4
Houses of Horror
From the depiction of derivatives as “Frankenstein’s monsters” to the evocation of the dark arts of “shadow banking,” uncanny specters of the gothic haunt the post-crisis moment.1 Although finance capital’s uncanny abstraction and specterlike virtuality have long been associated with the ghostly and the occult, more everyday forms of credit and debt are also now being described in the language of horror and haunting. The home mortgage has become a particular locus for these terrors, whether they are private nightmares (as in the so-called zombie mortgages that result from sloppy bank record keeping) or public fears (such as an Economist article about the global housing market titled “House of Horrors”).2 This chapter seeks to understand the prevalence of this discourse, arguing that it does not merely reflect the fear associated with market volatility but also is an attempt to register historical transformations in the economy itself: the financialization of risky credit that preceded the crisis and the material experience of housing risk that followed in its wake. I turn to a set of horror films that bring together fear, foreclosure, and financialized credit: Drag Me to Hell (dir. Sam Raimi, 2009), Dream Home (Wai dor lei ah yut ho, dir. Pang Ho-cheung, 2010), Mother’s Day (dir. Darren Lynn Bousman, 2010), and Crawlspace (dir. Josh Stolberg, 2013).3 All four films explicitly link the formal trappings of horror to the context of real estate lending, mortgage speculation, and foreclosure risk. Mother’s Day and Crawlspace are home-invasion thrillers in which the former inhabitants of a foreclosed home seek vengeance on the new owners, who are framed as savvy investors taking advantage of a distressed market. Dream Home and Drag Me to Hell are explicitly concerned with the financialization of the mortgage market. Pang’s ultraviolent slasher flick, set in Hong Kong in 2007, explores the consequences of the post-handover Hong Kong housing bubble. Its female protagonist goes on a gory killing spree after struggling to purchase an apartment in a city where 143
