Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House

"Haunting of Hill House" was the whole inspiration for Anatomy and the connection and comparisons you've made here make me happier than I can say. Thank you so, so much for this <3

When a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth That's a gorgeous line.

Therapist: Houses being alive and malignant aren't real, it can't hurt you. House: Aight, Bet.

Perhaps it's an unintended parallel, but one of the first things Anatomy reminded me of was the experience of living with chronic illness. It's like being an inhabitant in a house that fights you at every conceivable opportunity, a house that hates you. A house you can never move out of. You can try to renovate it and hope it makes peace with the fact that you live there, but it's your home, forever, whether you like it or not.

I was playing through A Plague Tale earlier today and this excerpt struck me. "Can you feel that? ... When you enter a place that has been long abandoned, theres something in the air. Its feels like...interrupting a conversation."

its kinda comforting how universal the childhood mad sprint up the stairs in the dark experience is. i've never really met anyone who hasn't had that experience.

As someone in the construction industry, there is something greater than reality about a house, or a building. The wood, the plaster, the paint, the plumbing — all is built over a period of months or years, with tens or hundreds of hands involved in each step of the process. But the complete building takes on a life of its own in a way that is difficult to explain. You can see the house built step by step, your own hands framing the struts and screwing the drywall in place — but when the house is complete, it isn’t yours anymore. It is more than the sum of its parts. It’s something you can drive past and feel a sense of pride in knowing you had a hand in building, but it isn’t “yours”. House of Leaves has always been one of the books that stayed with me the most throughout my life. You would think that in knowing the process and being involved in every step of construction would take away the horror of works like “Anatomy” or “The Haunting of Hill House”. But in truth, knowing the guts of the building only makes it more awe inspiring to comprehend its singular existence. It’s knowing that a building will outlast me, perhaps hundreds of years after I am dead and gone. It’s knowing that a building has existed, perhaps thousands of years before I was born. There is an undeniable power to the built environment, the walls and roofs within which we spend so much of our lives. Thank you for making this video. Incredibly well done, and has given me quite a bit to think about.

One of my favorite characterization of a place is room 1408. “It’s an evil fucking room.” Something being evil for the sake of it is so underrated as a concept. It’s like cosmic terror - you can’t understand it, change it, stop it, or escape it.

"a house malignant, boiling with leprosy, with lesions deeper than its walls" is a line that still gives me chills on my dozenth rewatch

“If I’m sitting alone at home on a dark and stormy night, and I glance nervously up towards the bedroom doorway, my fear is not that my house is being haunted by a spirit called Mabel who died in the 19th century at the age of fourteen and is constantly seeking her favourite teddy bear… because all of these details both humanize her and make her ridiculous. My fear is that there will be something standing in the doorway, because the doorway is where things come to stand. Because unoccupied spaces, in our imaginations, must find something to fill them.” — from “The Saturday Interview: ‘I Am in Eskew’ podcast”

*pats the inside wall of my house* “Please don’t eat me”

It reminds me of two beautiful opening monologues by Stephen King for his mini series Rose Red: "Houses are alive. This is something we know. News from our nerve endings. If we're quiet, if we listen, we can hear houses breathe. Sometimes in the depth of the night, we hear them groan. It's as if they're having bad dreams. A good house cradles and comforts. A bad one fills us with a distinctive unease. Bad houses hate our warmth, our humaness. That blind hate of our humanity is what we mean when we use the word haunted." "A house is a place of shelter. It's the body we put on over our bodies. As our bodies grow old, so do our houses. As our bodies may sicken, so do our houses. And what of madness? If mad people live within, doesn't this madness creep into the rooms, walls and corridors? The very boards? Don't we sometimes sense that madness reaching out to us? Isn't that a large part of what we mean when we say a place is unquiet, festered up with spirits? We say haunted, what we mean is the house has gone insane."

The part about the "house with leprosy" is so reminiscent of Pathologic, entire districts diseased to their foundations even when the residents have been dead for weeks

When I played Anatomy, I was taken back by how accurate the narrator had talked about how humans care for the things they built, that we had sympathy for them. I had thought that was a beautiful way to describe how I felt whenever I saw abandoned houses. I didn't think they were ever creepy, just spaces that needed to be filled. It was when the recording started repeating on the word "sympathy" that I started getting chills. I felt like my small heartaches for empty houses was being mocked, scorned. The house in Anatomy didn't care if I felt bad for it. It didn't want me here. It hated me. Maybe it even hated the way that I felt towards it, like I was the one mocking *it*. This wasn't a place that wanted sympathy. It just wanted revenge.

There’s a poem in my native language, Afrikaans, that describes a similar scenario. It’s written from the perspective of a house that slowly grows depressed and hopeless as it sees the constant strife, degeneracy and fighting of its inhabitants. I think it’s quite relevant to the situation: 1 my kamers is hol soos ‘n binne-oor 2 ek hoor hoe die bewoners roesemoes 3 liefde maak, verwyt, mekaar vertroos, skoor 4 soek met die goor hede, nooit tevrede 5 aanhou kibbel oor kon en sou en moes 6 luister, ek bewaar julle verlede 7 my fondamente kraak onder die las 8 my plafonne raak voos van die eggo’s 9 te veel vloeke laat my pleisterwerk bars 10 jare se trane laat my rame roes 11 so word ons saam verweer deur dit wat was 12 my dakplate en julle gebede 13 fluister en knal al hoe harder om hulp 14 ongehoord in elke nag se oorskulp Translated: 1 my rooms are hollow, like the inside of an ear 2 I hear the inhabitants’ tumult 3 making love, reprimanding, comforting each other, 4 finding faults in the present, never at rest 5 continuously bickering about could and would and should 6 listen, I guard your past 7 my foundations crack under the burden 8 my ceilings grow rotten from the echoes 9 too many curses make my plasterwork burst 10 years of tears make my frames rust 11 so we become ruined together by that which was 12 my roof-plates and your prayers 13 whisper and crack ever louder for help 14 unheard in every night’s ear-shell

Two years ago, my mom had our living room remodeled. There was a massive tarp closing off our living room for a few weeks, and it was always drafty and cold. During this period, one of my siblings had a terrifying medical emergency. Without going into detail, it was the most terrifying night of our lives. All I could do was watch, wait, and listen to their suffering until my mom finally called 911 and the medics came. I spent an agonizing weekend alone in the house. I had to stay home, alone, looking after our dogs and ready to answer the door for the contractors. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t hunker down in the living room with all the lights on for comfort. I’ve always been fairly superstitious. I believed in ghosts when I was a kid, and as an adult I’ve had experiences that I couldn’t find a rational explanation for. That weekend was different. It didn’t feel like there was a presence in the house, as much as the “presence” was the house itself, watching me. Waiting.

How could you do this to me? I live in a house!

honestly, the idea of being an unwanted guest in a house - being hated - is not as scary to me as the flipside. a house that, in its time of being alone, turns not to bitterness but obsession. a house that, upon the arrival of any human life, becomes enraptured with its guest. it pleads not to be left alone, trapping the person in a maze of walls, screaming its love for them. a house that, should the guest try to leave, does not allow it. i find that much, much scarier.

Just a heads up: my 4 year old son is really into Halloween and he caught a glimpse of the thumbnail for this vid on my front-page, so he asked to watch it. Long story short, now he asks to watch "the scary house" at least once every couple of days while wrapped in blankets. Congrats, your video essay just turned into a 4 year old kid's favorite horror "movie" lol Ps: huge fan of your work, this is probably one of my favorite of yours.

Ugh, I had a recurring nightmare when I was younger and we had just moved into our new house in which I would be in the kitchen with my family and it would be warm and bright, but something would feel off. I'd be afraid, seemingly for no reason. Then, since I was still a little kid, it would come time for me to go to bed. I'd ascend the stairs with growing dread with one of my parents, but when we got to the top, I'd look up to find myself alone in a dark expanse of rooms and hallways that seemed to go on forever. I'd race through the rooms, picking up speed as I went, screaming for my parents, but the only answer I would get was the dark and silence of the house. Sometimes I'd see monsters, but they never seemed too interested in me, simply standing there, as solitary as I was. One time, I fell down a set of stairs, and I miraculously ended up in the kitchen again. Sobbing, I told my dad what had happened, and tried to take him up the stairs to show him, but he seemed disinterested and brushed me off, as one does to little kids. As I pleaded with him, he started to walk away through the hallways, and I, following him, soon found myself alone again as his voice faded away around the corner. Worst series of dreams in my life lol