Topographical terrors and spatial interactions in Robert Wise’s The Haunting

Abstract

The haunted house, the ultimate ‘Bad Place,’ is very much at home in the genres of the ghost story/film and mainstream horror. Rumours of wrong-doing and regrettable histories survive even the ruins they dare speak of, and to speak about a haunting is to necessarily and reluctantly discuss lived space. Any ghost story in fact is a story about occupancy, a lived place and its ghost/s, now bereft but not altogether unoccupied (and therein lies the perversity of a ‘filled’ absence). This chapter seeks to assess the ways in which narratives of haunted houses are essentially foregrounded by topography and architecture, taking at its premise lived space as being central to a haunting. Using the dialectical approach to space/place as found in Michel de Certeau, this chapter redefines the concept of topography (space-chartering) in terms of character-appropriation (or the haunting) of space and how geographic/urban space further opens up into narrative space. Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) will be analysed to demonstrate how haunted houses narratives build, sustain and suspend terror through their topography. It will also be argued that occupancy, possession and the vying for haunted space are ambivalent in this film, and that ultimately, spatial interactions are political.