3.22 - Gothic in an Age of Environmental Crisis

Summary

The haunted house in contemporary Gothic literature and film serves as a means of conceptualising the current environmental crisis and troubled relationships with the humanity-supporting ecosystems that this brings. The ‘bad oikos’ – a haunted house whose haunting derives from the ‘malign sentience’ of a living house – confronts audiences with both nonhuman agency and the human entanglement with it, and so demands that we extract ourselves from what Amitav Ghosh has termed ‘modes of concealment’ regarding climate change and other anthropogenic environmental impacts. This chapter examines the development and recent popularity of the bad oikos, exploring its origins in 1970s debates over ecofeminism and fossil fuels in texts such as Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973) and Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door (1978), and then sketching its contemporary contours in a recent spate of texts from Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017) through Netflix’s hit show The Haunting of Hill House (2018) to It! (2017) and the surreal YouTube animated series Ghost House (2018–). Investigating the specific anxieties that impel these new versions of the bad oikos, the chapter considers the links that such texts forge between between large-scale environmental degradation, child abuse and identity-shifting transcorporeality.