New Books In Popular Culture

In her new book, Haunted Homes (Rutgers University Press, 2022), Dahlia Schweitzer explores the ways in which the trope of the haunted house in horror signifies the anxieties, traumas, and terrors of suburban American life. Comprehensive and readable, this slim volume establishes beyond a doubt that in movies and television series from The Conjuring to The Haunting of Hill House, "home is where the horror is." Haunted Homes is unique in its focus on what Schweitzer calls the "suburban gothic." Scholarly studies of the supernatural in horror cinema tend to be decidedly ahistorical, suggesting that contemporary films about haunted houses tap into the same fear of the uncanny evoked by eighteenth and nineteenth-century works of European gothic literature. Schweitzer, however, argues that these films are distinctly modern and American, framing them as a dark reflection of suburban life since the 1950s and particularly in the decade following the economic collapse of 2008. Schweitzer undertakes an in-depth examina