Explores the architecture of haunted houses, uncanny domestic spaces, and how the horror genre subverts and corrupts the sanctity of home.
Horror begins at home
From family homes in Amityville to Gothic mansions in Los Angeles and the Unabomber's cabin, houses often capture and contain the horror that has happened within them.
Sick Houses crosses the threshold of these eerie spaces to explore how different types of architecture become vessels for terror and how these spaces, meant to shelter us, instead become the source of our deepest fears. Using film, television, and literature to explain why we are drawn to haunted and haunting places, Sick Houses is a must read for anyone who has ever looked at a house and sensed there might be something unsettling going on inside.
Leila Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer, speaker, and designer whose work focuses on the intersection of history and horror and the gothic in contemporary culture. Author of Darkly: Black History and Americaâs Gothic Soul, her essays have appeared in Laphamâs Quarterly, The Repeater Book of the Occult, The New Urban Gothic, and Bitter Root Vol. 3: Legacy.