By Dr. Caitlin Duffy, Stony Brook University
caitlin.duffy@stonybrook.edu
A recurring setting found in films hoping to activate some sense of nostalgia in their audiences is the treehouse. Countless American comedies and dramas (particularly those produced in the 1980s and ‘90s) set significant scenes of childhood friendship in a treehouse, including Stand By Me (1986), The Sandlot (1993), and Jack (1996). Most often, these representations of friendships are a very specific type as the characters are typically suburban, white, and male.
In his Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film (2017), John David Rhodes explores the pleasures and anxieties that come with looking at private property on film. While he doesn’t consider the treehouse, he does highlight the porch as a major site of courtship and youthful intimacy because of its status as “a place that is both inside and outside the home, technically subject to but sitting slightly apart from the law of the parent who remains inside” (198). We might consider the treehouse, then, as providing a greater sense of youthful freedom from domestic order. In the popular films I have listed above, children enter the treehouse in order to hatch secret plans, swap pornographic magazines, and play imaginative games. This space is one that allows children to test out their independence and where they are able to solve their own problems away from the assistance and guidance of their parents and older siblings.
But what happens when treehouses appear in horror films? Suddenly, this space of freedom also permits invasion, lawlessness, and danger to threaten suburban children. It is no surprise, then, that the treehouse, a site whose very name conveys its liminal status as being both part of the nonhuman wild (“tree”) and a human-built domestic space (“house”), frequently engages with ecoGothic depictions of human relationships with the non-human world. By briefly examining the treehouse as it appears in two different recent American horror films, I hope to begin to explore this site’s particular ability to tap into ecophobic anxieties dealing with invasion, chaos, the return of the past, and excessive freedom.
In Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Orphan (2009), the Coleman family adopts Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) from a local orphanage. They believe that Esther is a nine-year-old girl; however, as the movie eventually reveals, Esther is actually a homicidal 33-year-old woman named Leena Klammer who has hypopituitarism, a rare hormonal disorder that allows her to spend most of her life posing as a child. After discovering that Esther had murdered Sister Abigail, an elderly nun from the orphanage, and blackmailed the Colemans’ 5-year-old daughter Max (Aryana Engineer), their 12-year-old son Daniel (Jimmy Bennett) confronts Esther in his treehouse. Esther tells the horrified Daniel that she hid the evidence in his treehouse and that she will kill his family if he says anything to his parents. Daniel eventually searches for the evidence but is caught by Esther, who promptly burns down the treehouse in an attempt to kill him (Figure 1). Daniel survives but sustains some serious injuries after jumping from the burning treehouse onto the snow-covered ground.
The treehouse of The Orphan takes Daniel’s space of safety and privacy, transforming it into a space of pure danger. The cinematic treehouse is normally a place where children share secrets and engage in imaginative play; but here, the secret is a deadly one. Daniel is forced to take on the adult-like responsibility of protecting his sister and his parents from the external threat that Esther presents. When Esther sets the treehouse on fire, the camera cuts repeatedly back into the house, where Daniel’s mother, Kate (Vera Farmiga) is on the phone and unable to hear his cries for help or the crackling flames. The framing of these shots features a moment where the burning treehouse can be seen through a window that Kate is standing just in front of, emphasising the liminal status of the treehouse as being both part of the lawfulness of the domestic space and the lawlessness associated with the wilderness (Figure 2). Additionally, The Orphan’s treehouse scenes suggest that the freedom that the treehouse offers to children can become excessive and dangerous. I am reminded here of the ecoGothic depictions of excessive freedom in early American texts like Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly and Ambrose Bierce’s frontier tales. In these narratives, men who spent too much time in the American wilderness away from the civilising influence of domesticity risked both their lives and their rational selves. In The Orphan, the domestic/wild space that is the treehouse demonstrates just how dangerous freedom from parental law can be.
A more recent example of a horror film with a significant treehouse is Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), which tells the story of the Graham family as they face the dual threats of demonic possession and inherited mental illness. Up until her graphic and sudden death, the young daughter of the Graham family, Charlie (Milly Shapiro), was targeted by the cult as the potential host body for the demonic King Paimon to inhabit. Early in the film, we see Charlie hiding out in a treehouse on the morning of her grandmother’s funeral and learn from her father, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), that she has been repeatedly found sleeping in the treehouse despite the cold weather. Following this scene, the camera never goes inside of the treehouse again until the very end of the film. This exclusion from the treehouse is significant given the voyeuristic attitude of the camera throughout Hereditary, which permits the audience to invade the Graham family home as the camera carefully captures traumatic and private moments with claustrophobic close-up shots, as well as every nook and cranny of the house itself through its lingering, all-capturing gaze.
The inside of the treehouse, however, is off-limits to both camera and audience. Rather, we are repeatedly shown the treehouse as it exists in the background of exterior shots and through the Graham family’s teenage son, Peter’s (Alex Wolff) bedroom window. Eerily enough, the treehouse is sometimes lit from the inside and other times shadows can be seen through the treehouse’s narrow windows. In one scene, the camera briefly enters into a point-of-view shot from what appears to be the treehouse and spies on Peter, who is unaware that he is being watched (Figures 3 & 4). The treehouse of Hereditary is a source of vulnerability for the Grahams. While their access to the treehouse is limited, the treehouse permits the cult members – and perhaps Paimon himself – an entry point through which to invade their family. Here we see the treehouse’s dual status as being connected to both the domestic home and the wilderness that surrounds it. Aster takes this connection to domesticity, however, and transforms it into something to fear; rather than the home offering some protection or influence over the treehouse, the treehouse instead provides a conduit for the chaos associated with both the demonic cult and the nonhuman to enter the house and family.
The final scene of Hereditary takes place in the treehouse. This is the moment where the terrible truth is finally revealed: the cult has successfully turned Peter’s body into a vessel for Paimon to inhabit, and now this demon can walk upon the earth freely. This is also the moment where the past finally invades the present. This ancient demon and its religion have fully destroyed and taken over the Graham family, a takeover that is paralleled by the film’s interest in inherited mental illness. As Keetley and Sivils have helpfully stated, the ecoGothic can be defined for its representation of time as “evolutionary” and the past as something “inexorably inherited…that marks us in particular as animals” (5). While the treehouse certainly is a site of nostalgia for a past childhood, in horror films, this site’s connection to the past becomes something threatening to anthropocentric definitions of “human” and “animal” or “nonhuman.” Earlier in Hereditary, there are numerous gestures towards this blurring of boundaries: Charlie obsessively builds miniature humanoid figures using the heads of animals (Figure 5), and Annie Graham (Toni Collette), Charlie’s and Peter’s mother, discovers a bit of black herb in a cup of tea she consumed (according to Ari Aster’s screenplay, this is the same herb that Ellen is seen feeding Charlie in a photo that hangs in her bedroom). These smaller invasions of the nonhuman into the human culminates in the final treehouse scene, where Peter loses his self as he is possessed by the ancient King Paimon.
So… is the treehouse a site worth exploring for ecoGothic scholars? I certainly think so. Its liminal status as a place that disturbs multiple category boundaries, including human/non-human, domesticity/wilderness, past/present, and safety/invasion, makes it an ideal setting for questions surrounding the interrelationship between humans and non-human Nature to play out.
Works Cited
Keetley, Dawn, and Matthew Wynn Sivils, ‘Introduction: Approaches to the Ecogothic’, in eds. Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils, Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (London: Routledge, 2017)
Rhodes, John David, Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
Author Biography
Dr. Caitlin Duffy recently received her Ph.D. from the English Department at Stony Brook University. Her research interests include nineteenth-century American gothic fiction, contemporary American horror films, and (neo)liberal theory. Her work has been published in Poe Studies, The Journal of Dracula Studies, and a collection titled Trump Fiction. Also, Caitlin’s film review of The Ritual (2017) was published in the first issue of Gothic Nature. Caitlin currently teaches courses on American literature, writing, and film at Stony Brook University.