The recent film, The Secret of Marrowbone (Sergio Sánchez, 2017) exemplifies a trope that has become an active model within the gothic and horror film since the mid twentieth century: the lone male figure enclosed within the spaces of the domestic realm, observing the women and children in his absence from afar, on the periphery of society and haunting the spaces of the family home. Hidden in attics, basements and crawlspaces, the domestically sutured male at once supports the male gaze but is at the same time disenfranchised from and on the borders of the society that supposedly promotes that same gaze. From Norman Bates’ scopophilic peephole view of Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960) to the image of Bryan Cranston observing the consequences of his self-imposed exile in Wakefield (2016), 20th and 21st-century film has given birth to a new societal orphan.
Howard Wakefield (Bryan Cranston) spies on his wife (Jennifer Garner) from the garage attic.
This figure is significant for a number of reasons as it suggests cultural and societal shifts within the gothic and horror genre. The ‘mad woman in the attic’ trope was well-established within gothic literature, as famously discussed by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their 1979 survey of nineteenth century literature. It is perhaps best evidenced by Bertha Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre as well as the unfortunate Maud Ruthyn in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, and the spectral lady appears and disappears between the cracks in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. The trope was re-asserted in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, with the deceased Mrs de Winter casting a spectral pall over the gothic pile of Manderley. In this case, a female ghost or ghostly presence brings with it the threat of female madness. The trope is further established by folklore and ghost stories, particularly in the UK, with tales of the Mistletoe Bough bride, who accidently locks herself in a chest and suffocates on her wedding night. In most cases, the woman is imprisoned in the house by a male protagonist, offering a metaphorical enaction of the domestic prisoner- literally ‘chained to the kitchen sink’ and suggesting the publicly and politically disenfranchised woman.
The trailer for Marrowbone:
The trope has a more sinister association with everyday horror, with the image of the tragic attic-bound Anne Frank serving as an indexical link between the domestic everyday and the almost unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust.
Although not as well known, film is also littered with films featuring a male protagonist hidden in domestic spaces. Not least, there is the numerous iterations of The Lodger, based on the Jack the Ripper case- Hitchcock’s in 1927, Maurice Elvey’s remake in 1932, John Brahm’s 1944 Hollywood version and the appropriately named Man in the Attic 1953. The basement-dwelling Boo Radley from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird also forms a link to the 70s and 80s, where the trope takes on an intensified and more significant social significance.
Jack Palance as the titular Man in the Attic
The TV-movie Bad Ronald (1974), based on a novel by John Holbrook Vance, perhaps indicates this change best. In the drama, the awkward and suggestively perverted teenage boy of the title ‘accidently’ kills a young girl and, fearing for his chances at trial (he lives in a fantasy world as it is), his protective mother hides him within the walls of the house. She passes away and a new family with two young daughters move in; Ronald becomes obsessed with the eldest daughter. He spies on them through gaps in the walls, and, in one climactic sequence, bursts through the walls in a scene that may be said to mark his ‘maturity’ into adulthood. Here, the ‘mad’ male is imprisoned ‘for his own good’ by a female protagonist, as opposed to Wakefield’s self-imposed role as peeping tom or the aggressive imprisonment of Marrowbone’s antagonist, perhaps having more in common with his female gothic antecedents and ‘inconvenient’ women of the Victorian era.
The trailer for Bad Ronald:
The trope worked its way into the slasher-cycle in Black Christmas (1974) and When a Stranger Calls (1979), with the killer stalking the female protagonists from ‘inside the house’ and has continued in more recent horror films such as The Resident (2011) and The Pact (2012).
The trailer for The Pact:
The 1980s provided a more intense run of films that offered a young, physically healthy (but mentally unhealthy) man displaced from society. Gary Busey adopts a family in Hider in the House (1989), which seems to represent everything he is unable to achieve, whilst he manipulates events from a safe hiding place in the attic. Pacific Heights (1990) on the other hand offers a rich and powerful male who exploits his knowledge of law and finance to terrorise another wealthy couple as he is boarded up in his apartment in a state of self-imposed exile.
Tom Sykes (Gary Busey) secures himself a hiding place in another family’s home in Hider in the House
What these examples suggest is that, on the one hand, there is possibly a male anxiety about not being able to conform to societal norms and being economically disenfranchised, and, on the other hand, there is the opposite- the demonstrable ability to powerfully exploit the trappings of wealth and masculinity to fulfil a will for power and control.
Does this inversion of the trope within the gothic, horror and thriller genres therefore suggest that men are safer retreating to the home as women struggle for parity in the public sphere, once an exclusively male preserve? It may seem spurious to suggest, in a climate of the #Metoo and #Timesup movements, that men are concerned about their power, influence and relevance, but maybe that’s the point. If power can’t be achieved legitimately it is enacted forcibly and violently. The ego is fragile and explosive, as Donald Trump’s rhetorical tweets painfully testify.
So, are these new examples a reverse of gender power relations? Are they about disenfranchised males haunting the fringes of the domestic and societal realm- the modern-day equivalent of their female counterparts? Or, are these simply another way for male antagonists to penetrate the sacred space of the house? Either way, they seem to express an anxiety about male domestic imprisonment and disenfranchisement from the public realm. Perhaps they offer a more positive explanation. In these films, the final female invariably triumphs over the aggressor, thus potentially suggesting a defiant reclamation and reassertion of traditional female spaces.
Dr Mark Fryers specialises in film history and theory as associate lecturer at the University of East Anglia. He has previous publications for Rowman & Littlefield, I.B. Tauris and John Libbey Publishing as well as blogs and articles for numerous websites and other publications. He has forthcoming book chapters on Jaws and on British horror television. You can find his essay on “Remember Me” (2014) and the haunted seascapes of British TV in Critical Studies in Television; he has also contributed essays to The Spooky Isles here. Mark has also written on Max Pachman’s Beneath Us and on Remi Weekes’ His House (2020) for Horror Homeroom.
Related: Check out our essay on The Boy –one of the more recent “domestically entrapped males.”
Related product: You can find Marrowbone streaming on Amazon:
And on DVD:
