#domestic horror

[goryhorroor]

horror sub-genres • domestic horror

horror that comes from within the family. domestic horror is deeply connected to real-life fears we have about ourselves and the people we love. it can cross genres, but has an important theme about family.

[horror-aesthete]

Prom Night II: Hello Mary Lou, 1987, dir. Bruce Pittman

[dinersaturn]

[nofatclips]

Ephemera on "Mother Horror"

[dodecatemoria]

It's been a rough week for Nora. A neighbor and close family friend, Ms. Kay, has gone missing, and her brother, Nick, has been strangely absent. But he's home now, and seems to be back to his normal self, more or less. So, why does something feel off? Where is Ms. Kay? Why doesn't Nick want to talk about her? For Nora, the answer may not be worth finding out.

Behind the Window is a short psychological horror game about a teenage girl coming to terms with the fact that her brother is a murderer. How she handles the truth is up to you.

If you're a fan of complicated sibling relationships, isolated environments, and stories where you love the monster and the monster loves you back, then this visual novel might be for you!

Gameplay is 30-40 minutes long

Contains 2 endings

Available for free on itch.io

[weirdozjunkary]

I really want to watch Skinamarink, but I’m such a fucking pussy when it comes to horror (surprisingly coming from the horror lover here)

I know I’ll fucking cry, but I just, I want to see it, man! It looks so good! So much inspiration from the stuff I’ve seen!

[misledmiseries]

totally recommend this video essay by Rosie Whitecombe.

how many times i said domesticity is a hell of a woman's horror? Jackson's make me wanna bites men's heads off and run the patriarchy over with a speeding truck on fire. her stories about the domestic without exaggeration sickens me.

[aardvaark]

oh i found what it’s called! the domestic horror subgenre. it’s a subgenre of horror, maybe a bit psychological thriller too, and it focuses on mundane things being horrifying and familial relationships and haunted houses that are also haunted by trauma or the past. the writers tend to be women

some key themes i’m seeing:

parent-child relationships: especially mother-daughter relationships that are either complicated or outright abusive or some mix of those.

family: how difficult it can be, how trauma gets passed through generations, how family can be suffocating or they can be your support but they’re usually unfortunately both.

haunted houses: or paranormal forces inside the home. sometimes it might be the kind of seemingly supernatural stuff that actually has an explanation or it’s from an unreliable narrator, but often there’s also just actual ghosts.

insular communities: often rural/regional, small towns, a lot of southern gothic or american gothic or australian gothic or [insert place here] gothic.

domestic abuse: whether in relationships or witnessed/experienced by a child.

conservatism as horror: many stories about religious trauma, purity culture, misogyny, mental illness stigma, persecuting or hateful communities, etc.

suburban life/suburbophobia: in these stories, the nuclear families hide abuse, the suburban communities are suffocating, the mundane home-to-work-to-home routine drives you mad with boredom, behind the rich white picket fences are traitors and murderers with fake smiles, and money and status often comes from crime and abuse.

i like horror and i have childhood trauma so it. it makes sense i would like this lol.

under the cut is examples in popular media. warning: since they have an explanation about what the elements of domestic horror are, it’s pretty long. whoops. also trigger warnings for mentions of: abuse, SA, death/murder, pregnancy, horror in general.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. i love Jackson’s other stories, and i’d say a lot of them fit this subgenre. it has the POV of a very strange, probably unreliable narrator, whose entire family - besides herself, her sister and her uncle - died of poisoning. the uneasiness and fears of the community, her agoraphobic sister, her mentally ill uncle, her duty to her remaining family members as the only one who can really go out for supplies, and her own peculiar personality, keep her mostly trapped in this house of death and horror. probably the best example there is of domestic horror… just everything from the gossiping town to the suffocating house to the major family problems, it’s very clearly part of the subgenre.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (and the tv show loosely adapted from this novel). the tv show is not exactly like the actual novel, but it’s still really good. the novel focuses on one woman going back to her very haunted childhood home as part of a paranormal investigation. the tv show focuses on four siblings reuniting for the funeral of their youngest sister, who has died mysteriously at their very haunted childhood home, despite them not living there for a decade or two. both focus on the haunting of a house being the haunting of a family, too, and ghosts not always being quite what they seem.

in fact The Haunting of Bly Manor (tv show), the other part of that anthology, also seems to fit. it’s about a woman who goes to work at a really fucked up and very haunted manor as a nanny for two kids whose parents have died. the horror, however, is not so much the ghosts as a concept, but what people - ghost or no - can do. and trauma and history as a ghostly influence.

also Midnight Mass. another tv show with some of the same people involved as the Haunting anthology. a strange new pastor arrives on an island with a small, insular population. they each have their own problems and more metaphorical hauntings, but this weird dude is about to introduce some much less metaphorical monsters.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn. okay, maybe this isn’t totally horror, but i’m counting it because so much of it is horrifying. it’s a bit thriller, a bit crime fiction, a bit drama, a bit american gothic. a journalist returns to her hometown to pursue a story: teenage girls have been murdered in this otherwise pretty standard, apparently happy community. our protagonist is not exactly happy about coming home because her mother is abusive and her childhood home is full of memories of her sister, who died when they were both kids. plus, the town’s been gossiping about her for ages - some think she’s troubled, some just feel she’s a bad influence. now she has to deal with a community that never welcomed her, a mother who never liked her, a step father and teenage half-sister she hasn’t seen in years, her own past and mental illness, and of course the grisly murders that brought her here. the southern gothic/american gothic and purity culture really add to the suffocating atmosphere of the novel.

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin (and the film version) a woman has a baby. the devil is involved. the idea of a woman trapped in an abusive relationship, sexually assaulted, experiencing body horror related to pregnancy, and basically being told by everyone that she’s overreacting and being hysterical… domestic horror. it’s the mundane but usually ultimately beautiful experience of having a child, put in a new light as a horror, not just due to the paranormal forces but also the horror that can come out of everyday things.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. this short story was written in 1892. the narrator is an unnamed woman suffering postpartum depression whose husband and doctor decide she just needs rest, so they trap her in a small nursery in an old mansion. soon, the patterns in the room’s yellow wallpaper start to move, she has strange dreams, and becomes convinced that there’s a woman in there who wants to get out. the story focuses on abuse in the psychiatric and medical systems, mental health stigma, sexism in general and in the medical system particularly, and domestic abuse. unfortunately, 230 years later, too much of this is still relevant.

[luzura-the-princess-witch]

So uh i think my eyeliner is broken it was leaking and gooping everywhere but its all I’ve got so I put a lil line on my lower lid and my lashes picked up a shit ton of excess and once i blinked my eye went FULL BLACK and now im crying ink and the left side of my face is a makeup crime scene

[wrongpublishing]

BOOK REVIEW: Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan's The Handyman Method

by Elizabeth Broadbent, Staff Writer.

If you’ve read The Marigold or were lucky enough to sit through StokerCon’s panel on anomalous architecture, you know Andrew Sullivan’s a master of the trope. The Handyman Method (Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster) pairs him with Nick Cutter (Rust and Bone, Cataract City) in a haunted house/DIY/the-sins-of-the-father-will-bite-you-in-the-ass novel out August 8th. With memorable characters and the same you-never-saw-this-coming hits as The Marigold, this work’s one more reason you need these guys on your must-read-list.

At first glance, Trent Sabor’s an average dude married to an average wife (Rita), with an average kid (Milo) and his plucky pet turtle, Morty. They seem, on paper, to be the perfect family. They move into the first house of a new development, Dunsany Estates. Their house, like them, seems perfect. It may be surrounded by dirt on every side, but it looks like everything they’ve ever dreamed of. 

The cracks begin to show—literally—when Trent discovers a gaping hole in their closet. Incandescent with rage, he finds a YouTube channel, Handyman Hank, to help him patch it. Meanwhile, his son’s hooked up to his tablet watching Little Boy Blue. As the Sabors’ new home begins to show more cracks, so does Trent’s family.

Handyman Hank goes from a few vids to “a cornucopia for the Y-chromosome set” endorsing “a certain kind of man[liness]” which “does things The Old-Fashioned way.” Trent’s sucked in, for Reasons that I won’t reveal—you deserve, like Trent, to discover these cracks the old-fashioned way. 

This novel’s concept feels both wildly imaginative—like so much new horror, with that Jesus-Christ-I-never-thought-of-that feel—and eminently relatable. Men lose their way; they turn to sketchy sources for validation. Spouses drift. Parents and children grow apart. It’s these metaphorical cracks in both relationships and identities that lie at the heart of this novel and its house. 

And if you’re a sucker for prose (you are, if you’ve read Sullivan’s earlier work; my apologies to Cutter for an ignorance about his), you’ll swoon. It’s not showy, but it’s rich, beautiful, unforgettable. The image of little Milo “plant[ing] his hands on his hips with an exaggerated squint, a pint-sized foreman assessing a construction site”—I can’t get that one from my head. My kids are a little older now, but goddamn if I can’t picture that stance.

Those prose and images are a gift in a fast-paced novel like this. You’ll find yourself rereading, sometimes slowing down to savor those moments, like Trent’s moment when “his eyelids fluttered and his breath bottomed out—some kind of psychic brownout that interrupted the power grid of his brain.” 

And once you get it, you get it, and you’ll want to read it again. You’ll flip through and see the pinpoint accuracy of their metaphors, the hidden mechanisms of characters’ motivations, and maybe that’s a sign you’ve got a real cracker of a book in your hands: you put it down and pick it up again. Then you’ll understand why Simon & Schuster picked it up.

You can pick up The Handyman Method in little more than a week, August 8th. Preorder it before it kicks to a second printing, third, or fourth printing—and it will. You’ll find this one on your Barnes & Noble shelves later this year, pinky-swear. 

Buy the book:

Nick Cutter (website)

Andrew F. Sullivan (website)

[unwellsetting]

𝐁𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐟𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐥𝐬:

¹²/³/²⁰²²

regional gothic: Arabian southwestern.

we stared at each other over the eggs and cheese, i was trying to communicate to him “are you seeing this? please tell me you’re.”, but his eyes told me one thing “ keep eating. don’t look around.”, his face is different, softer as if he was looking at me from under the water, it’s unnerving, my bare feet are swinging under the table, kicking him, he didn’t react. 

then i sneezed once, twice, and a feather lashed in my mouth, my parents wings, white, prodigious, heavy and overwhelming flooded the kitchen, my mother wing were weighing brother's head down, and still he was eating, his face an ugly dough, she was reading her morning prayers, her fingers flicking the rosary beads, her eyes bitterly cold wastelands.

 father's wings almost knocks me down, the feathers are falling in my tea, cramping us around the table, choking us, the table edge is digging between my ribs, i can feel them under us breathing, i gulp the tea with the wet sinking feathers so he doesn’t talk to me, he’s listening to the radio, damned thing, so loud the back of my skull burn, the day of judgment's lecture, when mountains walk, the moon falls and the sun burns out, and god calls forth the bones from the graves, his favorite subject. i turn to the calendar, it's still early until the day of reckoning, it's Tuesday, i kick brother again.

we fall under the table and crawl under the back breaking feathers, i latch to his shirt when i lose sight of him, until he drags me out by the hem of my gown.

we stand in front of the bathroom mirror, I'm standing on the toilet, we pluck feathers out of our hair, clothes, ears, noses, under our nails and throw the bundle of softness in the trash, we brush our teeth, and i run to my room, i wear my school uniform and my white socks with a bow, run down and i wait for him by the door.

when he descended the stairs, his wings were clawing the ceiling. i looked around then back at them looming above his head, he swung the door and pushed me lightly and yelled sharply baring his teeth over the howls of the nonbelievers hellish devastations, “we’re leaving.”

then without looking at me he muttered gravely:” I'll shear them.”

.

i ran to the school’s bathroom and pull up my shirt and turned to stare at my back in the foggy mirror, i wiped my sweating eyes, my lips chewed like spitted berries, but my back, there was no feathers, no lashing wings, no lumps.

i turned around me as if now the wings will blow out inside the door to splinters, sprawling from under the green tiles, burgeoning in the toilets and storming in the sinks.

when I'm out of the bathroom. i cough, retch and heave, i groan and bend over, and reach into my throat to pulls out a white feather.

[horror-aesthete]

Hereditary, 2018, dir. Ari Aster

[dinersaturn]

[elegant-impediment]

Getting Into the Autumn #SPIRIT

Two new poems releasing this autumn, goblincore fun, learning Japanese the formal way, and foster cats everywhere.

I’m hurriedly writing this update with 20 minutes to spare before my online Japanese language class starts. Sorry that writing updates have been sporadic but I do have a good reason. I returned to college after an almost 20 year absence. Finishing my degree(s) has been challenging while I juggle all of the other aspects of adult life but also proving to be extremely rewarding already. I’m…

[thekimspoblog]

FTR the way my fanfics end is NOT domestic bliss.

Jimmy basically gets the Monkey's-Paw version of his happy ending.

He's kept under house arrest, gets pressured into having two daughters, and is left realizing that Kim is becoming a more villainous figure. But he loves her too much to try to stop her. She's changed a lot in the six years it took to get him out of prison... and he fears her now.

Again, I'm very into quasi-Oedipal aspect of their relationship. That as much as Jimmy might brand himself as a free spirit, on the deepest psychological level he is always going to be the little brother, and he just wants a thumb to be under.

[violent138]

POV: Realtor selling my haunted house

Don't go into the basement, there's an old murderer there,

Lying in wait to give inexperienced idiots quite the scare.

The attic you say? Don't climb that ladder!

There's a banshee up there and she'll just make you sadder.

The master bedroom, gorgeous, yes plenty of light,

And a cold marital bed since all they did was fight.

Let's keep the tour moving, this is a child's room,

Sorry for the darkness, it was also her tomb.

A downer you say? Oh that's my bad,

Let's look in this bathroom, wait that's also sad!

Just ignore that other room on the side,

Inside it is only madness, you will find.

Here's the bonus room, perfect for family fun,

Also where the son accidentally fired a gun.

I see you getting scared, let's go into the kitchen,

Don't worry it's all re-tiled, doesn't it look bitchin'?

Sorry, I was trying to be cool and it didn't work,

Forget about the murders, all houses have quirks.

The cost of living is too high, inflation out of control,

And is this house all that bad, truth be told?

Still not convinced I see, worry not,

Wait 'till you see how much the price has dropped.