The haunted house is a common motif of Gothic texts. As Kim Newman observes, ‘The old dark house was the focus of the Gothic imagination well before the invention of the cinema’ (Newman 2013, 96). Anthony Vidler observes of the nineteenth-century Gothic that

Jack Morgan remarks: ‘In the gothic context, there tends to be much ado about […] real-estate matters, a reflection of the genre's notorious spatialization of fear’ (Morgan 2002, 179). Peter Hutchings refers to the horror genre more widely but notes the importance of the house for figuring issues to do with the past: ‘a recurrent feature of the horror genre is the house that contains secrets from the past, with the characters in these films often discovering that a familiar domestic setting is not so familiar after all’ (Hutchings 2004, 74). This chapter studies the use of haunted houses in contemporary Spanish films to consider the varied uses made of houses and the ghosts that haunt them. Following on from the discussion of the role of the past in the Gothic novel of the previous chapter, this chapter starts by considering the valuable conceptualisation of Spanish historical memory of the Civil War and Francoism in terms of hauntology (as hypothesised in Labanyi 2001). It also considers the problems and contradictions that nonetheless arise from it, not least the fact that Gothic horror tales deliberately evoke ghosts and other monsters so that the repressed anxieties which are called forth by ghosts may arise as much from the demands of genre as of history. The chapter concludes by considering the house as part of an unstable cultural flow of Gothic, underscoring the ironic lack of fixity of the house that prefigures parallel arguments for the lack of fixity of the Gothic body in Chapter 6.