Challenging the House – Domesticity and the Intrusion of Dark Heterotopias

Abstract

While numerous analyses of contemporary horror narratives/films provide almost an excess in interpretations and readings, one specific issue – the concept of space – remains widely unaddressed. By limiting itself to the understanding of various cases at hand through the prism of characters and other active participants in the narrative, the mainstream theoretical approaches typically underestimate and overlook the spatial paradigm as an element that constructively and actively contributes to both the creation of a horror storyline, as well as the articulation of a social and/or cultural critique. What the article proposes is a reading of two films – James Wan’s Insidious (2010) and Scott Derrickson’s Sinister (2012) through the application of Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopias. As proposed by the analysis, the spatial paradigm within the examined cases is premised on the simultaneous coexistence and superposition of heterotopian spaces over regular ones. Such coexistence facilitates the creation of particular contexts within which domestic anxieties and dysfunctions start to articulate themselves into a proper critical discourse.