Halloween 2022 is behind us, and yet Americans can’t seem to get enough of the horror genre, no matter what season it is.
Troy Rondinone, a professor of history at Southern and author of Nightmare Factories: The Asylum in the American Imagination, writes about this fascination with horror in an article in Psychology Today, “Netflix’s ‘The Watcher’: A New Mansion of Madness” (11/9/2022).
In the article, Rondinone looks at this popular Netflix show and the familiar horror trope of the haunted house, examining why it is so common in films. “Haunted house stories tap into worry over [the] unsustainable American real estate dream,” he says.
The trope has been around longer than films have, however, and Rondinone looks back at earlier examples of haunted houses in literature and the popular imagination.
