The Haunted House is home to horror: an exploratory study of the Haunted House manifest in North American film from 1940–2020
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hockey (1999) introduces the House of Doom; Bailey (1999) builds the Haunted House formula from American popular fiction; Meehan (2020) tracks the Haunted House on film and through history; and now, I explore how the Haunted House narrative belies societal concerns about the existential nature of humanity. When COVID-19 forced our global society into at-home isolation, inhabitants were forced to reckon with the effects of prolonged domestic survival, much like the inhabitants of haunted houses. This exploratory ethnographic content analysis of 40 films contributes a trio of phenomenological findings to existing Haunted House scholarship: 1) threats to the safety of one’s home can turn the house into a dangerous trap, 2) as a reification of biophobia, the North American Haunted House is more closely aligned with nature than with civilization, 3) the Haunted Heroines of the horror genre showcase the strength and adaptability of the feminine trope. Oppressors mobilize structural restraints—literally and systemically—to objectify the Female Gothic as a Gothic Corpse, all while personifying inanimate structures. The Haunted House manifests in the North American cultural imagination as a monstrous embodiment of biophobia, a fear of nature and the Self. What happens when you open the door to supernatural metaphors for fears about domestic life and the nature of humanity?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".