Why Haunted Modernist Homes Are Used to Critique Societal Issues

As part of their HomeQuote Explorer package, Progressive is running a series of television ads wherein homeowners speak to various problems that homeowner’s insurance can’t solve. One of which features a couple who purchased a historic home; a conversation in their kitchen with a Progressive agent is interrupted by the ghost of the original homeowner, who taunts them for their poor renovation choices. "We’ve spent a lot on this kitchen," says the woman. "Yeah, really high-end stuff," the ghost sarcastically retorts. They’ve updated the backsplash with a jade tile, and the ghost points out there’s mold behind it.

It’s a funny bit that hearkens to the common haunting tropes we see across film and television: Old Victorians harbor forgotten souls, their ornamentations and historic fixtures are conduits for the dead. Ghosts require fragments of the past, says the media—rich wood floors, solid and hefty old doors, or embellished furniture—to possess, pass through, creak, and slam shut. Yet there has been a change from the cobwebbed 18th-century mansion to the modernist endroit. In The Guardian, Owen Hatherley expounds on this change, attributing it not to built features, but the ethos that ushered in modern design. "The sentimentality, superstitious religiosity and brutal inequality of the 19th-century city would be swept away in favor of logical, equal, clear-eyed cities," he writes. The white walls, minimalist furniture, and austere design cannot hold "traces," he continues, that play to ghostly manifestations. The promise of modernism—functionalist equality—never truly came to fruition, laying the ground for a different type of haunting that speaks to broader social ills.

Perhaps this idea is most clearly illustrated in Candyman (1992), in which Chicago’s public housing failures—too often blamed on modernism itself—set the stage for tyrannical ghosts. A white graduate student named Helen (Virginia Madsen) studies urban legends, and encounters a local one named Candyman who mythically occupied the notorious Cabrini-Green homes. Early in the film, Helen discovers that her condo, located in a "desirable neighborhood" near Cabrini-Green, was built originally for public housing. While her floor-to-ceiling windows and finishes differ from Cabrini’s cramped, decaying buildings visible from her window, she tells her research partner that all the developer needed to do was cover the cinder block wall with plaster to make a market-rate buck.

Two buildings, identical in their layouts and design: One (located on "the good side of the highway") is deemed appropriate for modernism to flourish, while the other is left to fester. The Candyman—a ghost of a 20th-century painter who was brutally lynched by a white mob and appears in mirrors—doesn’t haunt her building, though they are, at their core, the same. As Helen explains, the Candyman, as an urban legend, can only exist to rationalize the daily horrors of poverty, the systemic neglect and abandonment of an entire race despite the housing project’s roots.

Helen’s observation is brought full-circle in Jordan Peele’s 2021 Candyman reboot directed by Nia DaCosta. It’s set in current-day Cabrini-Green a decade after its demolition, when new, high-end residential developments have been constructed on land surrounding the former public housing’s footprint. In one post-Cabrini condo lives Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), an artist, and Brianna (Teyonah Parris), his girlfriend and a rising curator. Anthony learns about the Candyman lore and Helen’s research (placing both films in the same timeline), and becomes haunted by the murderous specter as he tunes his art practice to issues of dispossession.

Much of the film’s discussion of gentrification relies on the long, sweeping shots of vacant, grassy land where Cabrini once sat. In one scene, Anthony stands in the empty lot to photograph an abandoned church Chicagoans know as the gothic revival Strangers Home Missionary Baptist Church that once hosted artist William Walker’s beloved mural "All of Mankind." The mural depicted Black leaders throughout history, and according to Art Design Chicago, "illuminated the triumph and struggles of Black Americans." In 2015, the mural was whitewashed by the owner to encourage a quicker land sale. In the film, the church’s minimalist white walls speak to the whitewashing of the area. Jokes on us: In our open floor plans, sleek and streamlined, there is no hiding place for ghosts; they move freely, manifesting as, "an abstract cypher," writes Zach Mortice in the New York Review of Architecture.

Without "traces" to latch onto, ghosts disperse, making them perfect containers for broader social ills like Peele’s commentary or, more recently, the film Tár’s haunting tale of social change. Tár is an unusual ghost movie starring Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, a conductor at the peak of an illustrious career. She also runs a foundation that mentors and uplifts women composers; the film opens at the New Yorker Festival, where she speaks eloquently about gender and equality in her profession.

Tár lives in Berlin, splitting her time between an icy, concrete penthouse home with her wife and daughter, and an unremarkable apartment that she uses as her composing studio. Throughout the film’s first half, we see glimpses of an unknown individual lurking behind Lydia—a redheaded woman whose face is obscured, standing in the shadows. Later, Tár begins hearing noises: strange, high-pitched hums and beeps at home, and screams in the park. She has coffee with her mentor, an older male composer, who tells her that Shopenhauer believed that one’s intelligence could be measured by one’s sensitivity to noise.

It’s not her smarts, however—the sounds are symptoms of a haunting. The redheaded ghost is her mentee, Krista, with whom she’d had a tumultuous affair years earlier and blacklisted from finding work as a conductor. Krista dies by suicide, prompting an investigation into Tár’s inappropriate relationship with her protégé and an edited video of one of Tár’s Juliard workshops provides evidence of classroom racism and abuse. All of this ignites what would become her social and professional downfall. Yet she refuses to acknowledge that society is changing, and that her abuses are now visible and unacceptable. The film becomes increasingly surreal as she spirals in status, relocating back to her childhood home, where wood paneling hosts posters and awards—uncurated, unremarkable, and free of her trespasses.

Though Krista’s ghost follows her—like all of our regrets—the specter comes to life in Tár’s brutal home. These dwellings follow what Alex Ross described in the New Yorker as the modernist "lair" that can be traced back through the style’s history. Writing about the film Don’t Worry, Darling, a 2023 psychodrama set fictionally in the 1950s that features Neutra’s Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs, he describes "an evolution in the cultural function of modernist architecture, from avant-garde utopianism to capitalist extravagance" that makes for a perfect villain’s lair. Alongside the lean and clean aesthetic that has become a signifier of wealth, modernism’s original values have been absorbed into the realm of elite capitalist extravagance. The ideals of social equality inherent to "the machine for living in" are hollowed out, a fragile front holding ghosts of broken promises and spirits who’ve slipped through the cracks—not dissimilar to Helen’s apartment, a public housing unit with a veneer, or the glassy condominiums built atop modernism’s ruins; or Tár, who built a reputation on "women supporting women" while she abused a woman who trusted her. A modernist haunting is a haunting, indeed, but it’s also a warning of what happens when egalitarian values are co-opted and violently twisted.

Even if our doors and floors don’t creak, the earth around us is shifting. 

Top photo of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in Candyman (2021) by TCD/Prod. DB/Alamy StockPhoto

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