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There is no more important location in horror fiction than the house. The geometry of surfaces that creates an inside where only outside once was, subject to the decay of time like a human body, able to be loved, often to be feared: the haunted house. Tourists, as I speak to you now from a home emptied of the people I love and denuded of the artifacts which made it a place of life, I plot today’s itinerary inside an actual haunted house, haunting at least to me, if not by ghosts, then by memory — which may, frankly, be the same thing. Today we explore the horror of the built environment in a segment I call Pied-à-Terror.

Let’s ask a fundamental question as we begin our journey. Why is so much horror fiction set in houses or other built places of living?

Houses are made for people to live in (as opposed to barns for animals or sheds for storage). There’s a sense that when homes aren’t occupied by people they are at best cold and empty, at worst somehow desirous for other things to move in. We have an urge for homes to be populated, usually by people, and if not then reminders or ghosts of people. They are vessels for living and we want to fill them with something. This is why it is demonstrably more difficult to sell a house that has no signs of life at all (no furniture, etc) than one that is. 

Historically, most people have died in their own homes, at least since there has been the concept of a home, and usually they’ve passed away inside bedrooms. Even today some terminally ill people choose hospice inside their homes specifically so that life can end there rather than in a hospital. People who have died — by choice or not — in a home are of course the source of the innumerable ghost tales associated with haunted buildings. We anchor people to location probably more intensely than any other correlative other than smell. (You simply can’t beat smell. Thanks, lizard brain!)

Scientists call this the “sensed-presence effect”, the feeling that there is another person present when there is not. This is explained as a result of monotony, darkness, cold, hunger, fatigue, fear, and/or sleep deprivation. All things that happen to people, especially when alone in a house. Other explanations proffered include hypnagogic hallucinations, restless leg syndrome, and of course very often outright hoaxes. Sometimes it’s the actual decay of a building that is to blame. Carbon monoxide, pesticide, and formaldehyde can lead to hallucinations and have at least on a few occasions been documented as the source of perceived hauntings. Clear up the monoxide leak, no more ghosts.

A poll from almost 20 years ago noted that 37% of Americans, 28% of Canadians, and 40% of Britons believed in haunted houses. I bet the numbers are higher now. But haunted houses are one of the oldest beliefs around. Pliny the Younger, the author from first century Athens, wrote what we think is the first tale of a haunted house, in this case a Greek villa bedeviled by a scraggly, bearded man in chains who really just wanted his bones properly interred.

Haunted houses more recently are, of course, everywhere. They are an entertainment industry totally separate from books and movies, especially around Halloween. And their popularity seems to be increasing: I’ve noticed many temporary haunt attractions just staying up and re-theming as Christmas-inspired haunted spaces. Soon it will never not be haunted house season.

Haunted architecture in horror movies specifically fall into a few categories. Let’s walk through this neighborhood together, tourists. Hold hands if necessary. 

Our first stop you’ve visited dozens if not hundreds of times before. It is the traditional haunted house (and its inbred cousin the cabin-in-the-woods). If there is a single icon of horror cinema, it is this — the ornate Gothic or Victorian mansion, usually up on a hill, often in a state of disrepair. The formula varies, but, like obscenity, you know it when you see it: Norman Bates’ house in Psycho, the neoclassical mansion from both Phantasm and Burnt Offerings, the haunted house on a hill in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, New England’s iconic The House by the Cemetery (1981), even the Art Deco castle of the pre-Code blockbuster The Black Cat (1934) — the list is effectively endless. All manner of bad things happen in these houses which are really just dressing on a corpse.

Tourists, let’s take a quick peek down this  side street before we get to the next stop. Often what I have called traditional haunted houses are simply creepy locations for the purpose of mood-setting; the threat is something inside (like ghosts) or outside (like home invaders). But sometimes it is the building itself that is the malevolence. Think of the house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, NY (not to mention that its facade actually looks like a menacing face) or The Overlook Hotel in Kubrick’s take on The Shining, or the outpost dormitory of Robert Eggers’ 2019 The Lighthouse. All of these structures are the antagonists, even while they possess or animate otherwise good people to do very bad things. Put another way, the houses are the source of the misbehavior rather than just the setting for it. This was the twist in Insidious (2010): where all the signs pointed to the home being evil we’re told quite explicitly “It’s not the house that’s haunted”.

One last excursion in this neighborhood if you will: we’re entering the cul-de-sac of suburban horror. The houses in these locales are not exactly terrifying, but their location — in seemingly cozy, safe subdivisions — and their very un-exceptionalism make the horrors they contain that much more disquieting. You probably don’t live in a decrepit castle, but you have at least been in a residential neighborhood. The message in these movies is that the crazy person with the machete will get you either way. Sometimes the very sameness of the homes of suburbia is the scare. Take Vivarium (2019) about a couple who cannot escape — as in, literally cannot find their way out of — the monotony of identical townhouses that make up their community. Poltergeist (1982) was one of the first movies to foreground suburbia as, if not the villain exactly, at least the problem. Developers intent on turning rural land into a planned community place a new home directly above a cemetery, moving only the headstones. It’s a deliberate commentary on suburbia as Steven, the Dad played by Craig T. Nelson, is a real estate agent. Even the original Halloween (1978), set in the fictional community of Haddonfield, places the killer on leafy sidewalks of what would otherwise be the most non-threatening of neighborhoods. In a nod to tradition (maybe), Carpenter used a folk version of a Victorian house for the Strode residence. Suburban homes became such a trend for a while (A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Gate, and countless others) that the first full-throated meta-horror, Scream (1996), was set precisely there.

Our next neighborhood, my tourists, is known for its surreal architecture. Sometimes these Escher-esque places are inhabited by ghosts or monsters, but in all these stories the frightening core — and often the thing that kills — is their spatial disorientation. I have personal experience in this regard. The first office building I worked in, called Wildwood Plaza in Atlanta, was designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei and opened just two years after his pyramid entrance to The Louvre debuted. Like any young idiot new to office culture I could not find my way around, but I later learned this was by design. Pei loved messing with right angles, which is to say, not having them. The halls, ceilings, and many rooms of Wildwood Plaza lacked traditional 90° joints between planes. It was wildly, though not always consciously, confounding. As right angles do not exist in nature, except accidentally, humans have come to rely on them to create orderly, understandable, legible spaces. And when that convenience is missing, we get confused or feel trapped. Which is why illogical or impossible spaces are so prevalent in horror. When characters are disoriented, so are we the viewers. 

The touchstone of this genre has got to be the book House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Z. Danielewski. To say that House of Leaves is a story-within-a-story is to leave out at least a half-dozen nested stories. But, at root, is a documentary film purporting to show the lives of a family as captured by their in-home camera system. Their house begins to change in very non-Euclidean ways — doors appear were once only walls stood, corridors extend impossibly beyond the house’s exterior envelope, a gigantic seemingly endlessly-descending spiral staircase appears inside a maze at the end of a hallway. The thing about this book, though, is that the writing style and format are simultaneously metafictional, with multiple narrators at cross-purposes, dozens of different typefaces and colors in use, and even pages that require physically rotating the book or reading it reflected in a mirror — all of this is the house-as-maze-like book or maze-like house-as-book. They are both haunted.

Danielewski’s novel has never been made into a film. I’m not sure it could be. But hoo boy would I watch it if it were. (Sidenote for game nerds: there is a Doom mod called MyHouse which was purported to have been created from a simple house map that the creator’s friend, recently deceased, left on a floppy drive. It is very much not that as the house shifts its shape and orientations, just like House of Leaves.)

Cube (1997) is a perfect example of, if not strictly-impossible, then highly improbable architectural horror. It follows five people who find themselves in perfectly square rooms that containing numbered hatches on the floor, the ceiling, and every wall which lead to exactly similar rooms, though each has been separately set with deadly traps. By way of prime number mathematics and, helpfully, learning that one of their cohort was hired to design the outermost shell of the maze, the group devises a plan of escape only to learn that, in fact, the structure is more of a Rubik’s Cube than a static one. The rooms can reconfigure and attach to different rooms. Like the rooms themselves, the movie Cube has led to three other near-duplicates of itself Cube 2: Hypercube, Cube Zero, and a Japanese remake.

Other good examples in this sub-genre include The Platform from 2019 about a vertical prison whose inhabitants are fed by a giant dumbwaiter that drops daily from the topmost floor through 333 levels, leaving the lowermost with nothing but crumbs and gristle, Relic, an Australian film from 2020, where the house of an elderly widow comes to mimic her own dementia, and even to some degree the haunted hotel room film from the Stephen King short story 1408.

Tourists, let’s end our walking tour at some places that deserve special attention. Here are two films that stand out precisely because they are about architecture per se.

The Night House (2020) begins with Beth whose husband, an architect who designed and built the house she lives in, has just committed suicide. One of her friends consoles her saying “You spend so much time with in the same space with someone it’s gonna feel like they are there even when they are not.” If you’re looking for the TL;DR version of this essay on haunted houses, that quote is it. As Beth attempts to deal with her grief she suffers from what seem like hallucinations until she stumbles upon a set of floorpans for a reversed version of her house. Eventually deep in the woods she finds an actual reversed copy of her house filled with ghostly women who look similar to but not exactly like herself.

This film makes great use of literal architecture as the source of fright. There’s a scene where Beth notices that the shadows cast by the moulding atop a basement pillar look unsettlingly like a human silhouette. It’s so clever and well-executed that I missed it, until the shadow moves and I jumped out of my seat. Without spoiling the movie I will say that Owen’s construction of a house-in-reverse is an attempt to fool dark forces out to get Beth who seems to have thwarted their plan for her years ago. The crazy house is actually the solution to the haunting rather than the haunting itself. A very novel take on the trope indeed.

Written and directed by Lars Von Trier and starring Matt Dillon, The House That Jack Built (2018) is a story that hangs off the scaffolding of the structure of Dante’s Inferno. It’s told through a series of flashbacks to the murders of Jack, a wannabe architect and very definite serial killer. The movie contains a narrated dialogue between Jack and Verge (obviously Virgil from Dante) as he descends through his crimes and the nine levels of hell. At one point Jack says “The old cathedrals often have sublime artworks hidden away in the darkest corners for only God to see or whatever. One feels like calling [him] the great architect behind it all. The same goes for murder.” 

Throughout the film we’re shown Jack attempting to build his own house from scratch, becoming dissatisfied with his progress, bulldozing it, and starting anew. Meanwhile he’s still killing, often disgustingly so. The movie’s climax takes place in the freezer where he keeps all the corpses of his victims. Verge appears, no longer just an overdubbed narrator, and reminds Jack that he’s never been able to complete his house between all the murders. So, improvising, he arranges all the dead bodies into the shape of a house. It’s a very disturbing image. Jack and Verge enter the house and drop down through a hole in the floor just as police are cutting their way into the freezer. I won’t spoil the epilogue, but if you know Dante you know how this ends. Ironically it is the failure of architecture — in this case a collapsed bridge across the River Styx — that plays a fateful role for Jack.

Of note, this is very long for a horror movie. Over 2.5 hours. Probably could have used a heavy-handed editor and would have been a fine flick without the Inferno metatext and frequent digressions into William Blake, Albert Speer, and others, but I don’t fault its ambition and it does not bore. Of note, there’s brief but very hard-to-watch animal cruelty in one flashback. (It’s CGI, but still.)

A poll from a few years ago found that 64% of people surveyed prefer to watch horror at home rather than in a theater. For movies of all genres the percentage of people who prefer to watch at home drops to 55%. Of course the theater is a different experience entirely (immersive visuals, superior sound, communal experience), but maybe the 9% point difference is meaningful. Maybe there’s something about being scared in the comfort and safety of your house which adds to the allure of horror movies. Is it possible that for that 90 minutes we enjoy living in our very own haunted house?

OK tourists, I hope you enjoyed our excursion today. Time to go home. May I suggest putting on a scary movie?

A full list of the movies mentioned above can be found at Letterboxd. Find out where to watch there.

The Terror Tourist is my occasional segment on the Heavy Leather Horror Show, a weekly podcast about all things horror out of Salem, Massachusetts. These segments are also available as an email newsletter. Sign up here, if interested. Here’s the episode containing “Pied-à-Terror”:

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“It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird,” we’re told by Atticus Finch, in the novel title-dropped in that line. Now, think back to your 8th grade self and try to remember why it’s a sin in his opinion. It isn’t because it’s a pretty bird; Atticus says flatly “Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ʼem”. Anyone remember? It’s because, as Atticus says, they “don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy”. They are, in other words, innocent. And the potential execution of an innocent person is what the book and movie are all about. The story is also about rape, racism, rabid animals, murder, an attack after a Halloween pageant, and a creepy recluse in a house named Boo. Despite this, no one would argue that To Kill a Mockingbird is horror story. But it is a prime example of Southern Gothic, a sub-genre that is full of the grotesque, macabre, and often supernatural and which, as we will explore on our journey today, easily slides into full-blown horror. 

Welcome to this week’s itinerary, travelers, called Undead Mockingbird. Grab a sweet ice tea with lemon to go because we’re headed south of the Mason-Dixon line to a land where I went to school, twice, on purpose. And it changed me forever.

Before we arrive at the destination that is Southern Gothic Horror we should probably hit a few waypoints for the terms that comprise it. Let’s start with “gothic”, since, as terror tourists, you’ve likely encountered movies that are utterly suffused with gothic ambiance and tropes. Now, unless we’re talking about the extinct Germanic language of the 5th century Goth peoples or trying to describe why you borrowed your sister’s eyeliner to go to the Siouxsie and the Banshees show — neither of which we are talking about — then we’re talking about a style of architecture. 

Gothic building design was a European architecture of the 12th to 16th centuries. You’ve seen it: pointed arches instead of curved domes, flying buttresses that meant walls could for the first time do things — like hold stained glass — instead of solely making sure the roof didn’t fall in, and elaborate ornamental stonework of all kinds including, yes, gargoyles. If you can picture Notre Dame in Paris or the Duomo in Milan then you know exactly what Gothic architecture is. Importantly the term “gothic” was originally applied to this form of architecture as an insult. Artists centuries later considered these buildings to be barbarous, monstrous even, precisely because they were so different from the classical curves of the ancient Greeks and Romans that the Renaissance so eagerly sought to revive. 

So, the term “gothic” was originally used with contempt. But it was also applied to very old structures, many in states of decay and ruination by the time of the Renaissance. These buildings — many of which were churches — were equal parts beautiful and rotting, isolated and grandiose, and were the primary inspiration for the gothic fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries. Many of these stories, the first of which is The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole from 1764, take place in gloomy landscapes and/or outright haunted manors. And the people in these places, well, they tend towards the end of the emotional spectrum where rage, lust, madness, and terror dwell. Think of the tales of Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, and Oscar Wilde.

Gothic fiction was the beginning of the horror genre as we know it. The aesthetic of mystery, of decay, of the past forcing its way into the present (sometimes supernaturally) so defined what in the West would visually be considered scary that most of the costumes you see today at Halloween are just riffs on old gothic motifs. OK so just glancing back at our map: gothic architecture, specifically the buildings of that style in a state of decay, inspired gothic fiction which itself eventually morphed into the larger category of horror fiction. 

So how does Southern Gothic, a distinctly American art form, come from what was primarily a European genre? Where the rotting hulks of churches inspired the gothic authors of Europe, the dilapidation of once-majestic plantation houses in the post-Civil War South became a focal point for authors in America seeking to explore themes of a flawed society trying to rebuild itself. These flaws, often personified by grotesque or mysterious figures (like Boo Radley from To Kill A Mockingbird), usually involve racism, violence, and religious extremism — even hoodoo and voodoo. 

The characters in Southern Gothic fiction are often physically or psychologically twisted – shut-ins, freaks, back-woods types and those unable to move forward in tight-knit communities, sometimes too tight. These characters, caricatures really, are usually colored — and color is key in this genre — by the dark events of the past, the violent history of race relations, the resentment of Civil War defeat, the Great Depression and, more recently, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Whether overt or as subtext the point of a Southern Gothic story is to reckon with — if not fully rewrite — the myth that the pre-Civil War south was an idyllic, harmonious, and happy time and place. It is, like gothic literature, an attempt to deal with a society in ruin. Authors who wrote in this style at least some of the time include William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty and more recently Anne Rice and (one of my favorite authors) Donna Tartt. 

Tourists, you may see where we’re headed. It is not such a leap from the dark themes of these Southern novelists to straight-up horror: mansions rotting into swamps, snake-handling preachers, and unreconstructed beliefs in the supernatural. Southern Gothic often becomes Southern Gothic horror and nowhere is this more true than at the movies.

Before we talk about films, though, a quick note on genre slippage. Categories are always tricky; what’s the real difference between a dark thriller and a horror movie with a gore score of zero, for example? But in the case of the category of Southern Gothic we’re actually taking about a geographical place, specifically the states of the former Confederacy. There are many films which you might otherwise call Southern Gothic except for their setting in the American Midwest or amongst the hillbillies of Appalachia. And many of these films are wonderful — see especially The Night of the Hunter from 1955 about a serial killer posing as a preacher in West Virginia or the 2017 film 1922 based on the Stephen King novella about murder and guilt on a Nebraska farm. But for now let’s constrain our travels to the South and a few standout films. 

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte is a 1964 creep-out starring Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland as middle-aged cousins in Louisiana attempting to keep the local authorities from demolishing a home in the path of a new interstate. That’d make for a pretty good straight drama, except that Bette is also the primary suspect in the decades-old unsolved murder of her former lover whose decapitated head comes back for a visit. Of note, this film is 133 minutes long and very slow by contemporary pacing standards, but it is a great example of the subgenre.

The masterful director Lucio Fulci wasn’t afraid of trying anything and his film The Beyond from 1981 is his take on Southern Gothic. Filmed on location in and around New Orleans, The Beyond is about a woman, Liza, who inherits and attempts to rehabilitate a crumbling old hotel — which happens to be sitting atop one of the seven gates of hell! This is an exceptional film, part of the Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy, one of the UK’s “video nasties”, and did not see an uncut release in the US until 1998. You need to see this film not only because of its contribution to our subject today but because the ending is bleak as all hell — er, as all beyond.

Angel Heart from 1987 is a noir-ish detective tale with a satantic twist. This film partakes of lots of Southern Gothic tropes aesthetically, but does include one we haven’t mentioned yet, the half-crazed war veteran. In this case it’s not a Civil War veteran but an injured WWII solider who’s gone missing. A man named Louis Cyphre, played by De Niro, hires a private investigator named Harry Angel, played by Mickey Rourke, to find the veteran who owes him a debt. It’s a fallen angel tale set amidst the dark, oppressively humid decadence of New Orleans. 

And if Big Easy decadence is your thing then you’re likely a fan of the novels of Anne Rice about the vampire Lestat. Interview with the Vampire from 1994 is the big budget film version of the novel of the same name, featuring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas and a young Kirsten Dunst. Much of the film takes place in antebellum Louisiana with all its Caribbean disease, rotten swamps, wrought iron balconies, and candle-lit passages. It’s ultimately a tale of child murder — or at least, taking the human life from a child — and the grief surrounding this act. But it’s also a very modern take on the visual trappings of southern-inflected horror. I suggest reading the books and skipping the movie, but hey you do you.

If you want the Cliffs Notes version of Southern Gothic have a watch of The Skeleton Key featuring Kate Hudson and John Hurt from 2005. This film contains every possible Southern Gothic trope (or cliche, if you’re feeling critical): a plantation house in the middle of a rural parish in Louisiana, the twisted legacy of a slave lynching, hoodoo rituals, and all the atmosphere of a once-majestic society now covered in a layer of dust. It’s not a perfect film, but it may be the most exemplary of our genre exploration.

Is there such a thing as a Southern Gothic slasher? Indeed there is, my touring pals. It’s called Hatchet from 2006 and features the undead, deformed Victor Crowley who slops through swamps in search of his next victims. In this case it’s a group of tourists (just like us!) stranded in the countryside on a ghost tour out of New Orleans. Hatchet is paint-by-numbers horror — you know exactly what you’re going to get and pretty much exactly where its going, but at the time I enjoyed the fresh setting and I found it fun to see how southern motifs were woven into the scaffolding pulled mostly from 1980s campground horror. There are several more Crowley films after this one, if this is your jam.

A House on the Bayou from 2021, reviewed on this pod previously, is an unexpected entry in the genre, focusing primarily on familial tension over an affair but set in a decaying mansion in the swampy countryside. The family here are outsiders, definitely not southerners, who basically represent us, the viewers, thrust into a world out of time, complete with creepy fellows named Grandpappy who represent the old order, the way things used to be but which definitely shouldn’t be. Great performances and an excellent twist!

Now, you may have noticed something about all these films. I chose them almost randomly — a few I had seen previously, a few I had wanted to see — as exemplars of Southern Gothic horror. But every single one of them is set in Louisiana, often New Orleans. This isn’t coincidence. Louisiana is ground zero for the genre, possibly because it has the most visible legacy of majesty-in-ruin, colliding cultures of decadence and religiosity, diverse peoples mixing uneasily (black and white, high society and low, European and Afro-Caribbean colonizers and immigrants), all stewing in an oppressive climate of bugs, alligators, and slithering creatures. 

I haven’t done an exhaustive census, but my guess is that more than half of what you’d consider quintessential Southern Gothic Horror takes place in Louisiana. Yes there are films which do not — of special note is Cape Fear, both the 1962 and 1991 versions, set on the outer banks of North Carolina. But the center of gravity for the genre seems always to be the Deep South. The entire third season of American Horror Story, called Coven, is set amongst the witches of New Orleans, for instance. Of note, my wife is from New Orleans. Is she a southern goth witch? This is an exploration for a possible future installment of The Terror Tourist.

Until then, my compatriots, sorry for the humidity. And the mosquitos. But hey, we enjoyed some lovely sweet ice tea, no? See you on our next journey!

A full list of the movies mentioned above can be found at Letterboxd. Find out where to watch there.

The Terror Tourist is my occasional segment on the Heavy Leather Horror Show, a weekly podcast about all things horror out of Salem, Massachusetts. These segments are also available as an email newsletter. Sign up here, if interested. Here’s the episode containing “Undead Mockingbird”:

Prefer to listen to this post?

The End. Fin. Game Over. 

We begin our journey today, tourists, at the very end. Cliche be damned: it isn’t the journey; it isn’t the people you meet along the way; it’s the destination. And that destination almost always is death. In the horror genre this is obvious — character deaths are usually dramatic fulcrums, sometimes moments of novelty, and often outright astonishing. 

But the end in film is so much more powerful than death. We watch movies in part because they end. We know the story is finite and must draw to some conclusion and that conclusion is usually hinted at before we even start. There’s a satisfaction in that, a satisfaction that often eludes us in the real world. Usually we don’t have answers to: How will we end? How will the world end? Are we humans a 90 minute hangout film or a multi-part saga? Do we come back for a sequel? 

Welcome to today’s Terror Tourist itinerary called “End Quote”.

Human death is as varied as human life, of course, and is the subject of the vast majority of films across all genres — whether explicit (as in horror) or as a unstated complement or antagonist to the will to live and love (as in romantic comedies). So, yeah, human mortality is the engine of all fiction. But all the different ways people die is an journey too lengthy for us today, travelers. 

Instead, let’s consider the end of everything. Apocalypse. Ragnarök. Doomsday. How humans behave in the face of worldwide annihilation is often as dramatically interesting as how they face their own ends. Which is why the theme of apocalypse is everywhere in films — from horror to thrillers to superhero movies to comedy. 

When we talk about the apocalypse we usually mean the end of life, specifically. There have been five near-total apocalypses in the history of planet earth. (We discussed the most recent of these — the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs — on our Terrible Lizards journey.) Almost all of these near-extinctions were caused by some kind of naturally-induced warming or deoxygenation of the planet. And this is why many scientists believe we are in a sixth extinction event, the only one caused specifically by humans as we have moved carbon safely stored in the ground and have thrown it into the atmosphere, trapping heat and warming our rock beyond the parameters in which life thrives. Fiction, especially in the last decade, has often made the existential threat of climate change its main or at least secondary theme.

But climate change isn’t the only way it all ends. There’s asteroid impact. We know that happens. In 2016 NASA established the Planetary Defense Coordination Office to track potential impact hazards. There are gamma ray bursts coming from far away in the galaxy. This radiation which comes from violently-exploding stars called supernovae would strip away our ozone layer, which I suppose brings us straight back to climate change. Without the sunscreen of ozone life just burns up. Speaking of the sun, that ball of plasma could be our end too — if we make it long enough. As our sun ages and dies it will swell in size and intensity, swallowing Mercury and Venus, irradiating and heating Earth well beyond what life can tolerate. (It may even swallow us whole too before petering out. Impossible to know, but again we’d be long gone before that happened.)

Film sometimes deals with these kinds of natural disaster earthly ends, but more often than not the subject is human-centric apocalypse — most recently viral pandemics. Indeed one way to categorize the history of horror cinema is to look at what threat currently dominates the public imagination. Alien invasion, robots run amok, beasts mutated from atomic radiation, zombies, werewolves, and vampires (which as often as not are stand-ins for some other fear or threat), nuclear annihilation, artificial intelligence that comes to oppose biological intelligence.  (We’re about to get a lot of those.)

But what about everything everything. As in the universe itself. Well, compatriots, this is where it gets really weird and little bit scary. There’s a branch of physics that deals with the ultimate fate of the universe. It’s quite a vibrant and not at all morose field of inquiry.

Basically there are four possibilities for how it all ends:

The Big Freeze (also known as Heat Death) is the one that has the most support amongst physicists. We’re coming up on about a century since ol’ Edwin Hubble calculated a cosmological constant which tells us how fast the universe is expanding from the cataclysm that started it all, the Big Bang. And it definitely, provably is expanding (in fact, it’s accelerating which is so bizarre we had to make up an undetected force — dark energy — even to explain it). Everything in the universe seems to be expanding away from everything else as if it all — planets, galaxies, you, me, your cat, that hot dog over there —  were all on the surface of a balloon that was expanding. So why is this called the Big Freeze? Well eventually everything will be so far apart that gravitational attraction will no longer bring matter into contact with other matter, so there will be no reactions that give rise to stars. And without stars, well, you get a heat death. The opposite of the Big Bang is indeed a whimper. Dark, cold, and nothing. Everybody dies.

The Big Crunch is the opposite. The idea here is that, yes, everything is expanding, but eventually gravity will win and halt the outward movement. In fact, eventually everything will pull back in closer and closer until it all smooshes down into a dimensionless singularity. Everybody dies.

The Big Bounce is just an endlessly repeating cycle of Big Freezes and Big Crunches, based on the assumption that a dimensionless singularity of all the matter in the universe would then explode (Big Bang-style). This seems to run afoul of quantum mechanics, but the truth is we really have no idea what happened at the very moment of the Big Bang. Everybody dies. Maybe life comes back. But everybody dies again if they do.

Now here’s the scary one: The Big Rip. I mentioned that the universe’s expansion is accelerating and that we don’t really know why. But we do know that the acceleration is constant, which we should be glad for because that constant is just fast enough to expand but not fast enough to destroy local structures like galaxies or stars or us humans. But … technically there’s no reason that the acceleration must stay constant. If it increases (because, for instance, dark matter and dark energy are weirder than we even think) it could be curtains for everything down to individual atoms. The distance between particles themselves would become infinite in a finite amount of time. Riiiiiiiiiiip. The ultimate explosion. Everybody dies.

Apocalypse has been a subject of film since the very beginning. We are lucky to have a restored copy of the Danish film Verdens Undergang (literally “The End of the World”) from 1916. While this is science fiction rather than what we would come to call horror, it definitely points the way. Natural disaster, panic, and general mayhem ensue after a comet passes Earth. And the audience was ready for this having just witnessed Halley’s Comet in 1910 and being in the middle of a world war and global influenza pandemic. Horror movies as a mirror of a society’s fears, even way back at the dawn of movies. 

Since then the end of the world has diversified. 

You’ve got religious, specifically Christian usually Catholic, apocalypse in films like Legion from 2010, starring Paul Bettany as the Archangel Michael. God has had it up to here with humans and so he sends hordes of angels , including the archangel Michael, to eradicate the human race. Michael goes against God’s willing and finds a pregnant woman in a diner whose child will be the savior of mankind. War ensues. The Archangel Gabriel comes down to battle. I liked this film, especially as it begins with Michael cutting his own wings off to blend in with humans. 

Then there’s worldwide apocalypse from the undead. Obviously there are hundreds if not thousands of zombie films but only a minority focus on the zombie infestation as a worldwide phenomenon. I mean, it ain’t an apocalypse if it’s just a few shamblers in your local cemetery. George Romero ultimately produced a series of six films starting with Night of the Living Dead that does slowly show the evolution of a global zombie outbreak. This all concludes in the book The Living Dead completed and published posthumously by Romero’s estate that does a wonderful job of carrying the zombie apocalypse to its logical conclusion (spoiler: all flesh, even undead flesh, rots away to nothing). Other good examples of zombies through a global lens are World War Z from 2013 and the 28 Days Later franchise begun in 2002. (28 Years Later is slated for release next year.)

There’s no lack of pandemic virus movies that wipe out humanity, especially these days. We discussed the movie Black Death on our last Terror Tourist jaunt, but there’s also the under-loved Carriers from 2009 starring Chris Pine early in his career. The pathogen in this film is literally called “The World Ender Virus”. No one seems to be sheltering at home — it’s all a bit of a survivalist wasteland — and really no one wears masks. There’s a serum, but apparently it doesn’t work. Maybe this is where Covid would have ended up if the mortality rate was significantly higher.

Let’s not forget the long tradition of alien monster apocalypse too. I don’t mean films where a single creature comes to earth and wreaks havoc, but actual global infestation. So The Thing is not apocalypse (wonderful though it is), but A Quiet Place (and its sequels) would be. As would Cloverfield and its sequel 10 Cloverfield Lane. (I will not acknowledge that a third Cloverfield film exists.)

Maybe my favorite type of apocalyptic horror is the completely unspecified type. Films that just begin in medias res, with a world already on fire, a color palette that no longer knows Roy G. Biv, and no explanation given whatsoever.Two good examples of this are The Road from 2009 and The Day from 2011. The Road stars Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, and Robert Duvall and is the simple story of a father and son making their way through post-apocalyptic wreckage to the coast of South Carolina. They try to stay away from “bad guys” while the little boy tries to understand the difference between good guys and bad guys in a morally ambiguous world of pure survival. In The Day, we get a ragtag group of survivors (including actor Dominic Monaghan) who come upon a house full of rare supplies in a ruined world. But the food and drink found there is bait and the house is a trap, setting up what becomes a pretty typical though eminently plausible siege movie.

Do these films teach us anything about how we end? Probably not. It’s impossible to know if we’ll take an asteroid to the face or a zombie chomp to the head. But maybe they do show us something, in a very personal way. If there is some apocalyptic event coming it is probably our human propensity for cruelty to one another that will be our undoing. Or selfishness, which is a kind of cruelty.  In the end, it probably doesn’t matter what the universe does. What matters is what we do to one another.

And maybe that’s why we are drawn to horror fiction. It’s a glimpse of what we don’t like to dwell on, of how fragile existence really is, skipping to the end of the story to help us understand our current chapter.

OK tourists, let’s end our bummer of a trip here. Go home and hug your family or your pet or your stuffed animal. Hug something and hope the universe doesn’t rip apart.

A full list of the movies mentioned above can be found at Letterboxd. Find out where to watch there.

The Terror Tourist is my occasional segment on the Heavy Leather Horror Show, a weekly podcast about all things horror out of Salem, Massachusetts. These segments are also available as an email newsletter. Sign up here, if interested. Here’s the episode containing “End Quote”: