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Copyright by Laura Alyssa Springman 2021 The Thesis Committee for Laura Alyssa Springman Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Thesis: Haunted Homes and Restless Ghosts: (In)Visible Structures of Power and Violence in American Haunted House Films APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Curran Nault, Supervisor Charles Ramirez Berg Haunted Homes and Restless Ghosts: (In)Visible Structures of Power and Violence in American Haunted House Films by Laura Alyssa Springman Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin May 2021 Dedication To my parents, whose endless love and support has acted like a warm blanket against this often cold world, and who have always reminded me of how far I’ve come and how far I can go. Acknowledgements Thank you to my advisor Curran Nault, whose invaluable support and expertise made this project possible. Our conversations never failed to inspire me and provided insightful feedback, encouraging me to consider new approaches and always foreground intersectionality. Your positivity, empathy, and dedication to inclusive scholarship has been an inspiration for both my academic work and daily life. In addition, this thesis would not have been possible without your Fall 2019 Colloquium presentation, which introduced me to the concept of necropolitics. Thank you to Charles Ramirez Berg for your extensive genre knowledge and always including words of encouragement. Your own scholarship has been a great inspiration to this project and your detailed feedback has been enlightening and greatly strengthened my work. Thank you to my cohort for always being there and providing a space I could turn to for advice and questions. Although we have had to be socially distanced, our Zoom meetings and park gatherings provided reassurance whenever I experienced doubt or felt stuck. Thank you for letting me brainstorm and talk through my various ideas as I worked on this project. Thank you to my parents for letting me ramble endlessly about ghosts and death, for sitting through multiple viewings of the same horror movies, and for being a sounding board for ideas you were unfamiliar with. In addition, this project would not be possible without our family Saturday morning Mystery Science Theater 3000 marathons, which v first introduced me to horror. And thank you to my sister, for recommending non-horror television to watch when all the death became too much. To my friends Mallory, Shannon, and Kiersten, thank you for never getting annoyed when the question “what are you doing today” was inevitably always answered with “working on my thesis.” Finally, thank you to BTS for being my soundtrack throughout the writing and editing process. A year spent writing about horror and violence needed moments of joy and hope, and your music was immensely helpful during this process. vi Abstract Haunted Homes and Restless Ghosts: (In)Visible Structures of Power and Violence in American Haunted House Films Laura Alyssa Springman, MA The University of Texas at Austin, 2021 Supervisor: Curran Nault This thesis explores depictions of suffering in American haunted house horror films and considers how hauntings can draw attention to systems of power and violence in our real world. Through textual analysis of The Amityville Horror (1979), Poltergeist (1982), THIR13EN Ghosts (2001), and The Amityville Horror (2005), I argue that an intersectional, necropolitical lens sheds light on the ways systems of violence, death, and memory operate in the American context of the horror film. Drawing from the insights of Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, in conversation with scholarship on hauntings, death, and the horror genre, I consider the ways violence functions in regard to both who is depicted as suffering, but just as importantly who is not. In doing so, I foreground the complex manner in which these films can both victimize the living, while also re- subjugating the dead. Further, I interrogate how real-world instances of violence in and around the home are made both visible and invisible within these limited white depictions vii of haunted homes. Taken together, my four case studies demonstrate the ways in which ghosts in haunted house horror films can unearth real-world instances of past and present American violence. viii Table of Contents Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Literature Review .......................................................................................................6 Theoretical Framework .............................................................................................11 Methodology .............................................................................................................15 Chapter Outline .........................................................................................................16 Post-Script: The Stakes of Haunted History .............................................................20 Chapter 1: Horror Films as Necro-texts .............................................................................22 Haunted Necropolitics ..............................................................................................22 Necro-texts ................................................................................................................28 The Haunted House Sub-Genre ................................................................................34 Ushering in Death .....................................................................................................39 Haunted Possibilities.................................................................................................40 Chapter 2: There’s No Place Like Home ...........................................................................42 “It’s the Deal of a Lifetime” .....................................................................................48 Reagan’s House of Horrors.......................................................................................54 Why Didn’t You Just Leave?....................................................................................59 Haunted Houses Unexplored ....................................................................................63 Haunted Whiteness ...................................................................................................65 Chapter 3: How do You Think a Ghost is Made? ..............................................................72 The Invisible Threat ..................................................................................................77 An American Haunting .............................................................................................82 ix A Machine Powered by the Dead .............................................................................91 Listening to Ghosts .................................................................................................106 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................109 Spectral Scholarship ...............................................................................................113 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................122 x Introduction In August of 1957 a couple and their three children moved into their new suburban home in Levittown, Pennsylvania.1 The Myers family and others like them were pursuing promises of prosperity made by private companies and government propaganda during the war. This image of post-war prosperity was represented with the figure of the single-family home in the suburbs.2 And for the first-time in history, urban and rural dwellers were outnumbered by suburban residents.3 However, what greeted this family was not prosperity, domestic bliss, or the imagined American Dream. Instead, the family experienced terror and trauma. After moving in, Daisy Myers received threatening phone calls, their food deliveries disappeared, they were haunted by disturbing images, fires on their lawn, and rocks thrown at their windows.4 The Clark family, who, six years prior had excitedly moved into the growing Chicago suburb of Cicero, had similar experiences.5 They too suffered fires and rocks thrown at them, trauma, and violence. And again, the same thing occurred years later in 1987 in the suburb.6 These real life events, when phrased like above, probably seem like the plots of haunted house horror movies. Instead they are true stories, harrowing tales of racist violence during the twentieth century. The families discussed were all Black families that had moved into all-white suburbs and there are countless more tales than just these three. The American Dream promised 1 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2004), 218. 2 Cohen, 73. 3 Cohen, 122. 4 “Whites Riot in Response to Arrival of First African American Family in Levittown, PA,” The History Engine, 2015, https://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/5272. 5 Michael C. Reiff, “Peril, Imprisonment, and the Power of Place in Jordan Peele’s Get Out,” in Dark Forces at Work: Essays on Social Dynamics and Cinematic Horrors, ed. Cynthia J. Miller and A.