Response Paper #1, Marit Anderson

Buster Keaton’s 1922 film The Electric House is a comedy, not a horror film. Major conventions and plot points in the film, however, were drawn from the same sources later horror classics would be inspired by. Keaton touched on elements of Gothic Literature, Horror Theater, and the “Cinema of Attraction” in his creation of The Electric House, ultimately creating one of the final stepping stones for the American horror film.
One of the common tropes of Gothic Literature was the destruction of the cursed house. In the Gothic works The Fall of the House of Usher and The Castle of Otranto, among others, the climax comes as the heroes watch the house fall into ruin. This cathartic experience generally symbolized the freedom from the issues which led to haunting in the first place (Worland 29). Keaton creates a variation on this idea in his own film. Though the house isn’t haunted in Keaton’s work, the machines end up wreaking havoc and ultimately destroying the house in the process. This destruction seems to symbolize freedom from the terrors of modernity, a growing terror during Keaton’s time. This parallel between Keaton’s film and the gothic tradition establishes the first link between this comedy and the birth of the Horror genre.
Keaton also draws on George Melies’s “Trick Films,” a brain child of the age of the “Cinema of Attraction.” Melies was fond of the “Haunted Hotel” plot, adapted from nineteenth century magic shows. This plot revolved around the idea that a guest was shown to a hotel room, but was so bothered by ghosts that he was either evicted for noise or scared away. Melies created variations on this plot in The Terrible Night and The Inn Where No Man Rests to name a few (Worland 32). Since this idea comes from the “Cinema of Attraction,” the whole idea of the film is to make the viewer aware of the act of looking, which these shenanigans would undoubtedly achieve. Keaton puts a new twist on this idea in 1922 by harassing the people of his Electric House with technology instead of ghosts, but the goal remains the same; laughs and awareness of looking. Once again Keaton adopts one of the predecessors of horror and takes it, instead, in a comedic direction.
Keaton also uses dramatic irony in The Electric House a major tool for creating more extreme horror in plays at the Grand Guignol. The Grand Guignol was a theater where horrifying plays were put on and its plays were one of the last major influences on Horror Cinema. At the Grand Guignol they used dramatic irony wherein people “suffered punishment from amoral forces of fate, chance, or insanity” (Worland, 37).  Keaton uses this same kind of dramatic irony at the beginning of his film. The audience knows the diplomas were switched, but Keaton’s character does not. Because of this mix-up he is thrust into the awful job of modernizing the house, after which he ultimately attempts suicide; this cruel trick of fate almost ended his life.
Right before Hollywood jumped into Horror, they adapted haunted house comedies from the stage to the scene. This final detail reveals how closely linked The Electric House is to horror cinema. Keaton’s film follows the conventions of these comedies: A group of people are trapped in a “haunted house” (haunted by both technology and a more conventional “ghost”) and confront threats which turn out to be illusionary (as technology is, by definition, a bit of an illusion). This close association serves to show that the Electric House was one of the last steps that allowed from the Horror Genre to come to life. Its close associations with technology and wariness of the modern age specifically link it to the genesis of films like Universal’s Frankenstein. Without Keaton’s contribution to cinema, we may never have experienced the horror genre as it is now.

Worland, R. (2007). The horror film: An introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.