Horror House Film analyses horror films – in different subgenres – in which the predominantly male drive for the possession of property and the exploitation of other people are brought together. It locates this pernicious aspect of modern culture in what Erich Fromm terms the being-is-having mode of human identity formation.
An article by Jane Clinton recently published on The Guardian website (29 May 2026) speaks of today being “the most challenging time to be a first-time buyer since the 2008 financial crisis.” Monthly mortgage payments are rising, and some prospective buyers are having to pull out of “buying” their desired home because they can no longer afford it. Another family “gambled” on interest rates and lost, leaving them in rental property for the foreseeable future. Yet another discovered that within the current volatile mortgage market they would not be able to own their home outright for many years to come. A week earlier (21 May 2026), in the Netherlands, where I live and work, the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation (NOS) posted a similar article about the Dutch housing market: mortgage payments were rising and many families’ incomes were no longer sufficient to cover the costs leading to larger debts and an increasing number of people unable to afford a mortgage at all. As such, little seems to have changed since the high-risk mortgage bubble burst in 2007-2008. Homeownership is still considered one of the primary measures of human wellbeing in Western nations (and beyond), whilst this luxury is increasingly reserved for only the affluent few. Significantly, most people who celebrate the “purchase” of a home, in fact, own nothing but a large debt to a faceless financial institution, the actual possessor of the property, until the debt has been paid off with interest. It is one of the great social contradictions, and a sign of the persuasive power of materialist ideology, that taking on an immense debt, making yourself subservient to the whims of a volatile financial market, and becoming reliant on long-term employment with a systematically increasing pay package is celebrated by so many as a sign of stability, prosperity, and success.
Horror House Film: Possession, Obsession, Domination, Masculinity (2026) chronicles how films and televisions dramas within the horror genre represent and critically explore this dark side of the ideology of homeownership. As a cultural historian of gothic and horror fiction, I realised recently that an increasing number of stories revolving around gloomy houses in which terrible things happen, no longer feature the haunted-house conventions of the past reaching into the present, of ghosts righting ancestral wrongs, or families curses that perpetuate evils. Instead, what I have called Horror House stories, focus much more on the potential evils related to notions of property possession and an obsession with materialist standards of success in which an irrational concern with ownership of property, and people, generates exploitative, violent, and often catastrophically destructive behaviour. These stories about the drive to possess even if possession of property is out of reach, I discovered, often also revolve around formations of toxic masculine identities, in which hegemonic notions of the “head” of the household, the “breadwinner,” and the “father” transform into fiendish identities defined by notions of absolute power, total control and the intrinsic right to exploit others. Such men of the home transform their domestic properties from the safe havens and places of ontological security they should be into prisons, and torture chambers even, for those family members living under the joke of the male monster.
Tracing the rise of the Horror House film, I move from Universal classics – The Old Dark House – and mid-century staples – the early 1980s Amityville Trilogy – to recent home-invasion thrillers like Deon Taylor’s The Intruder. Because the ideology of homeownership as the primary route to the good life is not only pervasive in English-speaking nations, I also draw attention to the significance of property ownership in two absurdist murder-movies by Dutch filmmaker Alex van Warmerdam, and also an Italian re-imagination of Richard Matheson’s “Mad House,” in which the titular property becomes infested with its owner’s obsession to possess and exploit property and people to shore up his masculinist sense of entitlement to praise and worship. Of central concern in each chapter is psychologist Erich Fromm’s insight (developed in the formative years of the now hegemonic neo-liberal, capitalist, mass-production and consumption society that is the West) that in a world in which being someone is equated with ownership of property, when one owns nothing, one is nobody, an insight that explains why so many people, against their better judgement maybe, but so often out of sheer necessity to have a home, feel the need to participate in the hectic scramble for unaffordable mortgages that will enslave them to a financial institution that cannot see the person beyond the profit margin.
Evert Jan van Leeuwen is a lecturer in English-language culture at Leiden University. He researches the history and development of English- and Dutch-language Gothic, horror, science fiction and noir fiction.
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