Description
The setting of the ?haunted house? has performed a dramatic, if not occasionally caricatured, role in the literary and cinematic narratives of the last century. The once popular ?old dark house? tropes ? particularly those descended from the place-oriented fantasias of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe or Bram Stoker ? have been relegated, largely, to derivative ?genre? fare as the experiences of domestic space have become increasingly fractured, urbanized and suburbanized. Apartment blocs, duplexes, tract homes, trailer parks, internment camps and roadside motels have expanded the function of the house from a mere stationary habitat to a mobile plexus ? a radically new architectonics of dwelling in the twentieth century.
With these alterations in dwelling space has come a concomitant reconceptualization of the haunted house as such. No longer an exotic and dilapidated pastoral castle possessed by grotesque ghouls and aristocratic incubi, the contemporary haunted house has been exorc