Diavola

The presence of a frightening, ominous house (often old, isolated, and sprawling in size) has become an almost-ubiquitous feature of the horror genre in literature and film. The haunted house in English-language literature can be traced back to a novel often considered the first work of Gothic literature: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764). The novel centers around a crumbling, eerie castle where strange and frightening events take place. Throughout the 18th and into the 19th century, other works of Gothic fiction, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), utilized forbidding, remote castles as settings in which sheltered heroines encountered danger. These Gothic settings were typically located outside of England in places considered “exotic”—often Italy—as a way of exploring impulses, desires, and psychological states at odds with the “rational” and “civilized.” In the later 19th century and into the 20th, British and American authors began to utilize more domestic settings, depicting frightening events and mysterious secrets located in isolated mansions and manor houses in England and America.

In many early Gothic works, particularly the novels of Ann Radcliffe, seemingly supernatural events are explained away in the denouement. However, as the genre of horror and the haunted house subgenre developed, authors more commonly depicted houses that actually were haunted, exposing characters to different types of danger and threat. Classic examples of the haunted house novel include The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson, The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James, Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier, and The Shining (1977) by Stephen King. Haunted houses are almost always large, isolated, and imbued with a sinister energy that quickly becomes palpable when characters enter them. These houses frequently turn out to have witnessed violent or tragic events: The ghosts associated with a haunted house are often former residents who suffered or died there. The presence of ghosts who attach themselves to a specific home evokes obsession with the past: Ghosts typically have some unfinished business or an inability to pass peacefully into the world of the dead, causing suffering for the living. The presence of ghosts can also suggest the dark side of domestic life and the possibility of familial trauma, the specters invading a private space where an individual should feel the safest. By locating supernatural threats in the private sphere, haunted house novels insinuate that familial dynamics can be a source of terror.

Diavola plays with this tradition, as its ghost ultimately proves no match for a protagonist weathered by years of family dysfunction. Likewise, its Tuscan setting pays homage to Gothic classics while also subverting them; the scenes in Italy remain grounded in familiar family dynamics, while the supernatural events ultimately follow Anna back to 21st-century New York City, insinuating themselves into the mundane realities of her daily life.