Crypts of Fear: A Cultural History of America's Haunts

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

American Studies

First Advisor

Lofton, Kathryn

Abstract

Each year, over 1,200 haunted house attractions in the United States open their gates for the Halloween season. Rife with chainsaw-wielding murderers, possessed nuns, and demonic entities, these attractions offer gruesome interpretations of U.S. culture and its history. Haunts craft such nightmares from the contingencies by which secularization anxieties wove themselves into the American Dream, yet there have been scant historical appraisals of Halloween or these attractions. This dissertation overlaps the histories of secularization and policing to illuminate how Halloween's public amusements are inextricably linked to evolving notions of security, race, and fear in contemporary American popular culture. Folded into a broader cultural critique of U.S. public amusement is an intellectual critique of a disciplinary tendency in the fields of American Studies, Film & Media Studies, and Religious Studies that has led to the limited historiographic and theoretical coverage of Halloween. I term this tendency "secular whiteness." An inverse of the oft-applied "white secular" in Religious Studies contexts, secular whiteness reveals how whiteness is the essential quality of secularism - or its fractal declensions - in the U.S. and how an effort to decenter or, at the very least, not acknowledge, the problematics of white secular identity seeds a reluctance in scholarship about American mass culture to implicate academic labor in systemic violence. As this dissertation finds, such a reluctance participates in recapitulating narratives that justify policing. To this end, there is an autoethnographic aspect to this dissertation that situates my role as a white secular participant in the haunted attractions industry before and across the research process. Part One of this dissertation names and redresses "secular whiteness" by examining Halloween's visual and performative culture to situate the history of haunted house attractions in relation to secularization anxieties and community policing. The first chapter revises historical timelines by emphasizing the roles of museum exhibitions, public amusements, Prohibition-era entertainment, vaudeville, and fraternal organizations in Halloween's commercialization. These contexts enabled the rise of haunted house attractions. Given limited scholarly engagement with haunts, the second and third chapters provide a taxonomy, key terminology, and a theoretical framework for analyzing the haunt community's historical development and craft culture. These chapters explore haunt types, the role of "scare actors," and the racial, gendered, and socioeconomic performativity of haunting, including found "haunt families" in attractions and among consumers. Offering a composite sketch of the industry and its history in the U.S., Part One thus identifies the when, how, and who of Halloween's public amusement industry. Part Two builds on the first by presenting case studies of the two largest and arguably most influential haunted attractions: Knott's Scary Farm and Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights. Chapter 4 traces Knott's Scary Farm's role in commercializing Halloween in the mid-20th century through The Farm's ties to the Republican Party, Evangelical Christianity, and community policing. Chapter 5 examines how Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights (HHN) became the world's most commercially successful haunted attraction alongside discourses around national security, privatized policing, and terror after 9/11, brokering HHN's infrastructural, syntactical, and aesthetic ties to television and news coverage. By documenting the history of the two biggest forces in the industry, Part Two thus prepares readers for future research and writing on the history of haunted house attractions in the United States.

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