The Horrors of Adulting: Cheap Murder House

Ah, the cheap murder house, a staple of horror movies. Someone, usually a couple of someones, buys a suspiciously affordable living space only to find that it’s priced that way for a good reason. Most often it’s haunted by the ghosts of people who murdered and/or were murdered there. (Though sometimes the problem is a more whimsical issue like a portal to hell.) Inevitably, the new owners will have a conversation that goes something like: “We have to get out of this house! Do you know what a difficult time I’ve been having getting these spectral bloodstains out of the floors?” “But we’ve sunk everything we have into this! Let’s just get a priest and an industrial carpet shampooer. The kids will quit peeing themselves and come out of the TV once they adjust to the new neighborhood.”

And the money issue is nothing to sneeze at. The choice to stay, not only so the movie can happen, is regularly based on the economic difficulty that would occur from backing out of buying a house and having to get a non-haunted one. Often there is a sense of tension built from mounting bills. So the real horror is being broke. (An exception being Insidious, in which case the family goes to a new palatial dwelling with no financial inconvenience despite the fact that the wife is an unemployed musician and the husband is a school teacher.)

But, despite financial hardship, eventually the time comes to learn the timeless lesson (©GhoulieJoe) that you can’t live in a cheap murder house if you’re dead.

What was the point of this post, you ask? I put a lot of work into that meme, dammit!