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The political stakes of horror movies have been studied extensively by authors like Robin Wood, Andrew Bretton and Barbara Creed; there have been, however, few investigations of how specific films contribute to the political construction of American spaces. This chapter, aiming to respond to that gap, is focused on the intersection between horror, politics and domestic space in the American haunted house film. By building on existing ‘cultural’ and phenomenological approaches to horror, the author argues that horror is evidence of an existential disruption of space. Taking this into account, horror film viewing can be seen, in Victors Turner’s sense, as a liminal ritual through which social space is conceptually and experientially reworked. Taking Peter Cornwall’s The Haunting in Connecticut as an example, the author demonstrates how certain films have, in the past decade, adapted a masculinity crisis discourse to the domestic sphere. By figuring haunting as a disruption of the father’s authority by violent masculine entities and powerful female ones, film-makers situate the movies in that discourse and open up a process of re-embedding oppressive notions of gender and social life in the domestic space.