This article is intended to elaborate on the Haunted House trope encountered in Realms of the Haunting.
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I know not how it was --but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me --upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain --upon the bleak walls --upon the vacant eye-like windows --upon a few rank sedges --and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees --with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium --the bitter lapse into everyday life --the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart --an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it --I paused to think --what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? |
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—Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, 1839 (excerpt). | ||
Notable Edifices reminiscent of the Mansion in ROTH[]
- Exham Priory (Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Rats in the Walls, 1923)
- Hill House / Harlaxton Manor (Jan de Bont, The Haunting, 1999)
- The Judge's House (Bram Stoker, The Judge's House, 1891)
- House of Roderick Usher (Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, 1839)
- Belli Castle (Haunting Ground, 2005)
- Salazar Castle (Resident Evil 4, 2005)
- Collinwood Mansion (Dark Shadows, 1966-1971, 2012)
- Oxford Street House (The Haunted and the Haunters or The House and the Brain, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1859)