I always thought a ghost is neglect. Abandoned places become hostile. Traumatic things spread into the physical world. Think about the Monster House movie with that manās wife falling into a foundation and dying. So, the concrete is porous. Liquids and gases from a decomposing body are not just sitting there; theyāre spreading, making the whole construction compromised, creating all of these creaks and groans of a space that is slowly collapsing on itself. So, maybe the house hunting children like a hungry animal is a metaphor, but it becoming toxic, spreading mildew everywhere, is totally real.
Or, again, Hill House. All of these bodies, especially the one in the basement, create spreads of black mold everywhere, making a place toxic in a very literal sense.
And then, again, even the dust of abandoned spaces can carry a ton of all kinds of toxic spores.
Houses in those movies are less continuously hungry for me and more growing toxic when abandoned. It ties back to vampire movies with all of these abandoned homes becoming vampire lairs when, in reality, their owners, old-world nobility, were driven away after mechanization, or the French Revolution, or what have you, letting houses rot, crumbling, filled with feral animals, vermin, and disease, creating a breeding ground for things like tuberculosis, which is basically a vampire special.
Itās the same mechanism of mythologizing un-human space that once created gods of lightning to explain weather, I think, because horror requires both history and the unknown.
It all clicked for me after I watched Iām the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House because that thing was straight-up moldcore. Mildew horror. The actual ghost in the story was almost tame, when the real shitshow was the heroine touching documents and photos covered in black mold with her bare hands.
In conclusion, wash your damn floors. Apparently, ghosts are not possessing sufficiently clean apartments.
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