The Real Horror in ‘Haunted’ and ‘Things Heard and Seen’

The supernatural at the service of ideological horrors

Ivery del Campo
Metafictions
Published in
7 min readMay 22, 2021

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Photo by SHTTEFAN on Unsplash

CW: murder, suicide

I used to love watching horror films, but things changed when I had children. I can’t stand it when children, naturally clairvoyant due to their vulnerability, are being depicted as victims of supernatural evil for entertainment purposes. Films that do this make me, as a viewer, feel complicit with this kind of sick, voyeuristic enjoyment.

I still watch horror from time to time, but totally avoid horror films with children in them. Unless the film is an intelligent one that actually has something to say about the nature of evil, terror (not just horror as jump scares), and victimhood. Even if children are involved.

The Real Horror in ‘Haunted’

The first two episodes of Haunted Season 1 sum up in compact 30-minute stories what real horror is that supernatural elements only make apparent. I’ve seen all episodes from Seasons 1 to 3, and I still think the first two are the best (or the worst, in terms of horror). Unsurprisingly, in these two episodes and in some others afterwards, the victims are adults telling stories of torment from when they were children. And in these stories, unsurprising as well, are parents who are as involved, if not more so, in the horror as the supernatural entities that are supposedly the source.

In Episode 1 “The Woman in White,” Jason Hawkins tells the story of how he was tormented every single night for six years by a hateful spirit, the “woman in white.” It started when he was eight years old, and this “woman” would crawl out of the closet in his room to literally scare him to death, night after night. Jason reveals that she might have seen him as one of her sons whom she had killed prior to her suicide by hanging in the closet. When Jason’s family left the house, the woman in white continued to appear to him. She led him to two close calls with death, like she intended to really have him killed.

Jason didn’t explicitly mention this, that the ghostly woman never hurt him physically. Perhaps, unlike other entities who could physically hurt their victims, the woman in white could not, but she used to the utmost and with…

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Ivery del Campo
Metafictions

Beach mom. Chef's wife. Literature prof, writer.