Horrors d’Oeuvres

I was on a family trip in Natural Bridge, Virginia—taking in such sylvan sights and quizzical attractions as Foamhenge, a replica of Stonehenge made out of (yes) oam; and the eponymous bridge, a limestone arch looming above a roughly two-hundred-foot gorge—when I entered my first haunted house. It was clearly a tourist trap. A crudely painted sign, I remember, directed passersby to take a chance on the “monster museum” down the road from the main parking lot: a stone cottage with some goofy plaster skeletons attached here and there. But I felt uneasy nonetheless—something about being in the boonies, the absence of other visitors, the house’s ramshackle façade. We were sat down in a creaky drawing room and left to wait for an uncomfortably long while behind locked doors. My anxiety tipped toward panic. Eventually a door opened, beckoning us through a pitch-black labyrinth that required us to feel our way through to the exit. Along the way, some shrieks and moans; some flashes of green light revealing severed limbs and chunky wax figurines. The chills and thrills, in retrospect, were laughably minimalistic. Just a strategic use of space, light, and time—and it worked.

All of this is to say that it makes sense why Leila Taylor’s Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread (2025) relies so heavily on cinema. So much of what makes an otherwise innocuous home scary is dependent on where we look, how we move, and how long we linger—work the movie camera performs. In the Halloween sequence of Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), young Tootie is dared by a gang of older neighborhood kids to ring the doorbell of the old Braukoff house, a white Victorian mansion that doesn’t look all that different from the other homes purpose-built by Minnelli and his team on the MGM backlot (dubbed “St. Louis Street”) where the entire film was shot. In Tootie’s eyes, however, it’s monstrous, in large part because Minnelli shows the house from a low angle and uses wide lenses to stretch it out and make it appear sinister. It’s no wonder that the witch in Zach Cregger’s Weapons (2025) goes so long unperturbed; the suburban McMansion she’s taken over looks ordinary enough, but it takes a patient gaze—or a paranoid one, via shots held longer than usual—to notice that the windows are covered and that the car parked out front never leaves.

Taylor’s interdisciplinary study isn’t all that concerned with the kind of haunted house I visited in southern Virginia. Those have their origins in attractions like Madame Tussaud’s hall of wax figures in London and Paris’s Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, both products of the nineteenth century’s fascination with the macabre and the illusive. Her cases studies, from the Amityville Horror house to the Tadao Ando–designed Malibu mansion that Ye (formerly Kanye West) gutted upon purchasing, are domestic spaces deemed corrupted, whether real, fictitious, or in the spooky space between. “They’re houses that haunt me,” Taylor writes of her eclectic examples. “The commonality among them is an uncanny quality of unease in a space designed for comfort.” Taylor approaches these homes like Julia Garner’s third-grade teacher turned gumshoe inspecting the Weapons house, scanning for anomalies and patterns to find the meaning within.

The title Sick Houses is a curious and ultimately unsatisfying one. Taylor seems to invite the reader to set aside the familiar vocabulary of haunting and horror for a metaphor of contagion, but the conceit gets lost amid the book’s grab bag of references. A better title might have been purloined from Walt Whitman’s “Wicked Architecture,” his coinage for the squalid New York tenements he decried in an 1856 jeremiad of that name. Taylor quotes the essay (while curiously omitting the title) in the book’s opening chapter, “American Houses,” on the institution of homeownership. “A man is not a whole and complete man unless he owns a house and the ground it stands on,” wrote the poet, extolling a foundational national myth that would later be enshrined in a Cold War consensus that cast private property as a bedrock of prosperity, patriotism, and anticommunism. This historical context enriches Taylor’s sound if not particularly novel argument that the haunted house belies the myth of the American dream. Even beyond this chapter, the book draws examples primarily from US history and culture, though, as Taylor notes, haunting has long been used to unsettle fantasies of possession and self-determination outside the American context (as in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764 in London and widely considered the first gothic novel). In Taylor’s words, “haunting shatters the illusion that we have control over our spaces; suddenly that which we consider ours is inexplicably not.” The happy family, having moved into a magnificent new residence acquired at a suspiciously low cost, will find themselves to be its owners only on paper—and will inevitably be terrorized by specters of past atrocities that lay bare the fragility of the white-picket-fence fantasy. Patriarchs are emasculated by these haunted houses and turn abusive like their fathers before them, inheriting a condoned cruelty that, generations ago, served a colonial project—hence the cliché of the “Indian burial ground.”

Ironically, the period that saw Whitman singing the praises of homeownership would also furnish the horror genre with its quintessential architectural style. Taylor explains how the Victorian home, specifically the Second Empire–style mansion, with its gingerbread embellishments and haughty mansard roof, became the prototypical haunted house in the American cultural imaginary. A relic of the Gilded Age, by the 1920s it connoted obscenity and decadence, its filigree and fretwork preternaturally disposed to gathering dust. The rise of the “cleaner and minimal Colonial Revival” was a knee-jerk response to the feminized excesses of the Victorian and, in its comparative simplicity, signaled a reformed, upstanding domesticity. Writing about Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Taylor identifies the Bates Motel, the low-slung clapboard structure where Norman presents as a shy, seemingly innocuous innkeeper, mother’s home on the hill, repository of her corpse as well as his bloodlusty maternal alter ego, is manifestly Victorian. (Like the Braukoff mansion, Mother’s house was a backlot construction. Hitch modeled it on Edward Hopper’s forlorn House by the Railroad [1925], the first painting to enter the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.)

Taylor’s study is most compelling where movie magic dovetails with architectural history, lending a jarring material heft to our fictional immersions—not all space, light, and time, it seems. For instance, the real house standing in for Leatherface’s in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was a “kit house” constructed in 1909, back when companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward offered mail-order homes at bargain prices to aspiring proprietors willing to build them themselves. (Originally located in the Texas town of Round Rock, it was moved fifty miles northwest in 1998 and now operates as Hooper’s restaurant, in honor of Chain Saw auteur Tobe Hooper.) “It is the commonness of the Chain Saw house that is most disturbing,” Taylor writes; it represents “a betrayal of our trust in standardized design” that extends to the deceptively sleepy suburbs and cookie-cutter McMansions that populate modern horror, particularly teen slashers (Halloween [1978], A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984], Scream [1996], etc.).

This distrust becomes most pronounced in the second chapter, “Brutal Houses,” in which Taylor turns, via David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), and the spectacular demolition, in 1972, of St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe complex (1954), among other examples, to the utopian ambitions of midcentury urban housing. Shivers, which was shot at Mies van der Rohe’s 1962 Tourelle-Sur-Rive condo towers in Montreal, visualizes a disease outbreak that turns the infected into nymphomaniacal zombies. The film’s orgiastic contagion, accelerated by the setting’s high residential density, seems to lampoon modernist preoccupations with rigorous planning and hygienic design. There is indeed an intriguing tension between the frenzied violence of such apocalyptic scenarios and the rationalizing project of modernism, even as Taylor’s tidy ekphrases tend to make that project seem doomed from the outset. The Thamesmead Council Estate in southeast London, begun in the mid-1960s, “wasn’t even finished,” the author notes, when Kubrick chose it as the setting for his adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s droog dystopia; “Did he predict what it would become and just nudge it along in self-fulfilling prophecy?” she wonders. In Walter Salles’s 2005 remake of Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water, Josep Lluís Sert’s Eastwood apartment blocks (1975) on Roosevelt Island are imagined as a zone of dysfunction and decay, one in which a gaping, growing hole in the ceiling of a single mother’s apartment indexes a history of systemic neglect. Conflating Brutalism with “failed idealism,” Taylor overlooks a consequential irony: Built by the New York State Urban Development Corporation, the Eastwood Apartments (now called Roosevelt Landings) are generally considered among the most successful realizations of late-modernist social housing—a complicated success, yes, but nevertheless a far cry from the explosive telos of Pruitt-Igoe.

Taylor has more fun with the horror houses of luxury modernism, the misgivings provoked by their icy exteriors and sleek designs, and their associations with “Bond villains, criminal ring lords, and billionaires, not families.” In Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934), modernism expresses a deluded attempt to design one’s way out of the past, an act not only of architectural hubris but of violence against history itself. Boris Karloff’s Hjalmar Poelzig, a treacherous Austro-Hungarian military commander turned architect, enacts such a fantasy of erasure when he builds his gleaming, Bauhaus-inspired compound atop the same battlefield where he abandoned his own men in the Great War. (Ulmer, a noted self-mythologizer, named his villain after the historical German designer Hans Poelzig, with whom he claimed to have worked back in the 1920s.) Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House (1925), a hilltop compound in Los Feliz with the bearing of a Mayan tomb, was used to shoot exteriors for William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill (1959), in which a shady millionaire (Vincent Price!) and his beautiful wife (Carol Ohmart) invite guests into their rented lair of luxury, its concrete textile blocks concealing all manner of iniquity. Decades earlier, Wright’s Taliesin home in southwestern Wisconsin had been the site of a real-life axe-murdering spree by one of his servants (among the seven victims were Wright’s mistress and her two children). “While we can’t draw a direct line from Taliesin to Wright’s work in Los Angeles,” Taylor writes, “it is notable that the inspiration for the houses he made after the murders came from structures designed to honor the dead.” Wright’s son, Lloyd Wright, would put his own spin on his father’s Mesoamerican modernism with the comically villainous-looking John Sowden House (or “Jaws House,” so called after its façade’s resemblance to a gaping mouth), built in 1926 and owned in the late 1940s by Dr. George Hodel—one of the prime suspects in the Black Dahlia murder.

As might already be evident, Sick Houses has a not-insignificant true crime–nerd sensibility—something embraced by Taylor, who also inserts slivers of personal testimony that, on occasion, come off as trite and forced. (One such story involves Taylor visiting the Unabomber’s cabin when it was on display at the now-shuttered Newseum in Washington, DC: “I immediately regretted my obedience to that little sign blocking the entrance. So the next weekend I went back, and I touched it.”) I’m not above the pleasures of real-world murder content, and Taylor, at least, satisfies this itch with reasonable restraint and justifiably related insights. But there’s a difference between the real and imaginary horrors that Taylor slides between so breezily, lending real places and people an air of abstraction. In “Mad Houses” and “Forever Houses—the former chapter about homes inhabited by dangerous outcasts, usually serial killers; the latter about homes that become their residents’ whole world, as in underground bomb shelters (10 Cloverfield Lane [2016]) or spaces where people are held in indefinite captivity (Room [2015] and the real-life case of Genie Wiley)—there is a temptation toward a kind of pseudopsychology, whereby the mentally warped individual’s home becomes an indirect expression of their worldview and predilections. Taylor, to her credit, treats such assumptions with some much-warranted ambivalence. When the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, was on trial, that spartan cabin where he lived in the Montana wilderness was introduced by his defense team as proof of his insanity, a gratuitous move, per Taylor, rooted in their belief that the all-American jury members would believe “that needing or wanting less is tantamount to madness.”

“Little Houses,” a somewhat incongruous chapter about dollhouses, relies more heavily on examples from television (Creepshow [1982], Sharp Objects [2018], The Twilight Zone [1959], the TV movie The Dollhouse Murders [1992]) than the rest of the book. One can chalk this up to the trope’s creepy campiness and its relationship to gendered play and entertainment, but the detour also underscores the patchwork quality of Taylor’s assembled case studies: random and whimsical as opposed to sculpted around a sustained line of argument. In the nineteenth century, dollhouses transformed from intricate objects of display—status symbols through which adult women signaled wealth and refinement—into miniature theaters where girls could enact and contain their fantasies. Miniaturization confers control, though a dollhouse’s haunting only reveals the fallacy therein.

There’s a feminist through line in Sick Houses that seems to argue against the title’s possibly pejorative connotations, asking how our cultural and aesthetic templates might program our ideas about what constitutes architectural aberrance—and therefore what make us intolerant of alternative lifestyles. Edith and Edie Beale, the mother-and-daughter protagonists of the Maysles brothers’ documentary Grey Gardens (1976), close the chapter on “Witch Houses,” in which Taylor explores the way deviant (unmarried and childless) women’s houses are imagined in fairytales (the gingerbread cottage in Hansel and Gretel) and cinema (the Day-Glo dance academy in Dario Argento’s Suspiria [1977]) to either “scare or entice,” contra the home’s role normative role as the site of patriarchal social reproduction. The Beales, relatives of Jackie Kennedy who had undergone a dramatic reversal of fortune, had allowed their twenty-eight-room East Hampton abode to descend into chaos and disrepair, a sign to many that the women were mentally incapacitated. Taylor wonders if we’re right to pathologize them: “We expect miserable people to live in miserable conditions. We expect the once wealthy to have a reverence for materiality.” Sarah Winchester, the heiress and self-taught architect who conceived the so-called Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, was considered mad, her eccentric design choices (upside-down pillars, windows on the floor, tiny switchback steps, staircases leading to nowhere) attributed to an imagined haunting as opposed to her ingenuity. The house was not for entertaining; it was constructed with only herself in mind. If “loss of agency is at the heart of every haunted house story,” as Taylor suggests, then the Winchester House, despite appearances, is homemaking, triumphant.