FLICKS AS FRIGHTENING AS THE HOUSING MARKET
Once upon a time, many a movie portrayed what was thought to
be the cruelest fate a family could suffer in its home: murder by demons
(sometimes followed by meta-murder by merciless film critics). But now, amid
plummeting property values, foreclosures galore, and the threat of zombie banks,
that untimely end seems rather tame — sure, you’d be dead, but at least your
credit rating would be intact. Still, the horror genre did tackle the housing
crisis before it happened (even if we’re still waiting for Wes Craven to make The Mortgage on the Last House on the
Left). Here are some real-estate lessons from films old and new.
Drag Me to
Hell
(May 29)
Spider-Man
director Sam Raimi returns to the genre that made us love him in this tale of a
bank officer (Alison Lohman) tormented by the curse of a demon woman whose home
loan extension she refused to approve. If only Rick Santelli could be so lucky.
The film, which is as relentless as a stop-motion army of the undead, paraphrases
Neil Young to ask an all-important question about our financial institutions: “Is
it better to burn out or burn in hell?”
The House
by the Cemetery
Italian director Lucio Fulci’s deliriously incoherent 1981
film is more than a gory jog through his favorite motifs (bad dubbing, worse
acting, and, of course, eyeball piercing); it’s a prescient warning about
housing bubbles. If the price seems too good to be true, it’s because it is
(and also because there’s a maggot-ridden 19th-century surgeon subletting your
basement, brutally murdering your visitors, and not kicking in for the electric
bill). Lesson: homeownership kills.
The
Amityville Horror
Foreclosed houses bring down the value of the property
around them. It’s one reason (Reaganomics being the other) that you rarely hear
the phrase “the nice part of Detroit.”
But there’s hope. Consider the case of Amityville, Long
Island: Ronald DeFeo Jr. killed his entire six-person family in a
home there, but did it yield economic disaster for the neighborhood? Nope.
After the next occupants claimed to have been driven from the house by restless
spirits, their story yielded a book and a hugely successful movie (followed by
eight more sequels and remakes). Think mortgage-backed securities are
confusing? Try figuring out how a real-life mass murder ended up inspiring a
series of movies that involved 3D, a haunted dollhouse, and a character impaled
by a plastic stork.
Poltergeist
If you’re terrified by a PG-rated plot that centers on the demonic
abduction of a suburban couple’s silver-haired daughter and her subsequent
rescue from the astral plane by a clairvoyant midget, you’ve obviously never
heard of subprime mortgages. In today’s world, the film’s ending takes on new
resonance: as the protagonists’ house is swallowed into another dimension, you
just know that their insurance won’t cover it.
