Victorian Houses and what happend to them?
If you think about horror movies or old films that depict horror, there's always a symbolic imagery being portrayed. Imagine a haunted house, does it look like a decaying structure with severe angles and wonky wood works? Maybe bats flying through the tower or out of it. This may be referenced through the Victorian Mansion. Its Ghostly presence traces back to paintings from the 1920s from artists like Edwards Hoppers “House by the railroad” Which Shows an old Vicotiran house, abandoned and isolated. Throughout 20th Century pop culture, similar-looking mansions appeared again and again as signifiers of dread in horror movies, television, and gothic pulp novels. It was featured famously as the menacing Bates mansion in Alfred Hitchhcock’s Psycho. The later part of the Victorian Era, was named after England's Queen Victoria, was known as the Gilded Age in America from 1870- 1900.
It followed through the Bloody American Civil War and was simultaneously an era of rampant income. Inequality, political corruption and industrialization that helped create a new wealthy class. And the choice home for the “nouveau riche,” or “new rich,” was the victorian. It was the McMansion of its time: A Gaudy and unbalanced monstrosity that showed off The wealth of Certain American Families. It was Borrowed from medieval Europe's Gothic architecture, these houses were designed to be imposing.
They were a mismatched combination of towers and turrets, Ornate gingerbread trim, and Inside was a maze of rooms like parlors, drawing rooms, libraries, and observatories, places that were often unoccupied, with the curtains drawn to keep out sunlight, Which could damage the clutter of heavy, expensive furnishings. It's scary right? Late 19 Century wealthy Americans wanted to emulate Europe but after World War 1, that changed, as the American Vision turned toward progress and Modern architects ushered in an era of clean lines and simplicity as the new hallmark of the Vicotorian, in comparison, became an antiqued symbol of excess, whose architectural style and was described as “Grotesque,” and the mansions were called “Mongrel types of desecrating. Critics of the time began to associate the houses with death, offensive reminders of and when the great depression swept across the country in the 1930s, a lot of the houses were abandoned or became the boarding houses for the working poor. Deepening their association with decay.
A cartoonist working for the New Yorker who introduced the world to the Addams Family. A reclusive collection of ghouls who were morbidly anti-social and mysteriously wealthy. These popular cartoons began appearing in the late 30s but it wasn't until november. These Popular cartoons became a staple in what began in the late 30s, but it wasn't just until November 1945 that addams finally showed us the exterior of the strange home the family occupies. The Addams Family was a dark perversion of the ideal American family, and their mansion. Charles addams later said in an interview that he chose it because Victorians are just “better for haunts” It was here that the Vicotrian became permanently associated with horror and by the time Alfred Hitchcock made his iconic film, Psycho, in the 1960s, audiences immediately recognized the Bates Mansion as a place of unspoken dread of something not quite right. In the promotional trailer for the film, Hitchcock describes the house's appearance as: “ A little more sinister-looking and less innocent than the motel itself.” When he takes you inside he describes the inside as sinister and twisted. It was Hopper from 1925 Both are towering, empty and isolated decaying relics that used to loom over a world that had a long history. The victorian mansion died over 100 years ago but its persistent presence in gothic inspired art and pop culture has made it an iconic symbol of dread and now serves an immediate signal to audiences that there's not something right about the place.
