Jordan Peele’s recent film Us (2019) cashes in on what horror does best: it takes a comfortable setting and makes it very, very uncomfortable. In Peele’s movie, that setting is a Santa Cruz-area summer home owned by the Wilson family. What begins as a relaxing getaway ends in a bloody showdown between the Wilsons and a murderous foursome that looks creepily similar to them. Like these doppelgangers, the physical spaces of vacation—the house, the nearby lake, the beach boardwalk—become, over the course of the film, decidedly uncanny.[i] The lush verdure of the house’s front yard becomes a menacing jungle in which the intruders easily conceal themselves; the once-placid lake becomes a watery grave; instead of a cozy glow, the den’s fireplace casts a hellish backlight behind the grinning doubles.
The Santa Cruz summer home of Us
Us is not the first narrative to find fertile ground for horror in summer houses. Vacation home horror, as I’ll call it here, nastily inverts any pleasant associations with both vacation and with the countryside. Instead of relaxation, the characters in these stories find terror; instead of tranquility, the vacation home’s typically rural location spells dangerous isolation; instead of grass stains, the protagonists’ summer whites are soon spotted with blood.
But as Us implies and as other entries in this list make explicit, horror stories about summer homes are also often specifically tales about class. That the protagonists are well off enough to own or rent a second home reveals their relatively comfortable financial situation, and the attacks that they undergo are often carried out by resentful locals or others from a lower income bracket.[ii] Many of these tales therefore come across as warnings or fantasies of class revenge.
1. Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997)
In Funny Games, provocateur Haneke trains his unwavering gaze on the comforts and manners of the bourgeoisie. A well-to-do Austrian couple and their young son drive to their lakeside home on holiday. But their plans of sailing, golfing, and steak dinners are interrupted when a pair of young men sporting preppy white clothes enter the house and begin to impose themselves on the family with a disquieting mixture of politeness and force. The increasingly violent “funny games” that the intruders play with their prey, and the meta-narrative winks that Haneke sprinkles throughout the film, present a sick parody of the entertainments of the privileged: Funny Games skewers both the pleasure that the rich family derives from its dull social rituals and hobbies, and the sadistic joy that we, as horror film viewers, find in on-screen suffering.
Trapped in the vacation home
See also: Haneke’s 2007 shot-for-shot remake of his film, this time in an American setting.
2. “The Summer People” (Shirley Jackson, 1948)
The Allisons, a retired couple from New York City, spend their summers in a New England country home, always returning to the city around Labor Day. But this year, they decide to stay on a few weeks longer, loathe to leave behind the rustic simplicity and natural beauty of their cottage. The residents of the nearby town—whose apparent simplemindedness the Allisons chalk up to “generations of inbreeding”— seem perturbed by the urbanites’ decision to linger past the usual but unofficial deadline. As things begin to go wrong at the Allisons’ cabin (kerosene runs out, the car won’t start, mail seems to have been tampered with), the “country people” appear to be taking an increasingly menacing kind of revenge against the vacationers, either for overstaying their welcome or for their decades of condescension towards the locals. Jackson’s subtlety is at its most masterful here, as in the story’s opening sentence, which tucks between two sweet clauses a sinister hint at the house’s simultaneously desirable and perilous isolation: “The Allisons’ country cottage, seven miles from the nearest town, was set prettily on a hill.”
3. Burnt Offerings (Dan Curtis, 1976)
The Rolf family—less well-off than most of the protagonists in this list—are overjoyed to temporarily swap their tiny Queens apartment for a gigantic, lavish, and (uh-oh) suspiciously cheap Neoclassical-style summer home in a remote region of Long Island. As the hot months wear on, the family’s young mother, Marian, becomes curiously obsessed with the house, even as her son, husband, and aunt experience strange fits of violence and dangerous accidents. Indeed, the house’s beauty, and Marian’s, seem to feed directly on the rest of the family’s suffering: with each new attack or spectral occurrence, the home looks just a little fresher, while Marian begins to match its aesthetic by donning opulent Victorian garb. Despite its lazily sexist equation of women with domesticity and materialism (as Marian’s love of decorating proves literally deadly for her kin), Burnt Offerings provides a glimpse of the desperate toll that socioeconomic aspiration exacts on the middle class.
Marian, thoroughly under the spell of luxury, prepares an elaborate meal with the house’s fancy dinnerware
4. “The Giant Wistaria” (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1891)
“O, George, what a house! What a lovely house! I am sure it’s haunted! Let us get that house to live in this summer! We will … have a splendid time of it!” So remarks our protagonist, Jenny, upon seeing the ancient manor at the center of this Gothic story. Jenny’s hope for a fun summer haunting—and, the desire that truly motors most ghost-hunters, her hope to uncover the lurid backstory behind that haunting—eventually come to terrible fruition. As in Gilman’s best-known work, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (also a creepy gem of a summer home story), “Wistaria” takes advantage of the palimpsestic nature of vacation homes to make a feminist comment: many women have lived and suffered under gendered oppression in this mansion before, leaving spectral traces of their tragedies behind.
See also: Horror Homeroom’s write-up of “The Giant Wistaria” in this list of Ten Women Authored Ghost Stories from the Gilded Age.
The vacationers probe the house’s unpleasant history in the basement
5. The Strangers (Bryan Bertino, 2008)
In a film that reveals the close links between vacation home horror and the home invasion subgenre (see also: Funny Games; You’re Next [Adam Wingard, 2011]), James proposes to his girlfriend Kristen, and the young couple drive to a secluded family cabin. But their fairy tale getaway quickly turns dark, then darker: Kristen rejects James’s proposal, and the couple are soon attacked by three masked intruders, who terrify and torment the lovers throughout the night. The movie’s bucolic setting in rural South Carolina contrasts grimly with the events that take place there, both within and outside the space of the cabin: a fireplace becomes a source of peril rather than comfort (as in Us); the camera cuts directly from shots of bodies being stabbed to shots of sunny meadows; the cicada soundbed of a Southern summer morning merges with Kristen’s and James’s screams.
As the intruders tie Kristen and James to chairs in the film’s final scene, a serene morning unfolds outside the house
See also: Our review of the brilliant The Strangers.
6. Gerald’s Game (Mike Flanagan, 2017)
In an inversion of the home invasion plot, Gerald’s Game (adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name) centers on a pampered middle-aged woman (Jessie) who becomes trapped in her own Alabama summer house—trapped, more specifically, on the bed to which she has been handcuffed by her husband during a sex game gone awry. Jessie must overcome her habitual passivity and rich-lady softness to overcome the mounting threats of thirst, nighttime predators, and her own unraveling mind. This movie capitalizes on many vacation homes’ combination of lavishness and a wilderness setting to stage its tale of gritty survival: Jessie is simultaneously in the lap of luxury and profoundly alone in her rural second home, and none of the house’s lavish decorations, hired help, or the Kobe beef in the fridge can save our heroine. As Jessie remarks of the stray dog who lurks about the corners of the bed, threatening to eat her, “that dog is just doing what it needs to survive. You [Jessie] need to do the same.”
See also: Horror Homeroom’s article on the complicated politics of sexual assault in Gerald’s Game
7. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1816)
Countryside retreats feature prominently in both the plot and the genesis of Shelley’s seminal work, reflecting Romantic creators’ tendency to find artistic inspiration in sublime natural settings. It is at Belrive, his family’s “campagne” near the shores of Lake Geneva, that Victor Frankenstein first witnesses the stunning power of electricity that will later bring his monster to life: lightning strikes an oak tree, obliterating it in a shock of “dazzling light.” And just as Victor derives his key idea (however ill-fated) from this vacation event, the spark for Mary Shelley’s novel also came to her during a lakeside getaway. It was while on holiday at Villa Diodati that Shelley (then named Mary Godwin) entered into a ghost story contest with her friends Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Polidori, and her chilling entry would later become Frankenstein. As these summer home settings imply, however, an important ingredient in many Romantics’ art was not only the rugged wilderness, but also cold hard cash. Mary and her future husband Percy were living off of his family’s substantial fortune in 1816, and Victor Frankenstein’s family is “one of the most distinguished” of Geneva. Unfortunately, in 1816 as in 2019, it often takes both kinds of green—a brooding natural setting and money—to bring works of eco-horror to life.
Villa Diodati’s previous name, Villa Belle Rive, inspired the title of the Frankensteins’ summer home, Belrive
8. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Kubrick’s film, like the King novel it’s based on, is really more of an anti-vacation home narrative—but it is for that very reason that The Shining helps cast the subgenre’s qualities into stark relief. Instead of the warm summer setting that vacation horror typically prefers, this film is set in the bleak winter of the Colorado Rockies; instead of a house, our setting is, of course, a cavernous hotel; and instead of seeking leisure time, Jack Torrance has come to the Overlook in order to work—both to serve as the building’s winter caretaker, and to jumpstart his languishing writing career. Indeed, the film is centrally about work—or, more specifically, Jack’s inability to succeed at it, due to his alcoholism and other factors. As a place where the rich come to relax and to throw lavish parties during the summer season, the Overlook surrounds Jack with torturous reminders of the sumptuous lifestyle he has failed to earn for himself. Accordingly, the manuscript at which Jack has been “working” all winter amounts to nothing but a perverse reflection of his thwarted longings to join the vacationing class: all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Jack’s hallucinations (or, depending on your reading, encounters with ghosts) are wish-fulfillments of the plush Overlook Hotel vacation experiences he could never afford
See also: Get beyond The Shining –and summer –with 5 Snowy Horror Films you need to watch.
[i] Sigmund Freud influentially defined the uncanny as “un-homely,” an ersatz blend of the familiar and the unfamiliar.
[ii] The Wilsons are presented as middle-class, and their vacation home is decidedly less ritzy than that of their friends, the Tyler family. Nonetheless, the dynamic between the Wilsons and their “Tethered” doubles is clearly framed as one of Haves vs. Have-Nots.
Chelsea Davis is a freelance writer and PhD candidate in English literature at Stanford University. Her research and writing focus on horror, war, and apocalypse. Her monthly newsletter, Shrieks and Howls, looks at the surprising overlaps between comedy and horror, two movies at a time. She is a producer for the horror fiction podcast Pseudopod. Read more of her writing on her website, and follow her on twitter @UnrealCitoyenne.
