Envisioning Temporal Parallax: On Television’s Haunted Houses and Our Own

Abstract

Since their invasion following World War II, television sets have troubled domestic viewers with uncanny access to distant places and nonlinear temporalities. Television made houses feel haunted, yet television series about haunted houses rarely explored the intrinsic uncanniness of the house before the twenty-first century. Through close readings of Stephen King’s Rose Red (ABC 2002), The Secret of Crickley Hall (BBC One 2012), and The Haunting of Bly Manor (Netflix 2020), I show how contemporary haunted house series explore the coexistence of multiple temporal registers in one moment—a phenomenon I call temporal parallax. Through nonsynchronic match cuts and spatial representations of memory’s associative structure, these series draw viewers’ attention to diegetically meaningful objects that exist across eras and dramatize the temporal parallax intrinsic to any home. They invite viewers to understand their houses as haunted by televisual ghosts, absent kin, and their past experiences of domestic objects and architectures.