“Black Mold, White Extinction: I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, The Haunting of Hill House, “Gray Matter,” and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House,” in Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman, edited by Sladja Blazan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 43-66.

 

Abstract: Oz Perkins’ I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House (2018), and ‘Gray Matter’ from Shudder’s 2019 Creepshow all figure their characters’ deaths through a spreading mold, offering a very materialist haunting. Mold has become a critical trope in stories of mass human extinction driven by anxiety about climate change: recent fictions of black mold reference the warming temperatures and proliferating storms that signal global warming. But these fictions of human post-death in the Anthropocene are not actually about human death but white death, thus resonating with earlier texts, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shunned House’ (1924).

There was a discussion of the racialized meanings of black mold in William Hope Hodgson’s short story, “The Voice in the Night” and Jordan Peele’s Get Out  that I couldn’t fit within the confines of the argument / word count for the essay for Haunted Nature, so I published it in Horror Homeroom:

Black Mold, Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night,” and Peele’s Get Out