The house is haunted by the echo of your last goodbye
The Exorcist, Poltergeist, What Lies Beneath, and the scariest thing in the world: moving
*This post contains spoilers for The Exorcist, Poltergeist, and What Lies Beneath. But also these movies have been out for decades, so grow up!!!*
To give you a sense of where I am mentally on this, the 29th day of October in the year of our Lady Gaga 2021, the most relaxed I have felt all week is while watching what many people—including my father who saw it as a college freshman in 1973—have called “the scariest movie of all time,” William Friedkin’s The Exorcist.
Granted, I’m not Catholic and I was watching it on cable, where it was all chopped up by noisy commercials (including some early Christmas ones) which not only fucked up the rhythm of the movie but pretty much killed its excellent, deliberate, dread-filled vibe. On the other hand, maybe this is the only way I can watch the movie at all, considering I watched most of Midsommar through slits in my fingers covering my face.
All this to say, it’s been…a week.
What I actually realized while watching The Exorcist on basic cable is that I don’t think of or experience it much differently than I do most other movies from 1967-1981 (which is to say the immediate period following Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde, a film that ushered in the New Hollywood era). A lot of my favorite movies from that period—Klute, The Godfather Parts I &II, Three Days of the Condor, Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Mikey & Nicky, Network, Alien, Blow Out—are all equally as dread-filled in various ways. You can’t escape the feeling something or someone is lurking in the shadows; you’re always waiting for it to come. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t (which is arguably worse). In the case of The Exorcist, it’s the devil himself, but at least he has the decency to show up. It’s not that the movie isn’t scary, but it isn’t any scarier to me than Jane Fonda’s call-girl being watched in Klute or Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley nervously peering around corners on the Nostromo hoping to not come face to face with a xenomorph in Alien.
It’s the unknown that’s scary; the paranoia of it.
To me, the scariest part of The Exorcist has to do with poor Ellen Burstyn’s divorced, working actress mom Chris MacNeil realizing the house she’s just temporarily moved into with her daughter maybe has rats in the attic. Or a demon. But frankly rats are just as much of a nuisance.
Same story with the Freeling family in Poltergeist: they have great home in a choice suburban planned development only to be suddenly dealing with a kid sucked into the TV set (she’s lucky, honestly) by evil spirits. Turns out the developer didn’t disclose that the house was built on a former cemetery, which just proves real estate developers are more evil than any supernatural being!
In What Lies Beneath, Robert Zemeckis’ criminally underrated Hitchcockian thriller from 2000, Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford play the world’s most attractive married couple and cellist and scientist respectively who find out their new, idyllic Vermont lake house is haunted. Imagine moving into a house that would make Nancy Meyers jealous only to find out it’s haunted by the rightfully vengeful spirit of a gorgeous, blonde student (played by a gorgeous, blonde supermodel - hi Amber Valletta!) your second husband killed because she threatened to expose their affair. Not only do you need a ghost exterminator, you need a good divorce lawyer! Terrifying!
If horror movies expose our deepest fears, then for me, most of them—at least, lately—are about the horrors of moving.
Did I mention I’m moving in three weeks?
It’s all that’s on my brain; little by little, eating away at my subconscious. And not only am I moving for the first time in eight years, I’m moving in with my boyfriend. In the midst of Scorpio season. In New York City.
Moving is already the third most stressful life event after death and divorce, but moving in New York City deserves a separate category that’s right behind death but before divorce and moving in any other place. To simplify, this is how I’d rank it:
Most Stressful Life Events
Death
Moving in New York City
Divorce
Moving anywhere else that is not New York City
If you think about it, moving is a death and divorce unto itself as you’re divorcing yourself from a place and letting a part of your life die in order to go to a new place. That part of you—a spectre of your old self—lingers in that place even if the new tenants aren’t aware of it. Every house is haunted without being actually haunted (and if it is actually haunted, then please seek professional help in the form of a medium or priest or Dan Aykroyd if he’s not busy with his skull tequila company or doing a Blues Brothers concert with comedian-turned-weed farmer Jim Belushi). There are little reminders of the past: marks on the walls, indentions in the carpet from where furniture sat, the occasional toothpaste spot on the mirror. It’s not exactly as scary as a TV turning on by itself or hearing furniture drag across the floor by itself, but it’s still evidence that someone was there and now they’re gone.
It’s all very appropriate for Scorpio season, which is about death and rebirth and transformation. And as a Scorpio, I wholeheartedly embrace these darker, harder parts of life—even the fears—because I know they’re necessary to become whatever I am supposed to be next.
But that doesn’t mean it’s also not fucking stressful. Lol.
When I watch haunted house movies, I see people being tortured during an already torturous time. Families trying to start over only to be haunted by the past. Tension between couples being exaggerated by malevolent forces putting a wedge between them. Unfinished basements are always an indicator of something terribly, terribly wrong (why every couple on House Hunters is so obsessed with unfinished basements I don’t know, but it’s a red flag people!!!), and you should always ask your realtor if there used to be a Native American burial ground where you’re planning to move. The shadowy unknown is always lurking there like all those New Hollywood movies I love that terrify me in the deepest parts of my subconscious. What horror will I find when I leave the home whose horrors I’ve lived through and outgrown and made peace with for the place I’m hoping to start new? Can we ever start new when the spectres of the past—even someone else’s—are still there but just with a fresh coat of paint?
Yes, horror movies are about trauma (as Jamie Lee Curtis has reminded us no less than probably 100 times during her Halloween Kills press tour), but they are also about resilience. People experience something awful and then come out on the other side having conquered it in some way, learning and employing various coping skills. Both we as an audience and the character(s) onscreen at the end experience a surge of relief, knowing the worst is (presumably) over. This experience will eventually become a mark on the wall someone will paint over until there are new marks for someone else to paint over and so on and so on.
Regan’s demon is exorcised. The Freelings get their daughter back and move elsewhere. Claire Spencer finds peace in her house on her own. The horrors of the past have been laid to rest. Nobody knows what else may lurk in the shadows, but for the moment, all is well.
And that’s all any of us can really ask, isn’t it? There will always be ghosts in the attics of our past, monstrous landlords or authority figures, disagreements that feel like malevolent spirits are wreaking havoc on our relationships. We can succumb to the horrors of adulthood or we can face them head on, drawing them out of the shadows. In the light of day, most things don’t look so terrifying (Midsommar being the exception to the rule!). It’s tempting to stick with the devil you know, but not at the expense of maybe getting what you really want or need in life. Not at the expense of your happiness.
And while horror is certainly full of very dumb people who make absolutely terrible decisions (I’m reminded of Gerri telling Roman on Succession: “You've got good instincts. You also have horrible instincts.”), there are equally a lot of hopeful people. It’s hope that ultimately drives us to change our circumstances. And that can be the most terrifying prospect of all: actually going after what we need and want no matter what and getting it. What would haunt us more: going for it and facing more horrors along the way or not trying at all?
My apartment is strewn with items from my not-so-long-ago past, calling out to me to relive the memories and terrors of the last decade of my life. Going through them again is exhausting, though less exhausting than when I actually lived them. It is not easy discarding parts of yourself that felt so tremendously important in the moment but now just faintly, if sadly, whisper from beneath your bed or a forgotten corner of the closet. I’ve spent plenty of time in therapy exorcising my subconscious, but this is different. It feels more final somehow holding these items and choosing to say goodbye to them. The energy in my apartment has shifted and will keep shifting until it is once again a blank void for someone else to fill with energy and memories. My walls painted a fresh coat of white for the next tenants.
The unknown is scary, but like so many “final girls” before me, I’ll take my chances.
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-Emmy