In honor of Halloween, Co.Design investigates what exactly it is about Victorian homes—the steeped gables, the prodigious chimneys, the mansard roofs, the cornices, dormers, or dentils?—that has made the architectural style synonymous with creepy and/or haunted homes. Art historian Sarah Burns chalks much of it up to cultural precedent set by The Addams Family and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
She also notes that when the modernists rolled in in the '30s, much of the talk about Victorian homes (that is, closed-planned, intricately laid out piles built by American nouveau riche in the latter half of the 19th century) revolved around how the Victorian era was, in Burns' words, "filthy and creepy and perverse and horrible and monstrous"—so, basically, Frankenstein's monster as a single-family home. Co.Design has the full story, this way.
· Why Are Victorian Houses So Creepy? [Co.Design]
· All Halloween 2014 posts [Curbed National]
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