Stuck at home facing an invisible enemy? From Rebecca to Shirley, movies telling tales of domestic spookiness are more resonant than ever
Not now, haunted house horrors! Never has the prospect of watching a movie about being confined to your home and beset by unseen terrors seemed less like escapism. We’ll soon see if the pandemic has sharpened our appetite for haunted house movies or put us right off them, as they seem to be the theme of this
Halloween – and almost all of them centre on women.
That’s not such a surprise, really. Unlike so many areas, ghost stories and houses of horror have been almost a haven for
Women, on the page and on screen. You could reason that the domestic realm was seen as a female space, and the natural receptacle for female writers’ explorations of things repressed and unspeakable. Some critics have ventured that female authors identified with ghosts – invisible figures struggling to exert an influence on reality.