Architectural Horror
A breakdown of one of my favorite subgenres
I know spooky season is technically over. But I wanted to dive into part of the horror I’ve enjoyed for years without ever putting a name to it.
My definition of “architectural horror” is any work of horror literature or film that uses building design as a major component of its storytelling. This isn’t just a haunted house story, though there are plenty of those out there. In these stories, the design of a building is purposefully meant to drive the story’s events and create dread. You get stories both supernaturally scary and scary because of how ordinary they are.
These are stories about hidden basements, attics, and mezzanines, people living in the walls, mysterious doors that appear in your home, buildings designed to be evil, and so on. If this sounds super-specific, that’s because it is. I guess everyone has their kink.
What I do not mean are examples of bad architecture, like whatever this is:
In this post, I’ll first hit some architectural theory and the relationship between buildings and fear (though I have zero training in architecture); I’ll review some of the best entries in my imagined sub-genre; and at the end of the post maintain a running list of architectural horror works as I find them. Recommendations welcome!
In order to do my best to avoid spoilers in this post, because I love to hear other people enjoying a good story, especially a spooky one, I’ll mark any spoilers in a footnote, so you can drop to the bottom of the doc to read some of my thoughts. Don’t click any footnotes if you don’t want any spoilers.
Some theory
What exactly makes some buildings scary?
I listened to a podcast episode of Unfrozen with Joshua Comaroff discussing his book co-authored with Ong Ker-Shing called Horror in Architecture. I haven’t read the book yet, but I listened to the podcast about it, which we all know is basically the same thing (kidding).
In their work, Comaroff and Ker-Shing have tried to put a name to many of the things about architecture that unsettle us. A few of the concepts they explore include gigantism, derived from the ideas of “Bigness” conceived by Rem Koolhass, which is the strange, unquestioned trend toward creating buildings that are larger and larger: the NOEM line city megaproject in Saudi Arabia is probably the best current example.
Some buildings frighten by sheer size. In House of Leaves, an exemplar of architectural horror, discovering the vast extent of what’s been previously unknown is the scariest thing you can imagine. Sometimes, when you peel the onion of things that are frightening, you find something more than you bargained for at the center.
Gigantism is more than just building giant skyscrapers. Brutalism might be out of style, but the brutalist design movement to create imposing buildings still captures our imagination. Denis Villeneuve most recently used brutalism to recreate the universe of Dune. To me it reflects how humans are small against the vastness of the stars. One of my favorite examples of brutalist architecture is the George Wharton Pepper Middle School in SW Philadelphia. Not because it’s being used the way a brutalist building should, but because it’s not. Due to flooding, the school has been empty for years, and its brutalist architecture still commands the landscape. Shameless plug here for my history book about urban planning in SW Philadelphia, which includes a bit about the Pepper school.
Another concept the authors of Horror in Architecture hit on is architectural taxidermy, which is the hollowing out of a building, replacing the interior with something that doesn’t match the exterior at all. The Masque of the Red Death is my favorite Poe story and sort of hits on this concept: the revelers are sequestered in a gothic castle, a traditional symbol of authority, but are remaking the inside into a color-filled foil for the colorlessness of mass plague outside the walls. The power of the castle is infiltrated by the disease in the end, which holds “illimitable dominion over all.”
Camaroff told horrifying story that will be in his next book. In early 2000’s Shanghai, as the city pursued its urban renewal, city officials wanting to move families out of their homes resorted to nasty tactics. A family targeted by the slum clearance program refused to leave. To get them out, officials started to remove roof tiles to let in the weather into the home. The family, instead of leaving, moved their belongings under the area of the roof that hadn’t been removed, time after time, until they occupied a sliver of the original house. They recreated a living room about a meter across, and would take guests into it. Camaroff calls the actions by the government “using architecture as a means of negative persuasion,” which is probably an understatement.
Architecture can be a carrot or a stick. It can evoke strong feelings. For instance, you have HR Giger. Who wouldn’t want to have some coffee in the shop below? Without HR Giger’s vertebrate buttresses, the Alien movies wouldn’t be what they are today.
The upshot of this section is that there’s some quality buildings possess that can scare us silly. Buildings aren’t benign structures, but instead act on us as much as we act on them, shape us as we shape them. Designed to fit the physiology of human beings, buildings also can tease out the monstrous in us, or be a catalyst in the unfolding of horrible events.
Anyway, because a lot of what I’ve written above is a kind of pseudo academic word salad, let me move on to some of my favorite examples of the genre!
Some exemplars of architectural horror
There’s a few works that really embody everything I’m talking about. It’s probably not your list. I’ll start with them so anyone who wants to get into the best of it can dive into architectural horror.
House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
House of Leaves is probably best described as a “layered epistolary,” that is, it’s a book that consists of letters, correspondence, and academic writings that form a wider narrative. Along the way, footnotes by various players explain (or fail to explain) what’s going on. And the best part of is the design of the book itself, which sometimes requires you to turn it upside down, read it in a mirror, and other bizarre approaches to reading.
At its core, this is a story about a family struggling with design gone wrong. Their house spontaneously generates a door in the family’s living room. The door leads to a hallway. And that’s all I’ll say about it.
The book is terrifying, it’s fascinating, and it is one of a kind. Any attempt at describing the book isn’t going to live up to the hype. Going into this one blind is your best bet.1
Us (2019)
Us is a doppelganger story, a story about your dark double. Lupita Nyong'o is great, with the rest of her family orbiting her flaws.
But it’s also a story about the design of society, and how that design influences outcome. Some people take issue with the big twist, but I personally loved it.2
Channel Zero: the No-End House and The Dream Door
This was a short-lived horror anthology show, and two of the seasons have to do with some twisted architectural concepts, which is probably why I loved them. In Season 2’s No End House, a group of young people confront a house notorious for its random appearance in different places. In Season 4’s The Dream Door, a couple are startled to find that the basement of their home has a door they hadn’t noticed before. Channel Zero’s first season, Candle Cove, was an incredible horror story and might be one of my favorite of all time.
Devil in the White City, Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, by Erik Larson
Larson is one of my favorite popular historians and this book is a classic in design. Maybe not a horror story, but certainly horrifying, it follows the architects of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, and the exploits of a serial killer operating in the city at the time. The latter’s story includes building a home that was a sort of facilitator and a monument to his killings. The former, about the design of the fair, is fantastic on its own, and even gives you the origin story of the Ferris Wheel.
The Night House (2020)
While it’s not the best horror movie I’ve ever seen (it has some wasted opportunities, I think3), this movie has stuck with me since I saw it. Rebecca Hall portrays a wife grieving after her husband’s suicide, attempting to continue her life in the home that he designed and built, and dealing with the increasingly disturbing things happening to her. Hall is incredible in this movie. Something about her intensity had me on the edge of my seat. The themes of empty space are really fascinating.
A running list of entries in the sub-genre in more or less alphabetical order - feel free to suggest others
Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer: Adapted into a movie by Alex Garland, this seemed to me to be a book about nihilism and how you confront meaninglessness. It’s actually about a weird zone that appears on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Most notably, there’s a Tower. Or, is it a tunnel? You decide.
The Cabin in the Woods (2011): If you haven’t seen this, try not to look up anything about it, including the trailer. It’s about several kids who go to party in a remote cabin. It’s about a lot more than that, also.
Don’t Breathe (2016): This one involves a bunch of would-be cat burglars trying to steal from a blind man. It turns out the blind guy’s home has more to it than the kids assumed.
Empire of the Ants, by Bernard Werber: Besides being inspiration for my own book from the perspective of insects, this book features both an investigation into bizarre architecture and a thriller from the perspective of ants.
Session 9 (2001): This is a scary movie, but maybe not strictly architectural horror. It does make the list, however, because its the only horror movie I can think of that centers around asbestos remediation of an old building. That has to count for something.
Severance (TV show 2022): Brilliant show, but not necessarily horror. Though it scared the hell out of me. Some design considerations really make the plot what it is.
The High House, by James Stoddard: James is a friend and I’ve loved this book since I was in high school and read it for the first time. There’s some frightening parts of this book, but its also an adventure novel about a mansion that never ends.
It’s been years since I read it but Leaves has a kind of yonic theme running through it that I haven’t forgotten. Throughout the text, one of the main narrators has graphic sexual exploit after sexual exploit of various women, while at the same time, the team exploring the house’s insane architecture is delving deeper and deeper into something that’s ultimately limitless.
The “underworld” of Us is a clear message of the haves and the have nots. But it’s more than people who are downtrodden: the people who come out of the underworld are twitchy and twisted. They don’t have the ability to act like us, even if they tried. It took Nyong'o’s character being raised in our world to stay in our world.
I felt like the “monsters in the house” were underused. For instance, her looking at the pillar in the middle of the room and seeing the man in it was incredibly scary but I think it gets a little brushed aside after the big reveal. The theme of empty space, of her struggle with Nothing, were just fascinating. Ultimately, a home is empty space too, into which things good and bad are poured.