In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Marion Crane looks up at the house looming in the night sky behind the Bates Motel, its hybrid New England/Victorian style oddly out of place. We’re left with the odd, impossible feeling of a face made up of windows for eyes and a door for a mouth.
That uncanny sense of a building being unconsciously anthropomorphised became a well-used horror trope, from the New England clapboard home of The Amityville Horror (1979) and at scale in Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), the vast Overlook Hotel’s lit windows strongly suggesting a brooding, malevolent giant looking back at the camera.
Part of an early 2000s wave of horror-tinged animated family films, Monster House (2006) takes that eerie suspicion that houses are looking back at us and makes it brilliantly literal. The house really is looking back at DJ and Chowder, two pals who believe they see sinister goings-on across the street in the house of cranky, gap-toothed Mr Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi).
