by Julia Foote
The door locks itself behind you. The lights turn on and off by themselves. A strange energy animates your house, and an unsettling, almost sentient presence watches you from its walls. Your house might be haunted, or it might be smart.
Smart-home technology shares many features in common with the haunted houses of Gothic lore, and these similarities aren’t lost on users. Twitter and Reddit threads are full of experiences with smart tech that wouldn’t feel out of place in a horror movie: Google Home laughs for no reason, Hue lights turn on unprompted, and Alexa users worry that she is talking to ghosts. Meanwhile, TV shows like Black Mirror (“White Christmas”) and movies like Ex Machina make the connection explicit, framing stories about smart technology within the conventions of Gothic horror.
In these plots, as in much canonical horror, houses are alive and full of secrets. They know things about their inhabitants, harbor intentions toward them, and are capable of exerting insidious control. Different iterations of AI haunt protagonists just like ghosts do, and like ghosts, their omnipresence, and liminality — in between human and inhuman, living and dead — makes them monstrous. The comparison is emotionally apt, and calls attention to a new batch of fears and anxieties we accept as the cost of convenience. But it also gets at a deeper sense of unease: as in ghost stories, the creatures that emerge from our technology are ultimately human or human-made.
The Gothic as a literary tradition originated in Europe in the late 1700s before coming to the U.S. a century later. You may know it from classics like Frankenstein and Dracula, or through authors like Shirley Jackson or Toni Morrison. The Gothic has always been an oppositional genre: It emerged in concert with transcendentalism, and pushed back against transcendentalist notions of people as fundamentally good and worthy of trust. Gothic protagonists are unable to fully understand or master themselves, much less the world around them. They are haunted by their pasts and the ways in which they have failed, unable to escape the terrible things they have done or that have been done to them.
In the Gothic, things that have been ignored soon bubble up again, and in the process, places and people that seemed familiar become strange. People gain doppelgangers that reveal their worst qualities, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Rooms and homes that once were safe become grotesque as they amplify the histories of their residents, as in Morrison’s Beloved, where 124 is described as “a spiteful house,” full of the venom of a murdered child. Gothic homes are frequently described as simultaneously strangely empty — often abandoned by their residents — and strangely full: of ghosts, of memories, and of an unsettling aliveness.
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