Haunted Houses: A Conversation with John Landis

If there’s one thing world-renowned filmmaker and horror genre expert John Landis loves, it’s a great story.

John Landis Presents Haunted Houses is a highly collectible anthology expertly curated by the master of horror himself, featuring ghost stories that have enthralled, terrified, and inspired readers for decades. Some of the stories are well-known classics while others are long-lost treasures, awaiting rediscovery.

This inaugural title in DK’s new Library of Horror series includes tales of terror by Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, and Perceval Landon; studies of creeping dread by Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James; short, sharp shockers by Ambrose Bierce, M. R. James, and Lafcadio Hearn; and comedic masterpieces by Oscar Wilde and Saki.

Mr. Landis sat down for a spine-tingling conversation with The Mind Reels pop-culture expert (and horror-film fanatic) Timothy D. Rideout to talk about ghosts, monsters, and Haunted Houses! 
 

TD Rideout: Your anthology Haunted Houses showcases tales you selected yourself by a variety of authors, and features a diverse collection of ghostly and non-ghostly residences. Which kind of story gets under your skin the most? 
John Landis: Well truthfully, ghosts and monsters don’t frighten me that much because they aren’t real. All good storytelling in literature, movies, theatre, paintings, and other media is based on the suspension of disbelief.
TDR: Mr. Landis, you clearly understand how a good story can hook the reader and also influence the creative process. You’ve spoken often about how the film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad showed you that there’s a world behind the camera. What other stories have stayed with you through the years, and how do they affect your storytelling?
JL: When I was eight and saw The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, I experienced the complete package. Total suspension of disbelief. I was on that beach fighting that cyclops... I was transported. In fact, I once knew a producer who told me, "You know John, we’re just in the travel business. People come to a movie theatre to go somewhere else." I thought that was a great analogy. 

I’ve heard filmmakers say "I’m not influenced by anyone," and they are completely full of crap. You’re influenced by everyone. And one of the things about movies is it’s a new art form. It’s only about one hundred and twenty years old, compared to literature or painting or theatre, which are thousands of years old. 

Haunted Houses came about because I did a book called Monsters in the Movies for DK that was a labour of love. DK recently invited me to do an anthology about haunted houses, which I stuck to, mostly… I have to say I was able to find really effective and interesting haunted-house stories by Henry James, Edgar Allen Poe, H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Saki. I have a lot of interesting authors in here, and classic important stories.
 
TDR: Oh, very much so. You’re dealing with the height of gothic horror and the beginning of pulp magazines. You’ve made great selections in the story choice. Any favourites?
JL: The one I’m really pleased with is The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, which is probably one of the scariest. It’s a novella, but it’s in here as a long short story. It's a fascinating, really scary story that’s been made several times into films, like The Innocents with Deborah Kerr. Wonderful film—really one of the best. It’s very difficult in a film to do ghosts. It’s almost better in literature because you can rely on your own imagination.
TDR: The haunted-house story is a classic trope, and now that we’ve seen the spread of suburbia, how would you go about telling a modern haunted-house story and do you think it could serve as a social commentary while serving up frights?
JL: Absolutely! There is already a tradition of this: starting in the 40s and through the 50s and 60s, storytellers began to come up with political reasons for ghosts. For instance, there are not one, not two, but maybe thirty movies where the ghosts are unhappy spirits from a Native American burial ground. This was the premise of Poltergeist: they built that housing development on a Native American burial ground, and the skeletons and ghosts came up from the spirit world for revenge. But you have to remember that spiritualism was huge in the 20th century. People like H.G. Wells bought into it as did Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a major proponent of spiritualists. And all of them were phony! 
TDR: What about ghosts? 
JL: The belief in ghosts is fascinating, because I think death is such an overwhelming and universal event. Everybody dies—and when a loved one, a spouse, a child, or a relative dies, it’s very difficult for most people to accept the loss. But since we don’t know what happens to anyone after they die, we invent! Different religions have different explanations as to why you don’t really die—people aren't dead, they go to heaven, or hell, or they are reincarnated. No one really goes away because the loss is too great to bear. Therefore, the idea of ghosts makes complete sense and ghost stories are plentiful. It’s a fascinating genre of literature because it’s so universal, in that everyone deals with death. And what are humans scared of the most? We are scared of death, pain, suffering—and beyond that, we’re really scared of the unknown.
TDR: And there are many scary stories in the book.
JL: Yes, Haunted Houses puts together some wonderful stories. Some will really disturb you and others will just fascinate you. And of course, there’s a couple in here that are pretty funny.
TDR: I was rereading the H.P. Lovecraft story The Shunned House last night, and I just love how so much of it is just buildup. He gives the history of the house and the family before our main character even ends up in the house, and it’s all just to build that sense of dread. I like when a story can take its time to do that and then scare the pants off you. 
 
JL: Have you seen the film The Haunting, the Robert Wise version? Its premise is that the actual evil is the house itself—the house is the malignant spirit made physical. And yet you never see anything... it's one of the scariest movies ever made, yet you see nothing. This Haunted Houses anthology was a chance to get some of these classic stories out in front of hopefully younger people who may never have been exposed to that sort of stuff.
TDR: There’s such a variety in the story selection, like you said. There's the humorous tale from Oscar Wilde, and then of course The Turn of the Screw is just so unnerving. And it’s all in one book… such a unique anthology. 
JL: I’m very pleased with the book and with the line I came up with for the subtitle: Classic stories of doors that should never be opened."
TDR: Love it. It’s such a good book. 
About John Landis 

Filmmaker John Landis has directed some of the most popular movies of all time, including National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), Trading Places (1983), Spies Like Us (1985), Three Amigos! (1986) and Coming to America (1988). He wrote and directed the classic An American Werewolf in London (1988), and the groundbreaking Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983). He has made numerous documentaries, including the Emmy-winning documentary Mr. Warmth, the Don Rickles Project (2007), and Slasher (2004).
About TD Rideout

Since first encountering Bruce the Shark in 1975 at the impressionable age of 4, TD Rideout has had a love of film. Coming up through the training ground of video stores, and augmented by courses, reading and countless discussions, he's discovered a multitude of movies (more every day) that he is eager to share and talk about via his blog, The Mind Reels. Be it escapist fare or arthouse cinema, TD delights in it all.