringing economic concern to the forefront of the opening sequence. Later, when a spiritual consultant, Dr. Fredrichs, arrives at their home as Katie looks for answers on how to get rid of the demonic entity, the evident use of \u201cproperty porn\u201d comes into full play. As they walk through the house, the walkthrough and display of the property is one suggestive of American solvency. Even Dr. Fredrichs claims, \u201cI never hesitate when someone says, \u2018will you come to San Diego?\u2019\u201d noting the idyllic comfort which the home\u2019s very geography represents. <\/span><\/p>\n As Katie and Micah walk Dr. Fredrichs through the house to show him where the paranormal activity has taken place, the sequence is unnervingly reminiscent of a real estate walkthrough. Their first destination, the living room, shows neat, leather furniture, the cheetah print rugs lying on the wooden floors and the zebra-print cushions on the couches, a wooden coffee table, and a large flat-screen TV at the forefront of the area. As they go on to explain happenings around the house, in each room we take in in full detail the plethora of decorations. Beyond the living room there is a big, imposing bookshelf stacked with material and Micah\u2019s own work station consisting of a double-monitor set up. As we go into the kitchen, we get a shot of a large, stainless steel fridge, and the kitchen\u2019s very own built-in counter. Katie then takes us to her bedroom, where we see their large, king-size bed crowned with an ornate headboard and two bedside tables, looking towards a window lined with wine-colored curtains. The bedroom has its very own bathroom, complete with shower (masked with equally ornate shower curtains) and a double sink. Katie then takes us down the hallway across her bedroom to two other guest bedrooms which we never even get into, suggesting that there\u2019s even more property to explore, but we are cut short due to lack of time. Micah longingly records everything, showing us detail by detail the entire makeup of his wealth. This use of property porn essentially expands the house in terms of meaning and devotion. It is no longer a simple setting where the film\u2019s action takes place, but rather a world of excess of commodities and an emblem of conspicuous consumption. <\/span><\/p>\n Paranormal Activity 2<\/span><\/i> takes this a step further by giving us a literal rundown of the house as Ali and then Daniel record the house for their new family member, Hunter, to see once he grows up. We begin outside, being shown the large, two-story fa\u00e7ade of the exterior of the house. As we move in, we see the wooden floors, the decorations lining the walls and the many coffee tables spread across the house. The kitchen, with its own built-in island, has a stacker of pots and pans raining down from the ceiling, the walls lined with towering kitchen cabinets and cupboards as the front leads to the living room, with yet another ridiculously large flat-screen TV (Daniel even takes a pause to describe this as his \u201cfifty-inch monster\u201d). Next to the kitchen, we see a glass sliding door leading to the backyard, where a pool, with its own jacuzzi built in to the side, rests with clean, chlorine water. As we go upstairs through the carpeted staircase, we are shown the bedrooms, one for Kristi and Daniel, complete with vanity dressers and another king-size bed. We then go to Ali\u2019s room, with its own built-in bathroom, and finally, Hunter\u2019s room, lined with new toys and decorations and an antique crib in the center. This extensive camera work devoted to present property in its full, affluent glory in both films is reflective of the obsession our main characters have with the hoarding and documentation of wealth which, as described before, is an iteration of the long white American history of wealth and property. The world which our characters inhabit is a fully consumptive, decadent one. Their introduction in the film cannot be done without the introduction of the property which comes to define them.<\/span><\/p>\n We understand that within these homes is imbued the very concept of wealth, a concept which Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro define as \u201cthe command over financial resources that a family has accumulated over its lifetime along with those resources that have been inherited across generations\u201d (2). We begin to question the fact that Micah, a day trader, and Katie, a college English major, have been able to easily gather wealth and property, and we must question where such wealth comes from. Their incongruent youth and affluence is perhaps evocative of the racial privilege which easier loan systems and extensions of opportunity have historically granted young whites (Oliver & Shapiro 105). Even simpler still, however, the film might just be demanding us to realize that they own such a large, wealthy home simply because it \u201cclicks\u201d with their middle-class, white identity. Indeed, their youth evokes the feeling that opportunity and wealth are easily available to everyone, even day traders and college students. However, we cannot shake the fact that, historically, they represent epitomic benefactors of the wealth which America generates and grants only to whites. <\/span><\/p>\n Daniel, a fast food corporate manager and Kristi, a stay-at-home mom, possess an even larger amount of wealth, reflected by their larger home and their backyard pool, due to their higher standing in the corporate ladder. Again, this is evocative of the exclusivity of their privilege. That they live in comfort, isolated and unbothered, is to say that they live basking in the long American history constructed to benefit middle-class whites. Thus, the house inhabitants become synonymous with their houses because the audience understands that whatever may begin to threaten the house will not only damage them, but also the property that they have so painstakingly shown us in detail. The hoarding of wealth, kept within the same family across generations, is anxiously and viciously guarded by the homeowners to maintain the inhabitants\u2019 privileged comfort.<\/span><\/p>\n While Stone is right to point out the abundance of the \u201cproperty porn\u201d aesthetic present in these films, his visualization of wealth in the haunted house is not complete, for he ignores that the house not only symbolizes wealth, but also produces it within its walls. As Oliver and Shapiro state, \u201cthe purchase of a home has now become the primary mechanism for generating wealth\u201d (41) due to its ability to increase in market value and provide geographic advantages in regards to where labor is located. Historically, \u201ctaxation policy, for example, provided greater tax savings for businesses relocating to the suburbs than those who stayed and made capital improvements to plants in central city locations\u201d (Oliver & Shapiro 40). Suburbia in the United States has meant not only the symbol of wealth and stability but also its producer, a concept which these films take head-on as they construct the home as a microcosm which neatly encapsulates both wealth and labor production. <\/span><\/p>\n Perhaps an even stronger bond between American audiences and these films emerges because the home space encompasses not only comfort and material possessions, but also the stability of a well-paying job. In most of these films, wage-labor is performed in the house. As discussed previously, Micah works as a day trader and the home includes his office set-up. The evocations of wealth and consumerism are salient in the setting: Micah is surrounded by a flat-screen TV, leather couches, wooden floors, and innovative technology. At the center of the house is his office set-up from which all this wealth emanates.<\/span><\/p>\n Renai, the mother from <\/span>Insidious<\/span><\/i>, is an aspiring musician who works on her music from home while caring for her three children. We see her at work in front of a piano and abruptly distracted from her task to check on her children. Her job, although creative and unconventional, is challenged by increasing childcare demands. When her son Dalton seems to fall into a coma, an entire hospital set-up is placed in his room. Renai must learn to check his blood pressure and administer his injections in addition to her other motherly and professional duties.<\/span> Imbued from wall to wall is the devotion to labor production at a frenetic pace, as embodied by Renai\u2019s constant undertaking of different labors, sometimes all at once. The home represents a center within which this frenetic representation of laborious duties flourishes.<\/span><\/p>\n In <\/span>Sinister<\/span><\/i>, the protagonist Ellison Oswalt, the father and head of the household, also labors behind closed doors. As a true-crime novelist who works from a home office, within which a major part of the film takes place. we see the home as a sacred place of labor. Ellison\u2019s entire endeavor is to finish his latest novel, one that he repeatedly claims will bring his family unlimited riches. Unbeknownst to his family, the novel he\u2019s writing concerns a series of murders that have taken place in their new home. His daughter, Ashley\u2019s initial concerns, however, are with the new home itself, claiming that she will miss her old school. Ellison simply replies, \u201cIf we don\u2019t like it here, once I sell my book we\u2019ll move back.\u201d The importance of Ellison\u2019s labor is deeply imbued in the ability to obtain property: the labor produced in the house is the same that makes the obtainment of the house (and future ones) possible. We see that the home not only embodies and contains wealth, but also produces it within its walls through enclosed labor. The inside of the house expands not only as a center of American property and consumption, but also the labor which upholds it. Ellison even recites various monologues throughout the film concerning how rich the family will be once he finishes his novel, and how they\u2019ll be able to live anywhere they want.<\/span><\/p>\n At this point, one cannot examine all the American values of homeownership and wealth implied in these films and ignore the racial implications behind them. The exclusion of ethnic minorities as homeowners in these films is particularly telling since, as discussed previously, the iteration of homeownership in the films, and by extension, in American legislation, is a racially exclusive one. The \u201cproperty porn\u201d aesthetic, stable employment and wealth as encapsulated neatly within the homes in these films constructs the issue of homeownership and all its benefits as a strictly white endeavor. The historical context of housing legislation is key to understanding how the haunted house merely reasserts what has already been embedded into the collective conscious of American society as to who can own a home. As <\/span>the House We Live In<\/span><\/i> documents the legislative procedures through which homeownership becomes the primary concentration of American wealth, the documentary also details that, to put it simply, \u201cwhiteness means living in the suburbs,\u201d and thus the very concept of racial whiteness grows to be synonymous, equal to, exclusive to, the ownership of a home.<\/span><\/p>\n Racist legislation, from redlining to white flight, which I explore in the next section, demonstrate that in the realm of housing, white families are favored and the same access is denied to people of color. We see that the demon that invades the house in these films embodies not only the disruption of homeownership due to the subprime mortgage crisis, but also a white, middle-class anxiety about white dominance of wealth and property being threatened by outside forces that are represented as nonwhite and non-middle class.<\/span><\/p>\n III. A Shadowy Figure: Racialized Demons in the House<\/span><\/p>\n The American home, as constructed in the popular haunted house films primarily from 2009 to 2014, is the center of middle-class American labor, security, prosperity, and life. The demonic entity that haunts the house however, is of equal importance, for it disrupts desirable comfort and stability. These \u201cboogeymen\u201d enter the house and desecrate, one could say, the very symbol of the American dream. They often break things, thrash rooms, and turn home life into a nightmare before revealing their more \u201cinsidious\u201d agenda. Often, they attempt to take away a family member or simply kill everyone in their way. What then, is the cultural resonance of these beings in contemporary American culture? If the home is the symbol of wealth, prosperity and dreaming, what is at the flipside, excluded and marginalized? To answer this, we must again turn to the history of housing legislation in the U.S., and more specifically, what or who it leaves out and how, and which concepts America has deemed as the threat to the production of wealth that the films so religiously celebrate.<\/span><\/p>\n First, we must observe how the demons\u2019 arrivals are always portrayed as antagonizing the safety and structure of the house. While the family members are always welcomed, in the same way white, middle-class American audiences are invited relish in the film\u2019s display of wealth and property, the demon always enacts a forceful break-in that provokes white, middle-class, and suburban \u201cmoral panic.\u201d Stuart Hall defines moral panic as \u201c[coming] into play when this deep-structure of anxiety and traditionalism,\u201d that is, the same traditionalism and anxiety built around the conservation of suburban tranquility, \u201cconnects with the public definition of crime by the media, and is mobilized\u201d (165). This mobilization of moral panic, which Hall also argues is deeply embedded in class and racial divisions, is precisely the same intrusion enacted by the demon\u2019s arrival in these films.<\/span><\/p>\n In <\/span>Insidious<\/span><\/i>, the demon\u2019s break-in is literalized. As the Lamberts sleep peacefully at night, the security alarm goes off. Josh, the father, runs downstairs to find the front door broken open. He runs back upstairs to warn his wife and children to stay put and lock themselves in the baby\u2019s room. The demonic haunting is correlated with the threat of a criminal break-in, of an outsider intruding into the home space, threatening to rob, or harm its inhabitants. What we come to understand is that although demonic haunting is the thing of fantasy, in the haunted house film it is grounded in moral panic and real anxieties over protecting the home.<\/span><\/p>\n Moral panic is explored further in <\/span>Paranormal Activity 2<\/span><\/i>, where everyone in the house is impacted by the demon\u2019s initial attack and the damage that it has caused to their property. Daniel, the father, walks through the house as he documents with his camera every single transgression that has occurred against his material goods for insurance reasons. The tour lets the audience see the violence that has desecrated what at first had been longingly and obsessively introduced to us through the \u201cproperty porn\u201d aesthetic: broken glasses and cups, overturned furniture, clutter from the tables and cabinets now lining the floors. As we move into the bedrooms, we see ransacked drawers, thrashed beds, torn bedsheets, toppled dressers, flung clothes all over the room, unhinged paintings, and torn portraits. Despite the violent and intrusive assault, Daniel is most relieved to learn, \u201cThe watches are still here.\u201d He then turns to his wife Kristi and says, \u201cAll your diamonds are here.\u201d \u00a0What the family seems most concerned with is the threat to their wealth and status symbols. The invasive force has attacked family\u2019s wealth accumulated within and through their house. We instantly realize that the demonic presence symbolizes a facet of \u201canti-wealth,\u201d seeking destroy or undo symbols of affluence embedded in American capitalist culture.<\/span><\/p>\n The film incites the audience to wonder: who would do something like this? Legislation about exclusion and segregation enable us to examine what is perceived to threaten the stability of suburban space. \u201cMoral panic\u201d is also useful in helping us to understand the divisions drawn by these break-ins. This division is precisely one racial in nature, as the protection of wealth and property is synonymous with the protection of white symbols of status and affluence. The wealth of the families, as mentioned previously, is encoded in their race: wealth gathered through privileges and legislations made to advantage whites. What threatens them, then, must be figured as the exact opposite, class-wise and racially speaking. These configurations of race, although only <\/span>symbolized<\/span><\/i> by moral panic, are also often<\/span> literalized<\/span><\/i> in colorist terms.<\/span><\/p>\n These white families, when made uncomfortable by an otherworldly presence, often highlight the horror-based colorism that divides them from this demonic entity. Even in literal terms, monstrous blackness is present in the films, given that horror antagonists are always presented as \u201cblack,\u201d described as \u201cdark\u201d or \u201cshadowy\u201d demons. Even the figurations of racial difference are present, encoded either symbolically or literally. For example, the demon that haunts the entire <\/span>Paranormal Activity<\/span><\/i> franchise is, in Katie\u2019s own words, \u201ca shadowy figure,\u201d a black mass of ethereal goop lurking through the corners of the house. Even more is that in the franchise\u2019s third installment, its name is revealed to be Toby. Evocative, perhaps, of Kunta Kinte from <\/span>Roots<\/span><\/i>, the allusion to black representation in American popular culture is evident through the demon\u2019s blackness and the popular resonance of its name.<\/span> \u201cBlackness\u201d is exclusively represented as monstrous within the haunted house, and indicates tensions in racial relations in these films which fully formulate historical racial divisions around housing.<\/span><\/p>\n The symbol of the tall, looming black figure is also evoked through the speechless, purely evil entity of Buhguul in <\/span>Sinister.<\/span><\/i> The framing of this entity is further evocative of moral panic: outside in Ellison\u2019s backyard, Buhguul stands menacingly in the distance, a suggestion of impending crime or violence to be perpetrated by the \u201cmenacing black figure.\u201d These symbols of \u201cblackness\u201d as dangerous and threatening to white wealth and labor are easily recognizable, for, as Hall states, they are popular media evocations of what the crime that threatens traditional stability looks like (165). This is not to claim that \u201clight vs. dark\u201d is a new form of antagonism created in this subgenre of films. However, in terms of wealth and the threat to that wealth in the U.S., the colorist tensions drawn by these films reflect the racialization of crime and the history of racial segregation.<\/span><\/p>\n I call this colorist dynamic \u201chorror-colorism,\u201d or the color-based tensions that these films construct through demonic presences and their broader implications regarding U.S. race and class relations. Robin Wood notes the particularly problematic nature of the representation of the monster in many horror films. He views \u201cthe presentation of the monster as totally nonhuman,\u201d noting that \u201cone can feel little for a mass of viscous black slime\u201d (Wood 192). In this quote, Wood refers in part to horror\u2019s refusal to afford human considerations as to the monster\u2019s origins or motives. Micah, as he researches demonology to get answers as to what could be haunting their house, illustrates the difference between demons and ghosts, congruent with Wood\u2019s evocation of the sympathy-less monster. When Katie says that the haunting presence \u201cdoesn\u2019t feel human,\u201d Micah replies, \u201cWell that sounds like a demon. Ghosts are spirits of human beings. Which is bad, cause demons suck. Basically, they\u2019re these malevolent, evil spirits that only exist to cause pain and commit evil for their own amusement.\u201d Not only is Micah\u2019s description of the monster in agreement with Wood\u2019s, but Toby, the dark demon, and Wood\u2019s viscous black slime point to the figuration of horror-colorism: that part of the monster\u2019s lack of sympathetic evocations, besides its asymmetry and abject physicality, always ties back to its demonic black color. Horror film constructions of blackness, therefore, are popularly tied with monstrosity, and such an evocation of monstrous blackness is telling of its significance in regards to American housing: that it is outside of the human, white realm of comfort and stability which housing produces, and directly antagonizes it.<\/span><\/p>\n Psychoanalysis is helpful in understanding the neurotic \u201cnegrophobia\u201d constructed in these films — the idea that blackness is the antagonistic force directly opposed to white comfort. Frantz Fanon discusses the figurations of racial otherness in relation to collective catharsis: \u201cIn every society, in every community, there exists, must exist, a channel, an outlet whereby the energy accumulated in the form of aggressiveness can be released\u201d (Fanon 124). In his description of how this catharsis is embedded in cultural products, he argues that the figurations, authored by white men for white children, of catharsis exist as \u201cthe Wolf, the Devil, the Wicked Genie, Evil, and the Savage\u201d which are \u201calways represented by Blacks or Indians\u201d (Fanon 124-125). This further gives credence to the concept of a horror-colorism as embodying racial anxieties and fears from white audiences in the form of blackness. This resonates with James Baldwin\u2019s figurations in \u201cStranger in the Village,\u201d where he comes to understand that the Swedish children that run from him in fear do so because \u201cother children, having been taught that the devil is a black man, scream in genuine anguish as I approach\u201d (171). The figurations of black demonization through the racial other are, as these examples illustrate, culturally resonant across global definitions of whiteness. We come to understand Wood\u2019s \u201cblack viscous slime\u201d not only as a generic, nonhuman \u201cother,\u201d but as a very specific form of racial otherness. In the example of the haunted house, blackness is specifically pitted against the American symbol of dreaming and prosperity: the home. The lack of empathy or sympathy for such a being leads to a monstrous embodiment of racial otherness in relation to their involvement in home desecration.<\/span><\/p>\n Besides symbolic representations of blackness and racial otherness, when characters of color are present in these films, they embody racial stereotypes congruent with definitions of demonization. In <\/span>Paranormal Activity 2<\/span><\/i>, Martine, the Mexican nanny hired by the Reys to care for their new baby, embodies the mysticism and demonic power embedded in perceptions of other races. As soon as Toby makes his presence known, Martine ritualistically cleanses the house of his presence, lending an exotic understanding of the demonic forces at play. She knows how to perform ceremonial cleansings, so that when Kristi becomes possessed by Toby, Daniel goes looking for Martine and admits, \u201cshe tried to warn me but I didn\u2019t listen.\u201d Martine, her culture, and her otherness are presented as being in the same realm of otherworldliness as the villainous demons. Kinship seems to exist between minorities and demonic entities.<\/span><\/p>\n This kinship is illustrated to an even more severe degree in the<\/span> Paranormal Activity<\/span><\/i> spin-off, <\/span>Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones <\/span><\/i>(dir. Christopher B. Landon, 2014). The film takes place in the \u201cbarrio\u201d of Oxnard, California, where our entirely Latino cast falls victim to the hauntings of Toby and its pawns. The main character, Jesse, becomes possessed by a demonic entity after performing a ritual inside a church. What\u2019s curious is that the relationship between Jesse and the demon plaguing him is not so much one of horrific invasion, but one of familiarity amongst the two. The principal signs of possession that Jesse displays are levitation and superhuman strength. His friend, Hector, after witnessing such abilities, exclaims \u201cthis is fucking awesome!\u201d and \u201cthat\u2019s insane, Jesse!\u201d again illustrating the familiarity between the demons and the racial others whom it visits, as their interactions always incite amazement and laughter. \u00a0When Jesse\u2019s possession gets particularly nasty, his grandma, like Martine, knows exactly who to go to for advice and what to do to battle the demon. The familiarity between ethnic minorities and demons reduces people of color to the same level as demonic entities.<\/span><\/p>\n Racial otherness is also present in housing legislation and residential segregation which the films also embody through demonic and literal ethnic representations. The haunted house film comes to reflect a racist facet of American culture that has existed for decades in relation to property. It often portrays \u201crealms\u201d inhabited by either actual ethnic minorities or by demonic entities as entirely antithetical of the pristine, comfortable microcosm which the suburbs embody. These \u201canti-suburbs,\u201d spaces entirely opposed to the idyllic representations of suburbia, are fully embedded in actual histories of American segregation. The account of the \u201cconstruction of the ghetto\u201d in its early stages, as Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton describe in <\/span>American Apartheid<\/span><\/i> helps us to perceive the racist forces imbued in living spaces:<\/span><\/p>\n As the tide of violence rose in northern cities, blacks were increasingly divided from whites by a hardening color line in employment, education and especially housing. Whites became increasingly intolerant of black neighbors [\u2026] Those blacks living away from recognized Negro areas were forced to move into expanding \u201cblack belts,\u201d \u201cdarkytowns,\u201d \u201cBronzevilles,\u201d or \u201cNiggertowns\u201d [\u2026] in white eyes, black people belonged in black neighborhoods no matter what their social or economic standing; the color line grew increasingly impermeable (30).<\/span><\/p>\n Denton and Massey\u2019s observations of the construction of the ghetto and the rise of northern segregation in the U.S.<\/span> point to the fact that social and economic standing are always secondary to race when it comes to separatist housing actions. In other words, the very geography of housing is embedded in racist segregation, and the idea that suburbia, in its idyllic construction of housing, is always intrinsically separated from racial otherness, much like the human vs. demon separations enacted in these films.<\/span><\/p>\n These films also represent an unconscious manifestation of \u201credlining.\u201d Redlining, which Oliver and Shapiro describe as \u201cinstitutional mechanisms that help to destabilize black communities\u201d by \u201cmaking it difficult and\/or expensive for homes and businesses to secure coverage\u201d (43), is the central racist procedure through which suburban housing communities became segregated. Redlining is the practice of \u201crating\u201d communities and neighborhoods based on the scale of \u201cfinancial risk\u201d or poverty which they represent, with the objective of seeing who would obtain mortgage loans and at what rates. Historically, however, racism is evident in this ranking system, for the simple fact of being a person of color was enough to devalue property, and for whiteness being favored in the system. As<\/span> the House We Live In <\/span><\/i>explains the process of redlining:<\/span><\/p>\n Those communities that were all white, suburban, and faraway from minority areas received the highest rating, and that was green, while those that were all minority or in the process of changing, those got the lowest rating, which was the color red. Most of these mortgages went to suburbanizing America, and they suburbanized it racially.<\/span><\/p>\n In the process of suburbanization blackness becomes \u201cundesirable\u201d and \u201canti-value.\u201d In other words, the physical condition of a home was as much a factor of its value in the market as the racial makeup of who lived in or near it. What this does, primarily, is construct blackness as a \u201cblight\u201d on neighborhoods and against wealth. The proximity of blackness to one\u2019s home signals the decrease in value and depletion of wealth.<\/span><\/p>\n With this information at hand, understanding the dynamic of the racially other demon vs. the house in our set of films becomes clearer. In <\/span>Insidious<\/span><\/i>, for example, demons emerge from the Further, \u201ca world far beyond our own, yet it’s all around us, a place without time as we know it. It’s a <\/span>dark<\/span><\/i> realm filled with the tortured souls of the dead, a place not meant for the living\u201d (emphasis mine). The figuration of this demonic realm is the figuration of where demons ought to stay and where they belong, and their infiltration in the realm of the living (where our white characters live) is what sets in motion the film\u2019s central disruption of the house. <\/span><\/p>\n When Josh travels to The Further to rescue his son, we see even further configurations of horror-colorism, this time also imbued with notions of anti-wealth: The Further is just like our own world, but darker, less glamorous, and less vibrant, and filled with vengeful entities anxious to escape and invade the world of the living. <\/span>Insidious<\/span><\/i> constructs a version of redlining while invoking the anxiety of a violation of borders as demons begin to pour out of the Further and invade the Lambert house. As Oliver and Shapiro state, \u201cmaterially, whites and blacks constitute two nations\u201d (3), and the Further acts as a literal embodiment of this idea. If the demon enters the house, it will inevitably disrupt wealth and labor production, because its very existence, in our understanding of race-based housing legislation, is what haunts the possibility of a decline in comfortable living. When a white homeowner in these films stands his ground, raises a crucifix, and implores, \u201cleave my house, demon!\u201d therefore, our understanding of this struggle is one steeped in a history of racist segregation. <\/span><\/p>\n Insidious<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Sinister<\/span><\/i>, which show us that the result of these hauntings is the white family\u2019s attempt to flee, is evocative of the concept of white flight that, like redlining, contribute to segregation. White flight is the departure of many white families from increasingly non-white neighborhoods to ensure that their property does not suffer an unwanted decrease in value. The Lamberts and the Oswalts opt for a literal representation of this when things go awry: they pack their bags and leave. They do so in hopes that this will result in the finding of a place where darkness is not so predominant, where demons do not bleed through into their realm. Their main desire is that the stability of their comfort and wealth can flourish once more, without demonic disruptions, which illustrates the separatist nature of suburbia in terms of escaping the tightening grips of otherness.<\/span><\/p>\n The Marked Ones<\/span><\/i> once more proves useful in understanding the racial and economic separations that come because of redlining by its evocations of the Oxnard barrio as a place completely antithetical of all iterations of suburbia previously shown in other films. Like Massey and Denton\u2019s study of the construction of the ghetto, we see the construction of the barrio in more contemporary terms. Everything about the environment that ethnic minorities inhabit portrays anti-value and anti-wealth. Jesse\u2019s family is unconventional in contrast to the Lamberts: his father is a working-class man who only comes home to sleep and his grandmother is often busy with household chores. Jesse lives in a small, cramped apartment that is decorated in dull beige and gray colors. His best friend Hector also states that he cannot take romantic interests home because \u201cthere\u2019s like 50 people\u201d residing in his home. Furthermore, Ana, the <\/span>bruja<\/span><\/i> that lives below Jesse\u2019s apartment, is evicted after a mysterious murder takes place in her home. As Jesse and Hector enter the now empty apartment, we see its squalor: filth and waste lining the walls and floors, discarded litter, dust everywhere, as well as the various grotesque <\/span>