Netflix’s 'The Watcher': A New Mansion of Madness

A current hit on Netflix is a miniseries about a bad house. In The Watcher, a family moves into a beautiful, spacious residence in the suburbs, replete with lake access, an expansive lawn, and a nifty dumbwaiter.

But we find this series under the “Ominous, Suspenseful” category. We know it isn’t going to turn out well.

The story begins with the car ride on the way to the property. Mom and Dad comment on the beauty of the neighborhood. Upon arrival, the house seems too good to be true. Yes, it’s a bit over budget, but the bones are so good—plenty of light, hardwood floors, you name it. They must have it. Dad digs deep into the family’s investments, and they take the plunge.

Without giving away too much, the family finds itself entering a dark time. The neighbors are unpleasant, and letters start arriving from a mysterious figure signing off as “The Watcher.” This Watcher seems to be observing their every move and is not happy about the changes the family wants to make to the house. The descent begins. Maddeningly, the Watcher could be anyone—a past resident, creepy neighbor, or perhaps someone else entirely.

Though proffered to be a “true” story, The Watcher firmly rests in the haunted-house genre. The basic conceit of this genre is the irony of our safest place also being the most dangerous one.

A benchmark of the genre is the 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. The book famously begins, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality… Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” A team of investigators finds out first-hand that bad things do happen at Hill House.

The idea of the “bad house” goes back further than 1959, of course. In the 1800s, as middle-class families began purchasing homes in bucolic areas and commuting to work, the family home took on an unsustainable idealism. Imagined as a “fortress” against the chaos and uncertainties of commerce and urban spaces, homes ultimately could not provide utopian relief. The darkness outside always came in. The ideal—hardworking dad, wise and doting mother, happy kids—was always more dream than reality. Unemployment, substance abuse, infidelity, and violence were just some of the wolves at the door.

Haunted house stories tap into worry over this unsustainable American real estate dream.

As The Watcher’s producer Ryan Murphy explains, “[The Watcher] is a very universal theme for me, which was parenthood—I have three children—and that idea of you work so hard, you get the American dream; what if somebody takes it away?”

The best metaphor for the haunted house is the battery. Batteries store energy and discharge it when needed. They are fixed things, concrete manifestations of useful power. But what if “bad” energy can also be stored?

The idea of “bad energy” houses is a common one in pop culture. In Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining, a massive resort runs on ghostly power derived from the sins of past residents. The ghosts here even allude to a diabolical “management,” making the evil allegorical capitalism. After all, real estate is supposed to be the best investment, right? At the heart of this hotel is an ancient boiler, which must be destroyed in order to save the family. Killing the home is the only way out.

Like the movie version of The Shining, The Watcher includes scenes of the happy family heading out to the property, followed by the father slowly self-destructing in paranoia. Both films tap into the deadly trap of the utopian household. Both show a helpless family tumbling in tough socio-economic straits. As Murphy says, “I think that idea of how we’re living in a world now where everybody all over the world, I guess, seems under attack in some way and that idea of, ‘How do I keep my family safe?’ was something I was instantly motivated by.”

Let’s conclude with Freud. His idea of the “uncanny,” in which past traumas bubble up into adult lives to make us feel unsafe, seems apropos. The Watcher continually evokes the past. The big house has a bad history (there are rumors of murder). So does the family, with bankruptcy from which they’ve only recently recovered. The events are “uncanny,” which in Freud’s original German is “unheimlich.” Unheimlich literally means “unhomelike.” Netflix is smart to cash in on this enduring trope of horror.