Stories of Haunted Houses is a rich engagement with three contemporary female gothic texts and with ideas on the mother, the uncanny, and domestic space. In the opening chapter of this video essay, we see the efforts of women to control and plan space in miniature—the blueprint of The Haunting of Hill House’s architect mother, renovating their home in order to flip it, and the dollhouses of Sharp Objects and Hereditary—while those women are overwhelmed in the frame by their own looming houses that threaten to absorb them. The haunted/gothic house cannot conform to the scientific methods of the planner and the architect. In its strongest moments, Grizzaffi and Scomazzon’s achievement is grounded in a disruption of that ordered domestic space on a formal level, by contrasting text, sound, and image, moving from the blueprint to the sensory.

The essay proceeds as a tapestry of quotations and clips establishing rhymes and repetitions between The Haunting of Hill House, Sharp Objects, and Hereditary. That structure finds its own parallel in the role of repetition in the uncanny as articulated in Tania Modleski’s reading of Freud, where fears of repetition and castration are both rooted in a fear of being lost in the mother, just as here we see mothers losing themselves and children returning to their childhood homes only to become lost. There is a risk of overstating the similarities between the three texts—what does it mean that in Sharp Objects it is daughters who are identified with the dollhouse and the law?—but the video essay raises pertinent questions not only about gender and repetition, as Grizzaffi and Scomazzon suggest, but also about genre and film cycles, about how generic structures of repetition and variation rely on and play with the uncanny.

The video essay concludes with both a loss of quotes from women scholars and a restoration of patriarchal order within the texts: men’s voices as opposed to women’s words. This final chapter stages the sources’ containment of the forces they explore even as their dynamics are repeated across media texts. I am left wondering: why the female gothic now? And what would a more radical female gothic look and feel like?