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. 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.” 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. 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. 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 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. “The Summer People” (Shirley Jackson, 1948) See also: Haneke’s 2007 shot-for-shot remake of his film, this time in an American setting.Ģ. 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. 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. A well-to-do Austrian couple and their young son drive to their lakeside home on holiday. In Funny Games, provocateur Haneke trains his unwavering gaze on the comforts and manners of the bourgeoisie. Many of these tales therefore come across as warnings or fantasies of class revenge. 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. 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.īut as Us implies and as other entries in this list make explicit, horror stories about summer homes are also often specifically tales about class. Vacation home horror, as I’ll call it here, nastily inverts any pleasant associations with both vacation and with the countryside. Us is not the first narrative to find fertile ground for horror in summer houses.
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