I loved this Kate Beaton twitter thread about her house hunting on Cape Breton. She looked at a house on a big blueberry farm but got extremely creepy vibes from the attic room. Later, she found out that it’s supposed to be haunted.
https://twitter.com/beatonna/status/1188985638919561216
We’ve been watching a bunch of old black and white horror movies for the past couple of weeks, great stuff like The Old Dark House.
One of the funniest things about these old movies is how dumb the protagonists are.
Anybody who’s ever been house hunting knows that you can tell IMMEDIATELY upon entering a house whether it’s got the creeps or not.
In fact, that’s part of the fun of the movie, yelling at the screen, feeling superior. “This would never happen to us,” you think, as you squeeze your wife tight. “We’re a lot smarter than that.”
I wonder sometimes if House Hunters learned this from horror movies: that if you show couples visiting a house and saying dumb things (“I don’t like the paint color!”) or making bad choices it gets the audience whipped up. (This piece on The Cut from last year is the perfect blend of horror and real estate.)
One of my favorite Richard Pryor skits is “Exorcist,” where Pryor imagines the movie if there were black people in it. “The movie would’ve been about seven minutes long. [In The Devil’s voice] ‘Hello?’ [In Pryor’s voice] ‘Goodbye!’”
About a decade later, Eddie Murphy stole Pryor’s joke and updated it using Poltergeist: “Why don’t white people just leave the house when there’s a ghost in the house?”