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Entertainment

When Houses Attack!

Prepare to settle into a new subdivision of horror flicks, including a freaky leaky condo.

Dorothy Woodend 7 Jan 2005TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend is the culture editor for The Tyee.

She has worked in many different cultural disciplines, including producing contemporary dance and new music concerts, running a small press, programming film festivals, and writing for newspapers and magazines across Canada and the U.S. She holds degrees in English from Simon Fraser University and film animation from Emily Carr University.

In 2020, she was awarded the Max Wyman Award for Critical Writing. She won the Silver Medal for Best Column at the Digital Publishing Awards in 2019 and 2020; and her work was nominated for a National Magazine Award for Best Column in 2020 and 2021.

Woodend is a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Vancouver Film Critics Circle. She was raised on the East Shore of Kootenay Lake and lives in Vancouver. Find her on Twitter @DorothyWoodend.

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About a month ago I wrote a piece about my housing crisis for The Tyee, and someone posted a remark saying that in Vancouver, it always comes down to real estate. If you eavesdrop on conversations at the park, or the supermarket, inevitably you will hear people discussing their mortgages, their renovations, whatever corner of their abode happens to be seeping or sagging towards crisis. So this spring if you are a home owner, or even if you live anywhere near a house, it's probably not a good idea to go the movie theatre. You'll discover that not only is your house driving you crazy, your house is actually TRYING TO KILL YOU!!!!

If you're looking for real horror, look no further than real estate. That's the premise of a posse of pictures heading into theatres including the soon-to-be released Hide and Seek with Dakota Fanning and Robert De Niro, and The Boogeyman. Both films make extensive use of those terrifying things called closets and bathtubs.

Then there is Darkness, starring Anna Paquin and Lena Olin, which follows the fate of a family that moves into a giant house in the South of Spain only to discover some Spanish spooks interested in opening yet another portal to hell.

And while that film's Gothic Spanish mansion is a far cry from Vancouver's leaky condos, the remake of Dark Water is not. Its central premise is that water is evil, especially when it gets everything all wet. The Japanese original was the simple story of a mother and child who move into a new apartment and discover leaks equal eeek!

The leaky condo genre

Many J-horror films take as their premise the interaction between people and the spaces they inhabit. Houses are extensions of the people who build and then live in them and they hold onto those reflections long after the people themselves are gone. The original version of Dark Water (directed by Hideo Nakata) was based upon a short story from Japanese writer Koji Suzuki. The story called "Floating Water" used as its setting an enormous apartment building in which a few remaining families, unable to sell out, are stuck. The economic costs are as grim as the building itself and result in murder most foul. The watery revenge of ghostie is also used in Ju-on (The Grudge) in which the murder of a child permanently permeates a house.

A very similar story is at the heart of one of the all time greatest haunted house films, The Changeling, which has influenced directors as diverse as M. Night Shyamalan and Hideo Nakata. Directed by Peter Medak, the film stars George C. Scott as composer John Russell, whose wife and daughter are killed in a tragic accident. To get over the trauma, he moves into a house that anyone in their rational mind would run away from screaming. It is another house with a secret, but John is drawn in and before long the spooky stuff begins.

All deaths are watery ones, and it isn't long before the freaky leaky is spreading. Which is what also appears to happening in Vancouver as well, from leaky schools to leaky apartment buildings. Now there's some really some scary stuff.

According to a recent report from CBC, the bill for fixing the province's leaky schools could be over $50 million clams. There are dark, damp problems at 473 B.C. schools (many of which were built in 1984) but the province is even having trouble finding anyone to repair them because they're too busy building leaky apartment buildings in Yaletown. "New wave of leaky condos" says another CBC report. "After years of tarps on leaky condos in lowrise, wood-frame buildings, they're now starting to show up on highrise buildings across Greater Vancouver. It's a problem that one leading leaky-condo expert predicts could plague the city for at least another 10 years."

What could be worse? Well they could have all been built on top of a First Nations burial ground. In Long Island.

Is your home 'psychologically impacted'?

The flies will be flying again this spring, when the mother of all haunted house movies, The Amityville Horror, reaches theatres in April. The original film starring Margot Kidder and Rod Steiger was a huge hit in 1979. It was based on the (supposedly) nonfiction account of the Lutz family who moved into a house on 112 Ocean Avenue in Long Island, New York, and lasted exactly 28 days before being kicked to the curb. It is the ultimate in cautionary tales for new home buyers. In Jay Anson's account of the family's experiences, George Lutz woke up every night at 3:15 a.m., the exact time that Ronald DeFeo Jr. murdered his entire family a year earlier. In his defense, DeFeo argued that the house was built on a Native burial ground, which didn't stop him from getting six consecutive life terms.

Although the Amityville remake might not have the same impact as the original film, it serves to indicate that we're all a little scared of the places we live in. The haunted house was long the standard stuff of scary movies before being supplanted by slashers and serial killers. Of course, even psycho killers need some place to hang their hooks. So the frightening abodes of Leatherface and Norman Bates have become as iconic as the fiends that dwell within. But what is it about closets, basements and assorted other architectural details that inspire such terror? Their very ordinariness is the thing that makes them so terrifying, the notion that here in our homes, where we ought to be safe and secure, we are actually most at risk. It works time and time again because it gets you where you live. Your house that is, gets you.

In a recent interview, the star of the Amityville remake, Ryan Reynolds, said, "One thing we've always made clear from the get-go is that one of the central characters of this movie is the house. It's a huge presence and there's something really disturbing and unsettling about it."

Right. As we know all too well in these rainy parts, there's nothing more terrifying than spending your entire life's savings only to end up with mouldy carpets, slime covered walls, and dark dank creeping costs. Then, try throwing in a ghost. A recent story from CNN Money said that "Psychologically impacted" houses -- in which a murder, suicide, or illness took place -- are a "tough sale." The mere mention of ghosts is usually enough to send skittish buyers running and houses with suspect histories can "take 50 per cent longer than comparable homes to sell, and price at an average of 2.4 percent less." Now that's terrifying!

Dorothy Woodend reviews films for The Tyee every Friday.  [Tyee]

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