A good haunted house is about the utter collapse of our accidental differences, the uselessness of class, of gender, of education, of personal history, of all the distinctions we cobble together and call the self. Late enough at night none of this stuff protects you, not from the boogeyman. What’s haunted or, more accurately, what’s uncovered by terror, is the poor forked thing, and the agon of a haunted house isn’t between God and Satan, or the righteous and the sinners, but rather between the self and annihilation.
